That time you dreamt of dreaming of being taken up by the birds surfing over the capricious spirals of a wind drawn with delicate lines rising to face gaping clouds dissolving into faces telling you of things you ought not to forget, of things that needed solving down in that ground you had just abandoned, you covered your ears and closed your eyes and let birds with glimmering eyes take you up, just below that space in the unforgiving dome which glimmered with the intensity of a mystery awaiting beyond the grey veil, this is the music you left behind you in an empty grove where things that needed solving were left unsolved so that mysteries that had to be faced were faced, and so they were, we saw a lightning bolt but we never heard the thunder.

Tickley Feather- Fancy Walking

We have championed Tickley Feather since we first listened to her in Art for Spastics, her bewitched S/T album out in Paw Tracks (Badmaster Records if you want vinyl, you so do) is the realisation of a lovely promise, or isn’t Fancy Walking the echo of placid and dreamy humming emerging from a heart-shaped den in the midst of the forests where the threads of the universe are being knit, so you can wear it like a warm sweater covered in the most beautiful patterns?

That time you went to the island, you told me about it with words stolen from someone who had been there before you

‘All down the west coast of the island at night glitter the lights of a city five miles long, its towers like black and gold cigarette packs standing on end. In the malls fluorescent light skids off the surfaces of hard and soft designer goods: matte plastic, foams of lace and oyster satin, the precise curves of cars and shoes and shoulder pads. This city is well-known for the scent of Anais Anais in its street; stacked video screens in the cocktail lounges; and, down by the ocean front- where men push past you smelling of sweat and seafood, and you can hear the soundtrack of your own life playing from the dashboard of a white car- neon of green, red or frosty blue. Music pulses from the amusement arcades, clears its throat in the night clubs. In the jazz bars they serve only Black Heart rum, and you can hear the intricate bass lines twenty miles out to sea‘.

I fell in love in this city I had never been with someone I had never seen, all through the words you had stolen and the music they became

Automat- The Rise, The Advance, the Genius (Original 1978)

The Cosmic Club people keep going from strength to strength, Automat’s ‘The Rise, The Advance, the Genius’ included in the fourth volume of their fantastic 12” compilations is the sound of a quartet of tuxedo-clad chrome androids passionately re-interpreting Giorgio Moroder’s the Chase to soundtrack Aha’s famous music video of romantic adventures across the pages of a graphic novel if only it had been written by early era William Gibson, shot in the perfect blue of a Michael Mann stylistic overdose, and ended with the echo of her stilettos fading away in the distance of a neon-lit back-alley, love doesn’t get any more synthetic than this, but it doesn’t get any realer either.

This one goes for Hugo, we hope last night was magic.

Read Algernon Blackwood, it’s good for you.

And listen to these songs, there is something of that mystery I referred to shining through, over and inside them, like a luminiscent shroud enveloping that ghost approaching from between the trees, not a single leave turns on its wake.

Little Claw crawl and bite like a wild thing, they understand the secret totemic power of the tribal stomping drone, and transmit it through their flesh and blood turned music in the same way in which the Velvet Underground did from the secret tower of darkness gleaming above the labyrinths of Gotham, or Sun City Girls and Indian Jewelry do spinning lost in circular deserts where they befriend rattlesnakes and coyotes. Their new album, ‘Spit and Squalor Swallow the Snow’ released by Ecstatic Peace is a storm of wind and dust and twigs which get inside your eyes making you cry, through tears you see a mirage fortress raising over the heat devils, coming at you like this was a Jorodowski flick or something.

Little Claw- Domestication of Manchild

Fucking hell John Dwyer, fucking hell Yikes, if hawks headbutted their prey before tearing it to pieces, leaving entrails and skin hanging from the branches of trees like a banner standing for all that feasting entails, and a testimonial of their bad-assness, they would sound a bit like this, the noise shitstorm unfolds furious furious furious, say it three times, raising you in the air as the spirits of a religion called Garage (not least because of the grease) come out of every orifice in your body, blood, spunk, shit, snot, they are all there in a raucous glorious mess we can’t wait to see delivered live.

Yikes- Blood Bomb

From the Whoa Commas or Blood Bombs EP released by Kill Shaman Records, which doesn’t pull any stops in making you feel dirty.

20JFG’s fave Tickley Feather’s lo-fi psyche ballads are that broken toy you stumble upon in the middle of the forest, a mysterious message which upon deciphering brings forth a beautiful reverie, the memories of whoever forgot it there and your own reaction to colour and shape intermingle like streams of a collective river, we have been keeping an eye on this mysterious lady for a while, she is drawing pretty enigmas on the sand with a drum machine put together with elastic bands and matchsticks, and we keep falling inside them enthralled.

Tickley Feather- The Python

You can get this in her split EP with Serpents of Wisdom.

If there is a band (besides Liars, and maybe Earth) able to summon fantasies of utter ghostly strangeness with their music, then it must be Yellow Swans, these two men craft strange spells where humming reverb and dissonant spikes come together like tentacles of smoke swirling and intertwining in the cold air to coalesce into phantasmagorical shapes where you are free to read whatever you want, if you dare, personally, and fittingly for today’s mood, Mass Mirage makes me think of funereal marches through the woods, an even darker equivalent of the fox wedding Akira Kurosawa documented in one of his beautiful dreams.

Stray ramblers treading across the Galician countryside at night be wary of the Santa Compana, if you do stumple upon this silent procession of the dead you might have to join them, and lead them carrying a cross through the roads as they visit those houses where a death is due.

Yellow Swans- Mass Mirage

This tune is taken from their new album, At All Ends, released by Load Records, and it might well be the most tonal piece of majestic psychedelia they have unleashed upon the world yet, now really, get this, and turn your room into a carnival of spirits.