She thinks about all of this, while sipping on an optimally configured cup of café cortado, in a terraza of knowingly retro white metal, surrounded by the carnage of memories obliterated, and the leering ghosts of murdered children.

Through which reverie he crashes, in his perfectly tailored suit, five minutes late, a smile that could melt a firing squad. It wouldn’t, of course, but then it doesn’t need to. Which may well be the cause of this insufferable sensation of lightness, and the reason why, even as she stands up to kiss him, she pines for the night.

2 Ways 4 Speakers act like the black sheep of a German Engineering dynasty, designing, manufacturing and installing a stainless steel elevator that takes Neubauten’s modern classic from a dark and brooding basement into a skyline-defining penthouse of Michael Mann blue and Environ pink, in whose central swimming pool we watch a coterie of beauties swim, kiss, sink, drown.

2ways4speakers – Ume&meU

2 Ways 4 Speakers debut album has been romantically (disco) rocking our space for a couple of weeks, in a way unheard of since Kelley Polar’s beautifully decadent ‘I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling”. We will give you a shout when it’s finally released.

Many modern-day Pharisees besiege that dance temple of which 20jazzfunkgreats are such devout followers. Most of these are turned at the gates, electrocuted by the furious gaze of a black & proud & bald titanic Jesus, hurled into a purgatory where they twitch in blank abandon, or much worse, stand in the outskirts of the dancefloor, thinking themselves cool when they are simply lost.

Innergaze levitate over this turgid sea like an enigmatic Joan of Arc possessed by the same man machine dancing ghosts as Chris and Cosey and other chasers after the essence of the night and why it contains love, most pointedly operational in1970s New York and 1980s Chicago.

But Nostalgia, no matter how exquisite, is not enough. Like Factory Floor (maybe the angular dagger to their shadowy cloak), they are their own men & women, uniquely motion-blurring, focusing & defocusing their songs into an etiolated space of no-lines, mesmerised swooning & liquid moves, a seance whose poltergeists and stigmata are distant & muffled echoes of a wondrous party happening elsewhere.

We have no other option but to try to get there, through this mirror, darkly.

Innergaze – Autumn

As included in their 20JFG already-ROTY ‘Mutual Dreaming’ album, out in Cititrax/Minimal Wave.

The future rulers of our planet — having fully mastered the pico-second telecommunications structure required to make vast trades before their  adversaries had fully thought about it — discovered that, paradoxically, they no longer had use for time.  As their machines operated at the edges of perception, manipulating the world like blind gods, the rulers slumped back into a stupor.  Their wealth and power ultimately so monolithically burdensome that weeks flew by like hours, conversations took days.  They became great lumbering beasts that straddled the globe as their enablers, the energetic peoples of the world, scrambled to prop them up, lest they fall on them.

20JFG’s egocentric investment in high frequency trading continues apace but for now you’ll have to accept our great lumbering apologies for sleeping on the latests missive from the forever awesomely named Solar Bears.  Everyone from XLR8R to Pitchfork has been all over this and rightly so.

Cosmic Runner remains firmly in Solar Bears’ cinematic cannon.  A hook worthy of a giallo, branching out into sci-fi.  Still operatic murder mystery stuff but potentially with clones…and an institute of some kind…and modernist architecture standing in for the future…perhaps in Canada.  Propulsive like all good cinematic accompaniments, stepping purposefully through the fallout of hippy idealism.  A darker world for sure — although a psychedlic half-life always existed in the flourishing of synth based automation.  And this still has it.  It may be a remorseless stedicam shot behind the killer but it’s painted in rainbow hues.  Just like any good giallo.

Solar Bears – Cosmic Runner

Staying cinematic, we were kindly sent this video for Terranova‘s Prayer.  Which we liked a lot.  The inimitable Udo Kier scrutinises your soul for five minutes while lip-syncing to the vocals of the video’s director, Coco Krebitz; in black and white.  What’s not to like?

apologies to Latin speakers for today’s title

Alan Turing thought of his famous machine while, hot on the heels of Gödel, he was trying to resolve David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (I cut and copied that btw), that is, whether there is an algorithm that can automatically determine whether a statement is valid or not (there isn’t btw). Turing’s machines would go on to become the conceptual basis of computing, which is the reason why we are here today.

It is Alan Turing’s centenary very soon (June the 23rd), and you should all pay him tribute. You will even if you don’t want to, by using the machines that are his legacy, and accepting help from the software agents that are his children. You can be sure we will.

But before that, let us boogie geometrical patterns as the ever-excellent DMX Krew tips his pixelated sorcerer hat to Mr. Turing in a (somewhat ironically) analogue way. The complex synaptic patterns of his acid-fried brain are translated into airwaves that activate our epistemological g-funk sliding (and g is for geek), in a disco floor bounded by reams of white tape, over which those cutely majestic Turing Machines dance their own particular dance, from infinity into here, and beyond. POW POW.

DMX Krew – Turing Test

Included in his Eastside Boogie, out in Voltaire Records.

(Via 50Watts)

Book a life upgrade with Placely, and forsake your past, no worries whatsoever. Our patented algorithm matches your personal preferences (as mined from your social media and consumption portfolio) against a set of career and lifestyle preferences, and delivers the optimal PlaceSure for you with a margin of error of ± 15% Utility. Slide into a new job, apartment and social network within the next 24 hours.

Of course, your life-cense fee will depend on the level of demand for your PlaceSure. As you’ll understand, we need to minimise the risk of urban and labour market congestion in those funky, urbanely buzzing places that everyone aspires to live in nowadays.

Adjust your professional and social parameters for a healthy discount, or even a refund that you can reinvest in future PlaceSures. Choice is endless: non-skilled services worker, non-parent supported intern in high cost of living location, rural location with conservative population, routine job in a non-descript urban sprawl etc.

If none of the options feels right for you, you can always try life out there, in the real world. But remember, life out there is hard and deadly. There is no climate control, and the population isn’t security vetted. Drugs, food and cultural content haven’t been quality assured. Life out there is weird. They have a strange super-accelerated evolutionary process going, sometimes we send trend-watchers and recon staff to check out what is going on, not all of them come back.

Those that do bring us things, do you want to have a look?

Here at Placely, we wouldn’t want you to go out there without knowing what’s waiting.

Follow me, look.

We know it’s a total cliché, at least in these parts, to talk about songs as artefacts from an alien civilisation. That is normal state of affairs in this blog. If things don’t sound like they were delivered by shapeless envoys droning in a psychic wavelength out of joint with – or even orthogonal to – ours, then what’s the point.

We seek absolution by trying to elicit the source of that alien-ness, or its socio-cultural dynamics as encoded in the music.

In the case of SHACKLETON’s latest release, the tremendous ‘Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ’ (out on Woe To The Septic Heart), we are surrounded by riddims evoking biomechanical rituals that we aren’t yet cognitively prepared to see, and synthetic glyphs hovering curious/threatening like gigantic dragonflies.

And then we have our throat sheared by a fractal-bladed boomerang, our blood poisoned by the hallucinogenic excretions of a Rorschach back toad – alien artefact hurled by an alien predator of savage grace whose lineage is subtly human, albeit adapted to the Cretacean jungles that await in some branches of our future diaspora.

SHACKLETON – Music for the Quiet Hour Pt. 5

Acquire, in vinyl.

Lust for Youth’s droid bounce pays twisted homage to the joyous frivolity of the Rimini super-mannequins, although with all the shine and gloss removed by the abrasive cat tongue of time and entropy, the discrete tininess of the quintessential italo beat broken down into a brown gruel which would be the staple diet for City 17’s worker drones… if the Combine wore more mascara. In vocal duties, we find an emaciated crone, all that’s left of your standard leather-disco-stud, it’s unclear whether he sings from this side of the Styx, or the other.

We collapse from Olympian cocaine heights into a quagmire of decay, looking for beauty.

Lust for Youth – Cover their Faces

Aquire Growing Seeds, in Vynil, from AVANT!.

Oh that sprinkling of chiptune nostalgia, why did I forsaken thee.  You couldn’t move round these parts for early 80s home computer music.  Quite rightly hugely influential on all manner of electronic musicians, the primitive (by necessity) synths of Rob Hubbard were being resurrected all over the place.  Then came the rise of the analogue synth and we all went Oneotrix and dug out some obscure German private press.  And that was hugely enjoyable too.  I’m reliably informed that the 16-bit generation were now fully entrenched making all manner of Bass in the UK which means that in a few years time hook laden channel-poor title screen music won’t have that same pull on a generation of music producers.  Which, in some small way makes us rather sad.  Licensed high quality music allowed us to drive around the virtual streets listening to Terry Riley and/or Jamie Principle which was great, but was it as great as this?

Chandeliers return to these pages with a headlong rush down the geometric trench you see above.  The chiptunes are strong with this one; managing to uncover the hitherto unseen path between No-Wave in NYC and our Spectrum dominated bedrooms on the other side of the Atlantic.  The recorded-in-a-box drums and wandering guitars would grace your favourite New York Noise comp. (ours is Vol.2), but the synths are straight from a wasted youth traversing endless 2D worlds — where games were still like books: requiring an almost parasitic investment of imagination to make their abstract shapes comprehensible, but in return they gave us worlds.

There’s a great moment after the initial rush of New Times, where the music seems to split apart.  Snatches of early Chicago House (which so influenced Sega’s early 90s music policy) and echos of the aforementioned Germanic experimentalism of the 70s, pull that early 80s nucleus in two.  What’s unleashed from that atomic metaphor is a an endearingly kaleidoscopic, complex world.  As evocative as the evocative things it invokes.

Chandeliers – New Times

New Times is the first track on Chandeliers’ latest album, Founding Fathers. It’s out on Captcha Records on June 19th.

(Jim Steranko is so cool)

I have been presenting MoToons with Lily Fermi-Gødel every Saturday Morning for more than 2 years and I still cannot understand a single word she says.

But it gets worse. I cannot fathom her fashion sense or body language. I don’t know if she is a new x romantic or a post-mo-formist. When she stares at me out of the corner of her eye, coyly, I can’t tell whether that coyness is coyness, lust or disgust. The book of her face is written in a hieroglyphic tongue. I can’t even tell if she wonders about me like I wonder about her. Maybe she’s a solipsist, maybe she thinks I’m a figment of her all-engrossing imagination.

I suspect our pairing optimises the audience reach for MoToons, and that’s enough. Sustaining our weird psycho-alien-sexual-call-it-x (which is an important element of the show’s mainstream appeal) requires keeping us in the dark about each other’s cultural-cognitive paradigm.

But it gets worse. I think I’ve fallen in love with her.

And I don’t know if this is what Mo-Toons Media Producers intended from day one.

One thing I know. I know that this weekend is our last, I wasn’t meant to find out but I did. MoToons is getting a makeover, with new presenters coming online next week. Lily Fermi-Gødel has a ticket booked for the Daisy Age System on Monday. What are their plans for me? I don’t know, and I don’t care, without Lily Fermi-Gødel, my future is void.

Tonight is my last chance. I have hacked her scheduling system and discovered that she will be at the Unselfreproducing Automata disco between 3 EST and 5 EST doing a feature on the Intersectors, a tribe that is trying to bridge contemporary society’s cultural trenches organically, instead of top-down, like the Media Producer Class does. Very revolutionary, and ripe for cultural phagocytosis I suppose.

One of the Intersector’s main brokering tools are Pop sonics (songs?) with a high level of emotional generality, executed in the context of dyadic/collective dancing. According to epsi/Wikipedia.org, these ‘songs’ were part of our species shared courtship & mating rituals, before we evolved away in a myriad market segments.

It all sounds quite weird, but I have nothing to lose. Tonight I will go to the Unselfreproducing Automata Disco, and listen to the ‘Pop’ sonics, I will grab Lily Fermi-Gødel by the hand, and I will dance with her, and perhaps she will understand that I love her, and love will have the same positive connotations in her cognitive system that it has in mine, right now. We will travel together to the Daisy Age System, and my future will be never-ending joy. Yes.

(The Media Producer Class precogs had of course forecasted that Enrico Karman-Unceta would behave this way. The live footage of his failure is available for body-glove simulation at MoToons/MoMotoons.life; The Interceptors continue experimenting with Pop Sonics, one day they will succeed. Translated from the Cute-Naïve dialect by Siri43.02)

Motion Studies are interstellar trovadours making torch songs for an uplifted civilisation that jettisoned fire in a distant segment of the vector that joins their origin to our location.

Hearts will Beat supports the panspermian hypothesis with its meme-o-type traces of the Swedish creep-pop diaspora, Bristol’s metal gun grey melancholia & Chicago’s dancefloor sex gospel. It will help us communicate with the self-same civilisation when it arrives, anytime soon (this post is part of the propaganda campaign preceding their advent).

Motion Studies – Hearts Will Beat

Go and get the Debut EP for free at Bandcamp.

The Passenger’s remix of Village ‘Stranger Thoughts’ rises from the Venusian Cloud Ocean which was Justin Bieber’s x800 coma like a crunk ghost dressed in primary colours, or an early pang of self-awareness electrifying that primeval soup of dumb bliss.

If Animal Collective hadn’t ripped off (ok, paid tribute to) Jamie Principle in My Girls, and instead taken its polygamist undercurrents to their Brian Yuzna flesh-sharing conclusion, maybe it would have sounded like this. And we’d probably be dead, given how much it was played at our club-night.

Village – Stranger Thoughts (the passengers drift mix)

You can check out Village here further. Go and buy The Passenger’s brilliant \_| here.

This week’s adventure into vast and unknowable sonic worlds comes courtesy of Suum Cuique.

The aptly named Intonation is the lengthy foundation to side 2 of Suum Cuique’s Ascetic Ideals LP.  Echoing bass hits sketch out the dimly lit boundaries of an enormous hull.  A psychic shape worthy of Stalker.  A chiaroscuro gift from Geiger, all monotones of flesh and metal.  The looping resonance of a distant unholy war invades this space.  Straight from hell through analogue oscillation and into this industrial vista.  A shipyard for the Event Horizon.

And yet, with all those allusions to the more terrifying side of science fiction accepted, Intonation is beautiful.  The space created may amplify your insignificance but the decay is calming.  The horizon may be a dusty filter of blue light but no violence stirs in this world.  It is at peace with only the natural, probing, planetary oscillations teasing out its contours.

After the formation of a forbidden zone, this is what plays in the ears of the survivors.

Suum Cuique – Intonation

Suum Cuique is one half of Demdike Stare.  His album ‘Ascetic Ideals’ comes out on May 28th on Modern Love

As a retaliation for throwing the guitar, Keith Moon grabs the head of his Bandmate Pete Townshend, wedges it under his drum pedal and resumes his drum solo, taking special care to show off his double-time floor technique.

As a retaliation for improvising upon the head of his Bandmate, The Who Singer Roger Daltrey lobs his microphone stand at Keith Moon’s mouth, lodging it deep in his oesophagus.

As a retaliation for throwing the microphone stand, Keith Moon unscrews his crash cymbal and throws it, like a frisbee, at his bandmate Roger Daltrey’s neck.

Unfortunately, the cymbal flies wide of Roger Daltrey’s neck and into the crowd, removing the heads of two audience members.

As a retaliation for the decapitations, The Incensed Audience throws one of its members – a weighty individual – at The Who Drummer Keith Moon, smashing his drumkit into several hundred pieces.

As a retaliation for destroying his beloved drumkit, Keith Moon smashes the Weighty Individual into several thousand pieces with the headless cadaver of his Bandmate Pete Townshend.

As a retaliation for smashing up the Weighty Individual, The Incensed Audience invades the stage and smashes Keith Moon into several million pieces with their bare fists.

Upon seeing this, Keith Moon’s bandmates Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle vaporize into a cloud of gas.

With nothing left to retaliate against, The Incensed Audience proceeds to smash itself up.

It smashed itself into several billion pieces.

And everything was dust.

My Bleeding Wound comes from Chocolate Industries excellent ‘Personal Space’ compilation where it sits alongside other magically topical ephemera from Jeff Phelps and Spontaneous Overthrow, and – like Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland after them – these guys are bringing some much needed love and soul to a contemporary trope that’s almost as worn out as the tapes this compilation was recorded on.

The New Year – My Bleeding Wound

Don’t know anything about the artist or the track, our best guess that this is a desk recording of the scene where Jimmy Page (played by Duncan Elliot) discovers the ‘Holy Grail’ in the Tyne and Wear Amateur  Dramatic Club’s 1986 adaptation of ‘The Song Remains The Same’. Most poignant use of Sex Noises on a record since French Kiss, even if it was probably made before it – 20JFG don’t respect chronology, yo.

Well researched and accurate information most probably available in liner notes of physical object.

Available here.

We accompany the above monumental crate digging effort with a half-assed ‘how on earth did this get in our itunes?’ effort of our own.

DJ Flash – I Have a Dream

People say that Punk died on the day that The Clash signed to CBS records, for enough money to keep 3 grown men in Koka Kola for a very long time. But Punk really choked it on the day when CBS records sold the rights to Muzak Holdings LLC, for enough money to keep a small country in Koka Kola for a very long time. The final spittle upon the grave of Punk was when Muzak Holdings LLC licensed their brand new Muzak recording of ‘Rock The Casbah’ to Apple, for Steve Job’s short lived ‘Macintosh Poetry Slam’ promotional campaign. With a vivaciousness and integrity unbefitting of this tragic anecdote, DJ Flash now represents for us the whole caper in an audio format.

Special Thanks to Black Diamond. May Punk rest in peace.

Go get at Discogs…….

The new ectoplasmic soul quasi-movement – of which Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland’s latest release in Hyperdub is an almost archetypical example – creates the soundtrack for that future the cyberpunk dreamers envisaged long ago, and which may yet come to pass as the machines leave us all physically stranded in a post-favela urban reticule, taking pot-shots at each other across the future-shell-shocked streets of the informal economy.

They do this by sounding – apologies – exotic, harkening to the East which overlays Bladerunner’s Angelino bustle, creole, rough like bootleg mixtapes hot off some fast-food joint backroom, delirious like uneasy nights stabbed by helicopter lights.

Also, unfinished, done on the run, recreating the Darwinian hustle of that future underground.

Brand retro, you are new.

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland – 5

Buy on wax, or digi.

With the synthesiser (computer), we created a new universe, new life which we haven’t yet recognised as such because it thrives in another dimension with its own laws of physics, it’s own tempo. There are, of course, exceptions to this ignorance, a few analogue ethnographers that venture into that new universe, and produce electrical cartographies of its wonders.

Suzanne Ciani, legendary composer, new age diva, artificial intelligence translator, is one of them. She also made music for commercials, perhaps most famously (in 20jazzfunkgreats’ pantheon) for Atari. Eight Wave is not billed as such in the track list for ‘Lixiviation’, the first output in her collaboration with Finders Keepers, but it actually is – an advert for Mentat School. Tune into the right reality, and you will see.

Suzanne Ciani – Eighth Wave

Purchase the record from Finders Keepers.

Image from Le Livre de la Sante by Joseph Handler via 50watts

20JFG is delighted to present, for your listening pleasure, side 2 of the unreleased album  …and I, Object

Like the best kind of mixtape, all new and inviting, …and I, Object flits between styles, unified by a hazy adult world we can not possibly understand.  Like the tender moments of Coil: pastoral and textured by fractals.  Like leaf patterns: rigid formulae giving birth of organic complexity.  Like being drunk at 3am on a dying sofa with only an illicitly purchased bottle of beer and a tape deck for company.  Like a lot of things…because it’s an entire side of an album.

We get snatches of percussion heavy (and bass light) music that segues perfectly into early electronic music (a trick that Laurie Spiegel pulled off masterfully). We get snatches of dub, the sort of narcotic mist that would have appeared on Warp’s 10+1 comp.  We get a sample that sounds like Freud, describing the role of a boomerang and managing to make the word sound like woman…which perhaps influences why we think it sounds like Freud.  We get torch songs being usurped by oscillating electronic tones that seem to knock the earnest piano that underpins them, out of sync.

More than all of this though, we get something suitably weird, arriving fully formed.  A digital private press.  A heady, intoxicating document that someone saw fit to craft, sequence and deposit in our inbox.  There are many great things about the internet age of discovery; the lack of material context around music, and this music in particular, is one of them.

Gewgawly I – …and I, Object side 2

We enjoyed Drive as a modular collection of beautifully shot set pieces that could have been reordered in many a way. Its story didn’t matter, and neither did its characters (except for Brian Cranston, for sure).

Contrary to most of our friends, we didn’t enjoy the use of music in the film. Telling us what to feel at particular moments through the songs’ lyrics wasn’t too subtle. Of course, this doesn’t apply to Chromatics’ Tick of The Clock, which made us lay back in a stylishly deluded Michael Mann fever, or to Cliff Martinez’ stuff.

We also learned that it is physically possible to burst someone’s skull if you push hard enough, even if you aren’t a Locust warlord. Good going Ryan.

Anyway, here you have a couple of extra scenes that were deleted from that extended version of Drive that circulates through the lost highways of our imagination, in the spirit of modularity that we referred to at the beginning.

Firstly, the German Army outtake, which would have seen Ryan take an unexpected detour during one of his nocturnal motoric escapades, into the back lot of a meat processing warehouse, to rummage methodically through containers full of offal with that wholesome, somewhat absent smile of his, looking for an external manifestation (or exit) from that strange place within his head where all the violence comes from.

German Army – Cannibals Crawling

The sounds of German Army are legion, here they camouflage themselves in a Carpenterian fog, through which we squint at geometrical silhouettes sliding in a tectonic dance, the tonality is blue, the mood even elegant, if it wasn’t for that pervasive whiff of putrefaction.

Cannibal’s Crawling is included in the ‘Parte do Corpo’ tape coming out in Electric Voice. You can also buy the sounds, like we did, at this Bandcamp.

Secondly, Paco Sala’s contribution, which sketches with eternally liquid indigo an aural icon, dare-we-say totem, for Ryan’s otherwise materially mediated existence (the car and its engine, the scorpion jacket, the mask), an emotion that fluctuates within and beyond the fixed spatial parameters of that which can be designed, and thus, commoditised.

Perhaps a revenant of soft & tender curves floating ahead of his windshield, tantalising close yet unreachable, regardless of speed and mileage.

Paco Sala – Legacy Edition

Paco Sala’s ‘Ro-me-ro’ induces abstract truths from the personal epic of the people of the city, and re-renders them into bass, pitch, riddim and ululation, like Balinese shadows projected at the back of the discotheque by a light that cannot be found.

It’s out on Digitalis, and you can buy it from Boomkat.

Saitam is one of those great shining beacons of light in our otherwise wheezing corpse of an inbox.  From under the vast burdensome deluge of spam that renders our beloved mailbox inert, occasionally comes something completely, unexpectedly, maddeningly wonderful.  Like this.

We are not sure what god Union brings us closer too.  The gods of Emotional Montage were appeased by Sigur Ros and the gods of Abdicated Responsibility For Communicating Complexity were sated by Steve Reich.  There are deities no doubt pretty chuffed with Saitan but who they are remains hard to pin down.  The rapturous chords of the second half of Union suggest some form of ascension but with the Gamelan like percussion this is far too substantial to float off (rather smugly) into the heavens.

Instead Union rejects the build, rejects the easy emotional release and pretty much rejects the gods of TV Licensing.  In their place it builds a beautiful delicate centre inside hand-claps and vast percussion.  A ball of white-magenta light inside an ever growing wicker cocoon.

Saitam – Union

Saitam has self released an EP called West – East on Soundcloud which you can hear, here.

Imagine a tarot deck whose cards display figures that represent verbs rather than hermetic archetypes, these verbs can be configured sequentially or combined synergistically to achieve outcomes.

Unlike Eno’s Oblique Strategies for creativity, this deck is indifferent towards the nature of the outcomes, or perhaps sees creativity as an intermediate step in your journey somewhere else. In Mirrorball, Nisennenmondai, a Japanese outfit that 20jazzfunkgreats should have featured already, devise a Giraudesque pentagram of adroit lines and golden gradients where the instruments stand for the cards we just referred to, they come alive in a metaphysical disquisition with very physical results, as you will soon realise.

• Guitar stands for question, the probing child, Ada Lovelace conjuring a mathematical army of harmonic regiments marching towards the outer shores of the universe, where everything that we know is washed by the sea of nothingness, chaos, something so alien that it cannot be fathomed.
• Drums stand for construction, the architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor stabbing with granite blades the stygian sky of the cognitive event horizon we have reached, in the absence of response, we gaze into the strange provinces ahead from our vantage point, at the apex of this building.
• Bass stands for lift, the flyer, we are tempted to mention Yuri Gagarin, or Mieville’s Yagharek, but we are going to stick with Arthur Russell, whose Dinosaurian bump most closely resembles the drop from the heights we have reached, and subsequent surge over and with psycho-thermic currents, as experienced in Mirrorball.

For this is after all a disco tune, and it never ends, where it hits silence, it makes its transition.

Nisennenmondai – Mirrorball

Mirrorball is included in the fantastic Destination Tokyo. We know we should have featured it like, 3 years ago when it was released, but we aren’t god.

Butter 08 were a short-lived collaboration between some mid 1990s alpha avatars of cool– Cibo Matto and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. (also released in the Beastie Boys Grand Royale). Their self/titled album was all over the place in a pretty great way, we were reminded of this at the wonderful and emotional send-off for Colin Edgeworld, when Barney played ‘Mono Lisa’.

The title is not a typo. It is a gnarly primate pounding the mystery out of its environment with a very big stick, its festival of survival eventually acquires mystical connotations, it becomes an inchoate religion. It may have some rather exalted tendencies, but the heavy metal riffage won’t let you forget that it only exists because muscles were flexed, and blood spilt. It may end up in heaven, but it was born in the charnel house.

Butter 08 – Mono Lisa

Go and get Butter 08

The 20jazzfunkgreats brotherhood live an ascetic existence, akin to Skyrim’s Greybeards, up in the summit of a snowy and wind-battered peak, tilling the frozen soil, keeping an eye out for Siberian tigers, listening to a variegated army of underground stalwarts practicing The Dragon Shout. Such is our calling.

One of the few luxuries that we afford ourselves is a cup of brandy and a cigar after dinner on Genesis day (Wednesdays).  It is then that we reflect on the state of the world, the netherworld, and the world beyond. One topic that is often raised is that of the ‘future of art in the age of digital reproduction’, something that worries us greatly, as aficionados and participants in that expanding experiment/multi-headed Schumpeterian hydra which is the Internet.

One area of concern is how to reward the creators of the wonderful culture that is being mass-distributed and shared and re-shared and mutated and consumed in (pricey) smartphones and portable music players. The numbers for the stores sponsored by the gatekeepers of yore are vile, and visibility in Apple’s milky garden is zilch. Most cyber-lockers are quasi-criminal bottom feeders, as evidenced by Kim Dotcom’s it-would-be-funny-if-it-wasn’t-depressing collection of license plates.

If you were to get all clinical and systemic about the state of music, you may say that, in the aggregate, the lack of income for artists doesn’t matter. Low production and distribution costs mean that there’s a constant influx of youthful and energetic entrants replacing those who exit because they cannot make a living from this craft. In fact, these low barriers to entry explain low margins in the industry, a natural state of affairs with perfect competition: supply exceeds demand, prices go down, consumer choice is ample etc. Network effects kick in to explain the insane valuations of tech companies selling gizmos or adverts on the back of all this abundant content- those ones, they aren’t in a competitive market, oh no.

Of course, the picture changes if you consider creativity as a dynamic process with learning – in that case, one disheartened veteran on the way out isn’t the equivalent to one ambitious rookie on the way in. We have been taught to think of music as the province of the young and reckless, but if you stop for a moment, you’ll realise that the young and reckless take time to get good. They usually start by ripping off those who came before them, and then progressively develop their own language and personality, come into their own.

What if they don’t have time? Imagine all your favourite bands if they only had been allowed to record one album – or song – their first one.

Imagine all our Dragon-shouting rebels if they only had learned their first word of power, Skyrim would be fucked.

So, we may have a thousand flowers blooming…for a day. What does this mean for culture? Jaron Lanier warns that the heralded explosion of creativity that the Internet was supposed to bring about has so far failed to materialise. Instead, we live in the throes of Retromania. Perhaps this is because those who should have crafted the sounds of the future, and pushed the envelope of modern culture quit after a couple of years because they had to pay the rent. Or went to launch a start-up, which sometimes feel like the new bands.

(There are alternative hypotheses for this, e.g. that the Internet makes it too easy to copy others and will bring an age of mass stupidity rather than the other way around, that tastes have fragmented so much that there’s no scope for new mass genres to emerge in the way that they did in previous eras etc.)

The jury is still out about whether we live in the times of Retromania, or what are its causes. We still fully enjoy doing that we do in this website, and think that there’s plenty of great inspiring stuff out there. We also believe there’s a right way forward, one that minimises minima in a scenario where income deprivation equals creative famine.

This is to multiply and strengthen the channels through which resources flow from audiences to creators, in a way that acknowledges the plurality of ways (and media) in which culture is now accessed, so that we may have the pros of digital creativity (recombination, access, diversity) without the cons.

(Of course, this is also the right thing to do. We get a bit tired of people somehow assuming that the only profession in the world that doesn’t care about getting paid, is artists. There is a difference between maximising incomes, and making a living.)

This is why we celebrate Bandcamp, Kickstarter and other platforms helping to get some money in the pockets of the artists with minimum transaction costs and intermediary taxes. This is also why we are proud endorsers and participants in ‘Amour & Discipline’, a DIY platform that will soon give provide you (us) with a user-friendly way to put your money where your ears (and heart) is, and donate money to those artists you love, plant today the seeds of tomorrow’s awesomeness, because contrary to what you may think, prisoner of your dilemma, no-one else will do it for you.

Go and get some more information here. Get involved.

And enjoy these jams.

Ou Où’s  Builded album is a traveller’s guide for a contradictory utopia of uncertain location, built with the Élan vital of the mystic Mittelstand, and the levitational tendencies of the NYC school of cosmic guitarwerks.

Contradictory why, you ask? Contradictory because the utopia is an absolute, but this one displays incommensurable phases that we transit through, ascending, descending and metamorphosing – they aren’t better or worse than each other, basic iterations in a minimum viable version of Heaven.

Ou Où – Better Sea

Go buy Builded from Already Dead Tapes.

Meanwhile, Josef +  technicolor jazz’s (aka Jo Berns of Food Pyramid saxo-fame) splatters us with a medley of some high points in the history of head music between tomorrow and the return of the Reapers, as related in the Mass Effect trilogy. This includes paper-radicalised ADD house to celebrate Patrick Cowley’s digital resurrection, an excerpt from the soundtrack for Wipeout 2166 (not a game FYI), and the distorted mangling of the star-spangled banner as performed during the secession of the trans-lunar idealistic colonies.

Prescient stuff.

Josef & Technicolor Jazz -crosstown holographic

We advise you to listen to it while looking for the strange loop in this back-alley of the Walled City.

Prior to our resurrection next week we’d like to bring to your attention a recent collaboration (as much as a remix is ever a collaboration) between Digits and Gold Zebra, both of who we’ve enthused about over the last year(s).

Digits’ slyly earnest synth-pop lyrics get wrapped up in a tough-like-Carpenter exterior to prowl the gritty VHS streets of our youth.  There is a moment where you realise that, in some horrible alternate reality Digits’ Alt would be crooning over an acoustic guitar, in a full on singer-songwriter nightmare.  We are forever grateful then that, like many a synth-pop front man before him, he decided to turn his voice over to the night.

Like Night Gallery‘s Constant Struggle LP from a couple of years back, this is almost angelic synth-pop music; so pure it loops back on itself and becomes out of phase with innocence in the same way that Peter Christopherson was out of phase with innocence.  It’s just…off.  Smooth like milk spiked with poppers.

Digits – Rachel Marie (GOLD ZEBRA Remix)

Gold Zebra’s remix of Rachel Marie is from a mixtape Digits made called Death and Desire.  You can stream Digits’ mixtape (in the Hip-Hop sense rather than the fey indie boy sense) here.

Blue skies are here.  Big blue bright skies ready to burn away our SAD with daffodils shooting lasers of pure spring-y goodness.  A suitable time then to indulge our northern-hemisphere-centric anticipation of long nights of Balearic bliss down by the sea.  A suitable time then to be visited by our favourite purveyors of these sort of fantasies: International Feel.  A label that mostly exists in our minds as a white and gold lair deep in a tropical wilderness.  A lair with some sort of rocket propelled plane that jets around the finest Mediterranean clubs, landing its Space-age exterior on the white washed, flat roofs of our DREAMS.

Boys From Patagonia have ascended from the transatlantic tubes of the internet to gift us with an exquisite slice of southern European cheese.  Like a 4AM version of Freestyle, It’s So Exciting (High Jingo Love Love Rework) — breathe — slides along in its own beautiful way; all drum machine pre-sets and bass guitar.  This is deep carpeted, white suited, late night-ed, mirrored-walled, Mediterranean Disco.

The Boys themselves have a suitably authentic Italian heritage even if one now lives in, predictably, Patagonia.  Entranced by their love (and ours) of heavily cheesy early-80s nightclub culture, the boys managed to live it (it only exists in our aforementioned DREAMS) before paying homage here.  A unreserved recommendation from 20JFG then, just add summer.

Boys From Patagonia – It’s So Exciting (High Jingo Love Love Rework)

The Boys From Patagonia – Rimini ’80 / It’s So Exciting 12″ comes out on International Feel on 16th April (we think?).

Kojima Lore tells us that the famous Eastern European covert chase level that stood in the boundary between Metal Gear Solid IV’s first two acts of sandbox Tactical Espionage Action, and the pseudo-interactive madness that followed, was recycled from Metal Gear Solid III and a Half, ‘The Snake that Came from the Cold’, set in the 1980s streets of cold-war-torn Berlin.

We could spend a couple of hours trying to summarise the plot, but we fear we’d get it so wrong the Cobra squad (or Dead Cell) may resuscitate and come for our bones. Instead, we will simply list a handful of features from the secret design document we had access to. They will help you realise why the game wasn’t made, and also make you sad it wasn’t.

(Note that we aren’t saying which snake is this snake, btw)

• Snake can camouflage in the fog that shrouds Berlin. The fog adapts dynamically to the situation to enhance tension (a bit like Left For Dead’s ‘Director’).

• The bosses in the game consist of SPHYNX, a cadre of human-skin wearing bio-metal gears called Tinker, Taylor, Soldier etc.. Prior to each boss-fight, Snake has to identify them through a Turing test. The game aims for ‘The Thing’ levels of paranoia, and spectacularly ghastly moments or flesh-shredding/shedding as the true identity of each of the members of SPHYNX is revealed. Snake isn’t positive he isn’t a member of SPHYNX.

• Kojima had secured from John Le Carré the rights to use both Smiley and Karla as important characters in the game. The initial concept art for Berlin was produced by Viktor Antonov, who worked on Half Life 2’s City 17.

• The game included an infamous ‘club night’ level where Snake had to infiltrate ‘The Western World’, a post-punk DIY venue located in a squatted penthouse atop a crumbling tower block, while being stalked by a sniper. The boss fight that concludes the level takes place in the mosh pit of the club, against SPIDER SPHYNX. It all ends with the collapse of the structurally unsound building.

The soundtrack for the climax of the level sounded a bit like this.

Animal Bodies – Thought and Consequence

Kiss of the Fang, Animal Bodies’ 12’’, grants them entrance into the lair of the Dark Brotherhood of nouveau cold wave terrorists – Xeno and Oaklander, Led Er Est, Soft Metals, you know the score.

Their riddims slam authoritarian like an army of balaclava-ed acronyms kicking down the door of your apartment in the middle of the night, the acid bubble bass cattle-prods you into an unmarked vehicle, to drive across desolate industrial states, past alleys where emaciated underground heroes throw their runes in post-punk’s version of Quintet.

Their revolution will be too late for you, you have already been purged.

Get Kiss of the Fang from Sweating Tapes.

UV PØP’s No Songs for Tomorrow captures a bleak moment in British history, a moment where people felt that there may well not be any songs tomorrow.

Not because of the nuclear holocaust looming in the horizon, but the social holocaust brought about by the clash between the Monetarists Stormtroopers and the entitled protectors of the post-WWII regime. Not happy times.

Our crawling through No Songs For Tomorrow’s no-man’s land of macabre funk, doom balladry and dole pop ends with Yorkshire Battle Hymn ‘Four Minute Warning’, which feels to us like a requiem for a dismantled industrial base, and an imploded way of living. It is epic like Fuckbuttons’ best, but with the added poignancy of relating to reality, or at least what reality once was.

UV POP – Four Minute Warning

UV PØP’s No Songs for Tomorrow has just been reissued by Mannequin/Sacred Bones. Get it here.

(Image from the latest Space Teriyaki at 50Watts).

Not only has the end of March brought us sun, bumblebees, the chirping of birds and all that the forthcoming spring entails. It has also brought us a small drone, the ambassador from a sublimed civilisation in an intelligence-gathering expedition. The drone, let’s call it Tonto, looks like a silver cigar case around 30 centimetres long. He is curious and verbose. He is also endowed with very sophisticated and powerful weapons, as our security golems have painfully learned. Sublimed civilisations are not naïve about the potentially irrational reactions of their surprised guests.

Tonto talks a lot, when we arrive home from work (exorcism milk rounds, trans-dimensional pest eradication, you know the drill) every night, he hovers around us buzzing about the origins and state of his civilisation.

They live, he says, in a situation of post-scarcity, immortality, and constant change. Although this allows the satisfaction of individual freedom and exploration of all possibilities within the confines of the body politic, it also produces a certain feeling of futility and ennui. That which has been achieved at no cost (post-scarcity), and with no sacrifice (immortality), doesn’t feel so valuable. Which may explain his obsession with history and tradition, those past accomplishments of his civilisation, when the going was a bit tougher.

Anyway, Tonto has a job. In telling us where he is coming from, he is telling us what he needs. He scours the galaxy for exotic gems that agree with the uplifted, sublime tastes of his masters, but are also tainted by that fragility, that contingency which all the fruits of mortal labour, and flawed genius, embody. That which they cannot have, because they have everything.

We hand Tonto some cosmic boogie, and send him packing back to his reconnaissance fleet. We stroke the shiny hunter-seekers that he is given us in exchange, and think of targets.

We were clear that dance music was what Tonto needed – fleeting shards of the no-place where, even if only for a night, people exist ideally, transformed into a simplified sketch, shadows of themselves and the exalted opposite of these shadows.

Aux 88’s ‘Phantom Power’ is a good example of this, a silky electro jam where Detroit’s Kraftwerk obsession is filtered through a jazz sieve, uncannily anticipating 2-step’s mega-airbrushing of urban nightlife. It is gentle like your lover awakening you up after a long night of restful sleep, into a future, slowed down, UI-upgraded, reality.

Aux 88 – Phantom Power

As included in the legendary Trance Atlantic compilation.

In Bobby Bell’s haunt, the walls are decorated with pictures of reticulated snakes, Balihu totems that represent the liquid dance of vintage synth-lines. When the time is ripe, they come alive to bite with analogue fangs, injecting us with a melange of passion, swing and love.

His remix of WRD’s Abyss is the ensuing hallucination, an abstracted chase past invisible walls which upon being breached release scents of manifold emotion, Chicago tom muscles flexing, the self-obsessed stylishness of the Italian masters, a minimal plea that transforms, for its duration, the disco into a temple. Pervading it all, a sense of drama and loss that reminds us of IDIB’s nocturnal street-strutting ballads.

Very special.

WRD – Abyss (Bobby Bells jam remix)

Coming out soon in Force Majeure. Bobby’s own output is also swell, check out the video for Until Morning.

Below is a live video of a section of the track V3, taken from their album Transverse (out 23rd March on Mute).

The remorseless throb: endlessly sinister.  Like some totalitarian womb ready to birth primal horror upon the bobbing audience.  Triggered incantations from their Norfolk lair ring out over this ceremony.  An alter of MacBooks and patch cables between them, a suitable visual metaphor for the New Throb.

Chuck D once said that hip-hop was the CNN of black people. Where does put Noise Rock then? Perhaps Noise Rock is the weekly hour that William Burroughs never got in CNN.

Which is the kind of stream-of-consciousness bullshit statement that we now try to back up with some music.

Picture a TV broadcasting everything that is happening in the world right now, at the same time. It looks like static and it sounds like distortion. But you wouldn’t improve the signal to noise ratio by breaking things down into chunks, i.e. analysing them. Rather, accumulation & overlay induces an Innis Mode style of augmented perception, if you stare into the screen for long enough, you will see God, or whatever it is that swims amidst the chaos, in a feeding frenzy.

Now, picture rRope as the sound equivalent of that TV broadcast, let’s go pattern hunting – a kerosene-addicted civilisation approaching its millennial reckoning, the underground resistance flayed, its entrails auctioned in MTV. Notional icons of guitar music resign from their positions in disgust, and jump out of their screens like CGI medieval chevaliers; a Natural Born Killer-style rampage ensues, Wayne, Beavis, Butthead, Garth against the Persuasion Industrial Complex, embodied in four monsters of Apache Legend.

Of course, all of this may be the equivalent of our life flashing in front of our eyes in the back of a wailing ambulance, while our nervous system shuts down, impacted by the noise rock equivalent of a hollow-tipped .44 round.

rRope – Ok Nic (7_ Version)

You can order the ‘Where Are You There’ 3xLP remembrance of rRope from Deathbomb Arc.

Butthole Surfers’ ‘I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing By’ slices through our perceptual framework more often than we could probabilistically expect (0.2%), in that very particular 20jazzfunkgreats version of the Russian roulette that is the playlist shuffle.

Our travails deep under the streets of London become a ‘Dia de los Muertos’ eschatological procession, neon lights transformed into information-sucking black holes, we navigate this darkness guided by the phosphorescent bones of our fellow passengers, knowing that our hallucination is revelation, searching for exit wounds in the body of the leviathan which has devoured us, Butthole Surfer’s other type of subversion.

For they were coyotes, they had crazy wisdom, and sharp claws too.

Butthole Surfers – I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing By

As included in Hairway to Steven.