In David Bischoff’s ‘Copyright Infringement’, a video games pirate confronts the ultimate digital rights management system: he gets sucked into the world of the game he was trying to access illegally- unlucky for him this was a digital adaptation of The Blob, and acid dissolution ensues.

Remember kids, Home Taping kills people.

Your 20jazzfunkgreats truly know for a fact that this so-called story is but a synthesis of many a folk tale about the legendary ‘Digital Frights Management’ system that MAFIAA clad IT nerds talk about in the small hours, after the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons session is over, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, mountains of polyhedral dice and glasses of flat coke. We know this because we have been there.

The stories go a little bit like this.

“At the beginning of the 1980s, Konami releases in the Korean market were suffering from high rates of piracy so the suits implemented the DFM system in the Korean edition of Castlevania. Within a week of release, around 120 kids had been found dead in their bedrooms and basement cellars. They were sucked dry, disembowelled, and worse. The response from the authorities was a total whitewash. They blamed the deaths on a youth cult under the nefarious influence of these ghastly video games, and Castlevania was banned for public health reasons. They buried a few thousands copies in the demilitarised zone close to the North Korean frontier. I managed to get hold of one through an Otaku forum, and gave it a go in my trusty Famicon.

It was totally awesome!

The LAZΣ- Run into Space (Bronnt Industries Kapital remix)

In Umdeutung Continuumb, a bunch of fearless seers recount their explorations of the opulent Kandarian citadel which is The LAZΣ’s Space Time Fabric Conditioner.

Bronnt Industries Kapital’s remix of Run into Space is one of the choice cuts, a thrilling play-through the dusty labyrinths of Dracula’s castle, where every beat is a leap over the black chasm between crumbling platforms, and analogue gothic melodies zoetrope into existence like spectral sprites. Levels of frozen epic are negotiated and foes from the netherworld vanquished as our agile witch-hunter strides forward with the obstinate purity of the classics, collecting an arsenal of silver relics for his eventual confrontation against the Master of Darkness.

“V. Sprake is the boogieman that survival horror developers use to scare their children off when they don’t behave. Not only was he the uncredited level designer of some of the classics of the genre, but also one of the five most powerful wizards in London. When Infogrames canned his ‘Psychical’ project halfway through, he vanished from the scene, taking all the masters with him. From time to time, you hear some dude talk about how he met some dude who knew someone who had played the demo for Psychical, and went insane. They say that Sprake has implemented the DFM into this demo not because he wants to discourage pirates, but because he wants those who play the game to be sucked into its world, experience it the way it should be experienced. Perhaps die.

It gives me the heebie jeebies.

As Stephen King would put it, ‘The terror just mounts and mounts’ in Ensemble Economique’s ‘Psychical’ album, out in Not Not Fun. These aren’t cheap thrills, latex masks and blood splatter, but blurry snapshots from La Fin Absolute Du Monde, dirgey effluvia that seep from the indistinct shadows projected by unspeakable acts.

Shacks Built out of Plyboard is a spiralling descent into a forlorn basement whose brick walls are covered with cryptic Arcana. On the dusty floor, amongst blotches of brutally oxidised red lay two dice made of human bone, revealing the symbols of the Stag and the Kissing Twins.

It is a corrupt bop animated by the same chaotic dread vibe that animates Riz Ortolani’s soundtrack for Cannibal Holocaust, Goblin’s Witch or Ennio Morricone’s Crime and Dissonance. It is the real deal, like that.

Ensemble Economique- Shacks Built out of Plyboard

When the stars are aligned, and upon contact with the golden needle lying hidden in the box of velvet crimson at the back of the old bureau you will open with an esoteric variation of the Fibonacci sequence, the surface of this record shall transform into the no-matter that black holes are made of, spill across the snakepit of coils lying in the floor and spread from the speakers into the still life of your lounge, inky tendrils will suck you in through a stroboscopic tunnel, fast ahead towards the Starchild if the Starchild was a figure of pure ebony sitting at the edge of time in a throne surrounded by snarling sphynxes.

Hi, ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ.

In Space Fabric Conditioner, they sound larger than the sky above and everything that lies under, imagine the Mahavishnu Orchestra after reading the Necronomicon, or Magma rocking from the apex of the pyramid where the remnants of mankind resist against the hordes of Eternal Darkness. Imagine. That’s what it’s about.

ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ- Time Horse

Apologies for the abrupt ending. Get the album if you want to know what happens next.

Cool Italian dudes Avant! recently released a 7” by German Cassetten 82/Hot Wave outfit Krysmopompas. The a-side, GeSa, is a beautiful line drawing of the graceful movements traced on the dusty floor of an abandoned hall by a mechanical bride and an electrical groom as they orbit around each other in their clockwork ballet while a crooning ghost dressed in an ill-fitting tuxedo provides dada admonitions from his pulpit. It sounds grainy, derelict, metallic and forsakenly beautiful like all the best German post-punk. We totally heart it.

Krysmopompas-GeSa

DC Recordings stroke the pure white as the driven snow jazz-funk kitty in their ivory tower of space/time combobulation, silently content that their latest creation, Higamos Hogamos, are poised like winged monkeys to fly forth and pillage the lands below with their glorious jumble of nuevo-krautrock and sci-fi beatnik – a sound that can only of come from another world where Marc Bolan had actually been a robot and formed Kraftwerk in the reflected sheen from a passing sunshine daydream.

Higamos Hogamos- Infinity Plus One (The Emperor Machine Dub Instrumental)

This “Infinity Plus One” lick, the next single from the self titled debut, is now picked apart by the dukes of echo-chamber fear-pop The Emperor Machine who half the bpm count and spread the track across several levels so it sounds like a noisy slinky folding over itself in repeated movements. Harmonia are stretched to the sonic limit whilst the cavalcade spearheads toward Zion, in another time, in another place.

(ps, cannot explain the crackle-fest on the player for this track – best just to download and enjoy…)

Then in Zion, where all you see is streaks of colour, backlit by synthesised moods, ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ are spinning towards the earth from behind the solar eclipse all slow motion and holographic with the clouds bleeding across the sky like coloured dye dropped into water.

ΤΗΞ LΔΖΣ – Run Into Space (The Ascension of Nightjar)

What begins as JC ’70s horror-house thumps, soon transmogrifies into medieval prog-rave vs. whimsical melodic alien folk that teases and taunts the artwork from Hawkwind LPs into life, strange creatures that congregate around the stone altar at cobalt-blue midnite awaiting the virgin sacrifice with reverie but are given instead a wicker man constructed from synthesiser circuit boards and the dials and keys from butchered mellotrons, all bound together with guitar strings and duct tape. They light the power chord trailing from the foot as the music strikes up.

Burning chrome and woodland creatures of unknown design can always conjure up the brilliance of Crossover. Surviving the Electroclash fall-out with just the correct amount of mutation irradiating their musical DNA, they return on Punch with enough electronic gloom to turn Suspiria’s technicolor terror into silent black n white.

Crossover – Dark Blue

On “Dark Blue”, Crossover make like the linear bat-demon depicted on the cover of new LP “Space Death”, hovering over the stylised city bathed in blood on the hunt for kills, and thus thrills, aided by a thousand points of sequenced stabbing fear and a macabre wireframe of synth effects and strings.