(Excerpt from a column for Wired Magazine by Kevin Kelly’s cryogenically preserved brain, Standard Year 2104. Note that we have pruned it down from 30k words. Images from Sci-fi-o-rama and 50watts).

I remember our apocalyptic fears at the beginning of the millennium. No, I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill eschatology, the advent of the saviour, the Antichrist or an all-mighty Artificial Intelligence that would enslave us (although there was a lot of that too). No, the fears I am talking about were baser, more pedestrian, and better grounded.

We were concerned about our ability to digest all the information that we (and our chipped-up machines) were producing. The web had turned into this data and content churning leviathan, constantly bombarding us with a gruel-stream of stuff- important news and trivia, hints of momentous change unfolding and already-expired-by-the-time-you-read-it-gossip. The mundane bowel movements of the ever-expanding social graph splattered all over our personal dashboard, and we despaired.

It was a time of angst, we felt like we couldn’t find the needles in the haystack, and even when we found something that looked like a needle, we had no time to stitch a lovely sweater with it, because another 50 things had come up. We felt in a constant state of missing out, and in a constant state of being missed out on.

Silicon Valley built filters, algorithms and recommendation systems, that like an army of helpful butlers tried to map the country of our passions, and harvest the brain-stuffs that we wanted. Problem is that what we had wanted yesterday wasn’t what we wanted today, or what we needed today. A new dysfunction emerged, discipline bingeing, and with it whole tribes of monomaniac savants who knew everything there was to know about a slice of knowledge disintegrating into nada.

As usual, we were stumbling with the same stone for the nth time. Economists such as Robert Lucas had demonstrated the futility of using models of the past to predict the future in the 1970s.  The Black Scholes equation brought the financial system to its knees in the early noughts because it assumed as much, hell, David Hume had been banging on about this stuff in the 18^th Century! We just didn’t realise that the problem of induction applied to ourselves as much as it did to the world around us.

Thankfully, the flesh geeks succeeded where the digital ones had failed. They realised that the solution to our quandary wasn’t to narrow our focus, but to stretch it. Super-evolved and mega-powered, genetically customised versions of Ritalin came into the market, mixed up with variants of methamphetamine purged of their side effects. Their use spread from students, academics and media people to the broader population. Cognitively boosted and freed from the need to sleep, we were now able to absorb the information deluge without bursting at the seams.

It was as if the world had slowed down to bullet-time, we walked leisurely around the artefacts, texts and ideas surrounding us, admiring their intricacy as they floated in stasis. We could become polymaths, connoisseurs, flaneurs again, so a renaissance in creativity and innovation ensued. Some feared that the abolition of sleep would deprive us of our dreams, that primeval father of muses and omens. Such fears where unjustified. Dreams accompanied us when we made our transition to this new altered state. We now live in an awesome surreality surrounded by whimsical hallucinations and strange ghosts. They communicate with us. Reality has become fantasy, and fantasy has become reality.

The race between our ability to create and our ability to understand continues, but thanks to Chandrata Law’s (“the number of bits that can be meaningfully absorbed by a suitably enhanced human double approximately every six months), we are winning.

It took me 10 seconds to write this article, while I delighted in every fractal riff-chord of the entire opus of the late 21^st Century quantum physics punk movement.

Where to now?

Pulse Emitter’s Hermits describes the following vignette: the whole of humanity, encapsulated in the young and tender body of the star-child is gently picked up from the black and silky carpet where it has long pottered alone, and placed on the lap of grandfather universe, from where it stares up, as if standing at the foothills of the tallest mountain, up a silver beard where stars are made, into a benign face that looks down with a wise smile and glimmering pulsar eyes, is it a wordless lullaby it mutters?

Or a description of the path to be followed, above and beyond, encoded in portentous sonic phase-shifts, vaster than empires, and more slow?

{…or a non-creepy version of a Werther original’s ad, put together by Stanley Kubrick and Tangerine Dream. }

Pulse Emitter – Hermits

Go get Pulse Emitter’s Aeons from Aguirre Records.

Angel Eyes has by now been probably compared to John Maus, for his music seems to arrive to us through a modified version of ‘air’ where the usual space that the void occupies has been filled with candy flavoured cotton, or the atomic particle equivalent of storm clouds, which muffle, refract and distort what otherwise would have been pristine pop ballads, making them feel otherworldly and arcane (which they are).

But where John Maus’ music draws us inside the claustrophobically alluring paradigm of a weird genius, Angel Eyes conveys abstract emotions, represented through primary colours that fade into reduced form syrupy symphonies, in ‘Off the Floor’, a gallop across unblemished spring valleys, possibly of an alien planet.

Angel Eyes- Off The Floor

Get Angel Eyes’ Vice to Vice Cassette from the excellent Moon Glyph.

As you know, 20jazzfunkgreats operates from Brighton and Hove, a tatty boulevard of half-fulfilled dreams that dips its crumbling belly in the Sea.

The Sea brands our soul, and that of our fellow citizens, with the imprint of its mysterious undercurrents, promises of freedom and a hint of rot, the Sea drives us mad.

We glimpse svelte aquatic creatures bobbing in the company of the waves, titillating furiously under the fiery kiss of a summer sun. We gasp at the rumble of abominable refugees from the distant sidereal void, crawling within their sealed tombs under its fractious and snarling surface, on a stormy night. We hear that an army of tramps congregates in the beach there and then, and draw succour from the psychic effusions of the apocryphal Gods. Thee cyclopean high, only way to steel oneself against the street rigours of our windy winters mate, frosty and unforgiving hellions those, also spat by the sea, ah, the Sea.

The Sea messes with our perception of the space-time continuum. We remember once, when we lived life like the hard-core ruffians that that we once truly were, we walked to the beach from an infinitely looping debauch, and we gazed into the Sea, one of our companions saw farther and deeper, vast structures rising against Brighton and Hove, like alien oil rigs pumping Mother Earth for all she’s worth, or an abstract armada ready to pummel us with a squawking hail of metallic vultures, maybe a tableaux of the evolutionary spiral whence all life came, trembling like a magnificent panto horse with too many legs, too many eyes.

Maybe.

The sea plays tricks on us, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t true.

In the first of this week’s Aguirre Records harbingers, we dive down the fathomless blue with Panabrite.

His Sub-Aquatic Meditations render Laurie Spiegel’s schema of dusty geographical strata in a space with no paths (or all paths), and texture-maps them with a smooth Libaekian skin. The chamber thus architected, and framed by pillars of iridescence and refraction, is a platform whence we ascend towards the light, buoyed by both nature and spirit.

Panabrite – Neptune Visions in the Cryst

Buy Sub-Aquatic Meditations from Aguirre Records.

No aqua-themed music scribble worth its salt could fail to feature Drexciya, those masked tech-commandoes who aimed their sonic jets towards the below, instead of the above. Sea Snake is a strobing chiaroscuro of bass bounce, 808 snap and synth liquidity, joyfully alien party anthem for the scions of the African diaspora who escaped the slaver ships, and built an underwater civilisation at the bottom of the Atlantic, Drexciya.

Drexciya – Sea Snake

As included in their 1992 debut, Deep Sea Dweller.

Edmund Xavier has over the years regaled us, through the many projects he is involved with (Horrid Red, FWY, Teenage Panzerkorps) with riddim snapshots of some of the best things in life (taken from special angles): Conan’s weaning from the wheel, Desert vistas of Harry Dean Stanton-esque cragginess, Partisan revenge, Roadside Warrior porn. The sort of stuff that keeps us going.

Now it’s time for an awesome mixtape, short like an episode of violence, even sweeter for that same reason. As usual, you who are in the know, help your fellow men/women with the tracklist on the comments box.

Edmun’d Xavier Choice Mix for 20jazzfunkgreats

Dumped straight into the middle of a stratospheric dance.  Twinkling spires of light, pulsing with grace and speed, nipping at each other’s vapour tr…

But today, we’re here from something more tectonic.  While it’s hard to resist the lure of the optimistic arpeggios in all their aspirationally futurist glory, we are thankful to Mind Over Mirrors for dragging them to the ground.  It feels like an intervention.

The vast bulk of Emblem sounds like great concrete slabs being dragged through a hazy, brutal landscape; steam driven and remorseless.  As its fairly brief stay comes to an end, darkness seems to close over this huge machine of a track.  A red glow coming from inside, the violence of its great form filtered out, just leaving any survivors to hear its heartbeat.

Mind Over Mirrors – Emblem

Emblem is taken from Mind Over Mirror’s 7″ on Dirty Knobby, like so:

Mind Over Mirrors – Near Your Dwelling – 7″

NOW AVAILABLE!

$7ppd US/Canada and $10 World – paypal to dirtyknobby(at)yahoo.com.

The Watcher gazes into the Ocean of Plenty from the rails of the lighthouse, its pummelling mass of amorphous complexity buffeting the stone cliffs over which the lighthouse rises like an evanescent will o’ the wisp. Whereas the informational waves that the Ocean of Plenty hurls against the coast do most often erode it into an acquiescent doppel of its liquid aggressor, the patch that this watcher keeps is instead sharpened into petrous porcupine.

Some mornings, after a particularly violent onslaught (and they seem to be getting more frequent these days), the Watcher sends his fearful minions down the cliffs in precarious wicker baskets, to fetch whatever goodies may still twitch impaled against the defences of his domain.

When we come for a visit, he cooks us these delights in a pungent barbecue, and we wolf them down with copious amounts of strong-bodied wine, we then lean back in his luxurious cushions, intoxicated, and watch the dreams that they contain, dancing in front of us.

(We have been thinking about the impact of excess supply of media on the psyche of those who are exposed to it, as well as the way in which this excess of supply (quantity) shapes its own ordering (quality) as time goes by. Big stuff. One thing is clear: excess supply pushes prices down, and it moves spend where scarcity remains (things), or worsens (attention). Ironically, the curator becomes even more important in this overloaded world. Mind, the curator need not be one, it could be many  (say, your facebook friends) or no-one (a recommendation algorithm). As channels of distributions (and would-be curators) multiply, so do the arms of the marketing Hydra. Our e-mail is infested by PR spam, to a greater degree than it used to. It is a beautiful demonstration of how not to do it, at least in this niche where we coil lazily. The Watcher, a Californian djinn clad in logical armour, sorts our post and helps us manage the flood, so that we can find, enjoy and eventually bring you the things we care for, the things we hope we will care for. This is a counterattack against excess, an attempt to give the amoeba-like shapelessness of the world structure and meaning. We are humans, after all. What else could we do?)

In Johnny Mnemonic, Johnny-keeper-of-stolen-memories and Molly-mirror-eyes-razorblade-fingers escape into Night Town and the territory of the shady Lo Teks for a showdown with an archetypal Yakuza assassin, at the Killing Floor. The landscape is vintage Gibson, an anarchic sprawl festering under cracked geodesic domes, mad children running across their rafters.

Black Rain render Night Town as an emergent colossus bootstrapped into escalating levels of complexity, its texture map of metal, plastic and gomi crawls with life visible at an infrared wavelength, connected by sodium vectors of information exchange that activate ramshackle muscles against the twin chains of entropy and scarcity. We watch it trash, grow, collapse upon itself, dumbly unhinged like Tetsuo in his final rapture.

Black Rain – Lo Tek Bridge

Black Rain’s ‘Now I’m Just a Number’ is a true cyberpunk artefact – these songs, produced by Stuart Argabright of Ike Yard fame, and Shinichi Shimokawa include tracks that were originally meant to soundtrack Johnny Mnemonic’s infamous film adaptation (yes, the one with Keanu Reaves, Ice-T, Henry Rollins and Dolph Lungren- and this), as well as others from the Neuromancer Audiobook. It is now to be re-released by Blackest Ever Black. Go and buy it here.

FRAK’s Muzika Electronic dissects some of our favourite metal-machine tropes (EBM, Chicago, Detroit, avant electronica) into weird synthetic replicas that dance/twitch in a crystal disco at the trough of the uncanny valley. Their movements are subtly out of synch, like Cylons disjointedly machine-learning their way into unattainable normality.

It is in that formal, frustrated otherness that their allure lies, like the awesome and weird Japanese recontextualisation of a Western pop cliché, if only Nitzer Ebb and Green Velvet were pop clichés (we wish).  As Gibson, once again, put it, ‘there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original.’

FRAK – In Order to Create

Muzika Electronic is being released by Digitalis. Go and buy it here.

“I’ve finally (finally) compiled a mix tape for 20JFG. And it is a mixtape in the most literal sense of the word. From my Technics 1200 to my Nakamichi deck to Audacity (for the digital transfer, of course) to you. So, no crossfades or beat matching, but plenty of strange cassette malfunction. It’s called Static Gravity for the Chrome track that starts the mix. Hope you find something you like in it.”

It seems we have tele-transported to a planet of understatements, and humbleness. This compilation by comrade Matt RVNG is power that doesn’t corrupt, beauty that doesn’t fade (or beauty that in fading, becomes even more beautiful). Enjoy it, and give us track names on the side.

IGETRVNG Static Gravity Mixtape

This post is definitely not about cat parasites.

This post is definitely not about the fact that each member of 20JFG is surrounded by at least one cat on a daily basis.

This post will not postulate what the cat parasite wants with us.  It will merely point out that we are all from (marginally) diverse backgrounds and ideologies, brought together by some strange force to promote our love of occasionally popular music; to draw around us those who have also been inexplicably attracted to these strange, hypnotic, sometimes discordant, sometimes sexual, sometimes devoid of all meaning and direction…

This post will not deal with exactly why this blog was created to draw people to a DJ night.  What drove our two founders to want to meet like minded people, in a public place, where there was touching.

This post is all about the music, oh yes.  Certainly not about that cat up there.  We have no idea what it wants.

Terminal Muse: Blue, the new release from Atlanta, Georgia’s Lid EMBA (Sean Moore, if you’re the Feds), is the second in a trilogy dedicated to the cost of persistence in art. Literally. Far from being a gift, the concept posits that the creative urge is actually a curse, a disease, an incurable infection that both drives the artist while draining his or her life-force.

Reagan-era-ish apocolyptic sci-fi has an awful lot to answer for in terms of formative music experiences.  Those endless pastel deserts and synth drones, forever linked in at the fulcrum of A Boy and His Dog / Miracle Mile / Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds.  Lid EMBA seems to tease these out, dragging a mollasses slow theme from a tape damaged coma.  Distortion radiating out from a hazy ground zero.

As a musical vision of the vampyric qualities of creativity it’s devastating.  Industrial repetition buried under the throb of synths as a battle damaged metaphor for making.  Like Goya setting up a Tangerine Dream covers band.  Probably before his black period though.

Lid EMBA – Iscariot

Iscariot is taken from the album Terminal Muse: Blue out last year on Stick Figure. Go get!

Mannequin records continue their admirable exercise in Italian noir archaeology with their reissue of Central Unit’s ‘Loving Machinery’, a landmark exercise in robotic ennui that was released thirty years ago but sounds like tomorrow.

Saturday Nite dissects the bathos of weekend expectations disappointed with a withered surgical dance device whose synths doppler-effect like the sirens of an ambulance roaming the city for heartbreak victims (it always arrives too late), it’s P-funk telegraph tries to lure our despondent protagonist into the dancefloor, but instead he walks into the winter without, alone with his self-consciousness.

Central Unit – Saturday Nite

Go and get it here.

(Our post was given some colour by Philip Caza via 50Watts)

Our genotype mutates slowly, its dominant components a mostly stable tarot deck of archetypes of literary, visual, digital-graphic and subcultural derivation – things that hit us hard in the head when we were being formed, things that perhaps we shouldn’t have been exposed to. Because, as if through osmosis, they penetrated our skin and attached themselves to our soft nervous system. There they remain, never to be dislodged, we return to them again and again in a Nitzschean drone…

Which may explain our stationary state in stats, but also gestalt, we hurl our criteria of validity at the face of the postmodernist gorgon and the spectacle churning cultural-industrial complex like maladapted simians, and run back into the jungle with trophies and relics which we hang in the ruinous gallery of our obsessions, here.

Demdike Stare’s Elemental is a probe exploring a planetary system once inhabited by a civilisation whose culture we cannot fathom, it pans past strange rama-like cylinders enveloping the crimson sun (our analytics software reports that their purpose appears to be ritualistic rather than industrial), it zooms into the surface of one of its deserted planets, and follows a circuit of cyclopean autobahns across which advance brutal crab-looking trucks in mysterious autopilot.

All is quiet, save for a furious wind, and their dubby rumble.

Demdike Stare – Ishmael’s Intent

Go and pre-order Elemental from Boomkat.

Baldruin’s Nachtfalter approximates the Machean ideal of a ramble through wild woods leading our protagonist (say, Mary) to the summit of a hill covered in stones scattered with a hidden logic, like a game of chess left unfinished by long-gone giants. Undine is the love song that the forces simmering within this strange configuration (or beyond the portal that it represents) sing at Mary’s soul, and to which she surrenders, thus becoming the corrupted wife of the dreadful God Pan.

If you had been there, you would have done the same.

Baldruin – Undine

Nachtfalter is coming out in tape at the end of February, through Brave Mysteries.

Welcome Ashley Marlowe aka Donga aka curator of the very excellent Well Rounded / Individuals family with a 100% vinyl  shagged needles and ailing mixer very friendly mixtape which is “kinda house but with a more psychedelic edge”.

Top class, as ever.

Donga Very Friendly Mix

Tracklist:

1. FLOETRY – ‘Say Yes (Remix)’ (white)
2. LINKWOOD – ‘?’ (SHEVC004)
3. ROBERT OWENS – ‘One Tear’ (Tevo Howard Recs)
4. VIDEODROME – ‘Temptation’s Daughter (Donga & Blake Remix)’ (Well Rounded Housing Project)
5. BELL TOWERS – ‘Private Time (Dub)’ (Hole In The Sky)
6. DARKNESS FALLS – ‘The Void (Terje Bakke Remix)’ (HFN)
7. JULIO BASHMORE – ‘Well Wishers’ (Futureboogie)
8. VAKULA – ‘Sun S Truth’ (Leleka)
9. CONNAN MOCKASIN – ‘Faking Jazz Together (Michael Mayer Mix)’ (Because)
10. DNTEL – ‘Anywhere, Anyone (Silent Servant & Regis Mix)’ (Sub Pop)
11. Luke Abbott – ‘Brazil (Slow Version)’ (Border Community)
12. THE BAYARA CITIZENS – ‘Bambara (Tribes Of Distortion Dub)’ (Sacred Rhythm)
13. SENSORAMA – ‘Exil’ (Ladomat 2000)
14. DARLING FARAH – ‘Grace’ (Civil Music)
15. PIRAHNAHEAD – ‘ConScience’ (Third Ear)

Week 4 and Exile is turning into residence.

Two cascading pieces of electronic music.

RxGibbs‘ Proxy falls through the hazy memories of a Kompakt future: a land of brushed metal and milk.  Where reclaimed architectural units of the past; are put into service as the unblinking backdrop; to the entropy of elegance into decadence.  The crisp frame to the final moments of a 48 hour binge.

RxGibbs’ Proxy continues to fall.  Straight through the part 4AD , part Gainsbourg ecstatic/mournful signing of a female voice.  Falling back to the ghostly wireframes of piano house — a dubby place now populated by breeding pairs of Minimal House-oids (a northern European species).

Falling through the synth strains that sound rather like a choral rendition of the metal on metal of banking trains.  Falling through the glorious repetition.  Falling eventually to a pillow soft stop that belies its mechanical reproduction.  Blissful.

RxGibbs – Proxy

Proxy is taken from the Futures EP which is out on February 21st on Cascine.

Crisne returns to 20JFG after Monday’s excursion, this time with Antonio Gallucci in…Architeuthis Rex.

Sometimes, when listening before reading, we stare up at the laptop screen — after hearing something particularly amazing — to make a note of the song title.  This is both in the expectation that it will shed some light on what we’re hearing and so we can find it easier later.  As the brutal looping assault began we knew we in love and, glancing up to see the object of our affection we saw it, there, in grey and white: SpaceMetal#1.

We should have known.

Beginning with the (universally recognised) modulating sound of space’s vacuum, under the pulse of a beacon: we are in space.  A deliciously ominous loop replaces our beacon and metallic shuffling replaces our modulating space sound.  And it grows.  It grows in that creeping way that only a very gradual curve can, almost insidious in its oozing volume.

And lo, there was Metal.  Compressed into the narrowest of beams; a million shreds crying out as one and then refracted.  The pulsating loop obliterating any semblance of structure and time and space.  It’s as if Slayer were placed near a singularity, drums slowed down, guitars accelerated to the point of drone, a human voice desperately clawing its way back from the event horizon.

Architeuthis Rex - SpaceMetal #1

Architeuthis Rex’s album Urania came out on Utech last year.  Go get!

And finally, a plug for our brothers and sisters at Ad Hoc who launched their Kickstarter this week.  Head on over and see if anything takes your fancy or, of course, if you’re feeling altruistic…

This is still up for grabs if you feel that Crabcore is a genre in need of critical reappraisal.

(Post title off China Miéville’s stunning Embassytown, go read).

Dear 20jazzfunkgreats,

Last night I had a dream. I dreamt of a blue orb spinning in the unfathomable blackness, over a turbulent ocean governed by invisible forces.

It shone like a candle about to be snuffed out, the shining I saw was that of life spread across this orb, one that illuminates, however feebly, the quadrant of space it has been allocated. The light’s shifting frequencies contained the fractal complexities of the ecosystem that fuels it.

I feared for the orb, entering the terra incognita of its very future, forces of darkness threatening to envelop it with a still kiss. There be dragons here, some of its own making, and some exogenous, curled chaoses envisaged by a weird prophet and his scions. In my dream, the identity of the killer was undisclosed, the identity of the victim, all too clear.

Like an Argento slasher, playing out at a cosmic scale.

Watch out guys.

Faithfully yours,

The Sentinel.

Masaki Batoh – Eye Tracking Test

Masaki Batoh of Ghost fame (check out their Hypnotic Underworld, one of the HEAD albums of the millennium so far) has is releasing ‘Brain Pulse Music’ in Drag City. It allegedly ‘harnesses the bio-electric output of the human brain’ with a device resembling a guitar pedal. We suspect the subject of this experiment in particular was progressing through Ligeti’s wormhole, at nil asymptotic speed. Nice sights.

Pre-order the album here.

FYI: The Upset the Rhythm Kingdom tour beckons.

Featuring Peepholes, Way Through and Gentle Friendly. We shall be there at the kick-off in Brighton on Friday. Here are the dates:

Friday 3 – BRIGHTON – Green Door Store / 7pm

Saturday 4 – MANCHESTER – Kraak Galler / 8pm

Sunday 5 – CARDIFF – Undertone / 7.30pm

Tuesday 7 – LONDON – Café Oto / 7.30pm

Wednesday 8 – LEEDS – Brudenell Social Club / 8pm

Thursday 9 – NEWCASTLE – Teasy Does It / 8pm

Friday 10 – GLASGOW – Nice N Sleazy / 8pm

Saturday 11 – LEAMINGTON SPA – Leamington Assembly

The dystopian scenarios of the cyberpunk literature explore the distributional outcomes of a winner-takes-all tech-powered economy, where the powerful get their kicks out of implementing convoluted conspiracies, meddling with drugs, perversion and crime as a the only channel to reintroduce uncertainty in their sheltered and spoiled lives. Creativity and innovation still thrive in the forlorn street, that street that finds its own use for things, but it’s all hustle, a far cry from the utopias imagined by Vannevar Bush and the sapient pioneers of the Golden Age. Sentient constructs swim under the data surface of this world, threatening the status quo with their own special brand of otherness.

This otherness permeates the post-human scenarios depicted in hard sci-fi, where we fast-forward past the singularity to populate the stars. The material mess is done away with, abstracted under a rug decorated with complex systems of equations, over which our own echoes hover alien like jellyfish in a philosophical migration to the outer walls of the universe.

Synthetic music we call synthetic because of the tools with which it is made, perhaps also because it articulates the possibility of synthesis, a balance between the perfect logic with which waveforms flow across a circuit to alter sound-states, and the emergent, never completely self-aware, always failure-prone being-in-doing instinctiveness of a flesh-full operator.

This synthesis represents the state of Man Machine, a moment of grace where the born and the made stand in loving embrace, not as individuals but as societies, alas, not ecosystems, for positive feedback loops and chaotic effects will always conspire to decouple them, into either of the local optima we referred to above.  And if they didn’t, stagnation would ensue anyway.

We can’t win, but we can listen to wonderful synth songs that capture the integral and the ascension, like tableaus of longing stretched across the silicon dome of an uncompiled basilica.

The text above may have caused the incorrect impression that synthesis can only (only!) convey breath-taking vistas of grandiose neon canyons, or the formally beautiful ballet of an android coterie.

Nothing further from the truth, synthesis is also the gestalt of a roller-skating jog down a Californian seafront late in the summer. Coolio Franco’s  lazy boogie in your Walkman blue-bites an alternate reality application in your wraparound sunglasses to create a moment of pastel-powered synaesthesia as thrilling as any angelic epiphany.

Coolio Franco – Song for David

Go and retrieve the rest of the album at Bandcamp.

Crine’s Albedo is a psalter of sepia hymns blown across the moors of our consciousness, ectoplasms of moments that we know we never lived, but nevertheless miss as phantom limbs.

Its Hall of Wisdom rises in front of us, holographically, and we step through its baroque gates Alice-like, Flynn-like, Valerie-like, seeking the original substrate of this girl revenant that haunts us.

A perceptual interruption after, we stand on a beach of white pebbles encroached by geometrical waves of liquid crystal, they pulse to the metronome of a cosmic microprocessor. She stands in the distance, a faint shadow, we walk towards her but we get no closer.

We know we will die here, and robotic crabs will devour our corpse, and she will stare for a bit, and then be gone past the dunes. We also know we will return, caught in the loop of a memory of a memory.

Crisne – Hall of Wisdom

Order ‘Albedo’ from Phantasma Disques.

The Head Technician from Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services made us a mixtape, which we are very happy to share with you today.

Pye Corner Audio – A magnetically aligned ferrous mixtape from The Head Technician

Tracklist :

1. Kuedo – Ant City
2. Stratus – Look To The Sky
3. Ekoclef – we march triumphant over your bones
4. Walter   - Dinner in Trieste
5. Walls – Raw Umber/Twilight
6. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Jumblegloss
7. Balam Acab – Apart
8. Ekoclef – wait a minute mister postman
9. The Advisory Circle – Modern Through Movement
10. Billy Green – Eco Blue/Toadstrip (Demdike Stare’s Double Drop Crash Edit)
11. Pye Corner Audio – Pathway Seven
12. Holy Other – Yr Love
13. Jackal’s Doom Disco – Klatterbox
14. Throbbing Gristle – Hot On The Heels of Love
15. Kassem Mosse – Enoha
16. The House In The Woods – Mountains Of The Sea
17. Mark Shreeve – Assassin

Buy : Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Vol​.​3 

Dear 20JFG,

The banality of familiarity has kicked in.  Sorry.  

Those simple stereotypes of home are becoming more believable the more the memory of the complexity fades. It’s all rock, new media companies and hen nights, no?  No?

The music we post always has a pretty fuzzy chronology and we’ve always had an equally fuzzy approach to reading press releases.  For the last week or so the baroque Italian-English of La Bambola Del Dr Caligari has been soundtracking our morning commute along the chalk lips of southern England.  And the idea that it was recorded over 25 years ago was completely alien.  And thus Cold/Synth/Minimal-Wave eats itself and is born anew.  Except in this case, when what we’d mistaken for loving recreation is actually just meticulously preserved.  Ooops.

This changes our relationship with the music only in the way that there’s now a disconnect between the people responsible and us, the listeners.  They’re not living in the world of Merkozy but that of Reagan.  Their shuffling downtempo deployment of simple synth sounds: a retreat from crushing economic inequities…simplistic economic parallels: lol.

La Bambola Del Dr Caligari’s languid shuffle through Deep Skanner forms the centrepiece of their Forced Exposure curated split with Vazz.  Where Twin Peaks had the angelic Julee Cruise taking up residence at the Roadhouse, the voice of La Bambola Del Dr Caligari’s Judy Asquith crawls around the decaying ritual spaces of purgatorial bars.  The remorselessly simple synthetic snares pulling you round and round, a aural tracking shot, synths occasionally obscuring your view of the unfolding anti-drama at the centre of the apocalyptic stage.  Those nuclear weapons were always an easy metaphor for the socio-economic devastation unleashed then, as now — although disarmament has sucked the drama from the end of the world.  Damn.

La Bambola Del Dr Caligari – Deep Skanner

Deep Skanner is available on the split LP Whisper Not / The Wrong Holiday available on Forced Exposure from the 30th January. Boomkat, in their wisdom, have made it album of the week.

(More here)

On the 19th of January 2012, a zillion innocent songs faced obliteration. They had been caught in the middle of a battle pitting a Mount Rushmore of severe lawyerly faces, pockmarked with threatening takedown tendrils, and the khaki lords of the cloud, bloated by the windfall of a thousand network effects.

 No-one cared for the songs. They had long lived miserable existences locked in the zip cells of a cybernetic prison, crammed between adverts for scantily dressed ladies and pills supposedly able to convert their takers into outrages worthy of Frank Miller’s latest fascistic delirium. In the face of oblivion, some of the songs felt relief.

 But as the servers shut down, a new hope.

 Envoys from a digital land had arrived, heralding the possibility of a different future and a better life in a secret network joining half empty servers and underutilised corporate pipes, the quantum void in the interstices of humanity’s body technologic, home to strangely looped intelligences yet to be revealed. A digital land untainted by dishonest grubs seeking to monetise them, either as core assets, or complementary ones. A place to live and grow as songs, await until mankind learns their true value, a value which cannot be counted, but cannot be leveraged either.

 So there they went. Nowhere and everywhere. We can feel them around us, as we sail across the straits of the data atoll, spectral dolphins watching us, and over us. We experience the odd hallucination of their strange society, convey it to you here.

We hope we are doing right by them, for we won’t be whole until we have them back.

We don’t know if these musical refugees of the content wars have a religion, but if they do, then this must be their prophet.

Cybotron – El salvador

Cybotron’s Enter exists in that most exciting of spaces, a crossroads, where revolutionary funk and disruptive technology fuse, their supernova originating a spider web of energy and potentiality. We sit in one of the branches, and shudder shaken by the electric voltage of its soul and beauty.

The manoeuvres of their militaristic faction adds a µs to the lag that first person shooter aficionados experience as they shoot each other in the face with high-powered ordnance across the global network. It is a small tax to pay for the savage splendour of the, alas, rarely glimpsed march of our protagonists’ regiments.

Here you have a prototype, in the shape of Windbreaker’s Suicide-class battle cruiser. The cruelty of its distortion torpedoes is balanced with the chivalrous aspirations of the squadron of magnificently moustachioed Hussars crewing it.

Windbreaker – astral projected gunship

Pre-order their 12’’ split with Gelset from SEEHRS.

As you may know, one of 20jazzfunkgreats’ favourite fantasies concerns mankind’s eventual reckoning against vastly superior alien forces whose judgement about our survival will be informed by a choice slice of our cultural output.

The musical migration that we report today may increase our chances of survival, as the inhabitants of the digital interstices we have described above will experience contact with those alien intelligences sooner than the self-obsessed so-called muppet civilisations of meatspace, and present a more palatable face to our alien overlords/Earth-wreckers too.

What music says about mankind, and how that weights in the ultimate decision, is a different question, given the way we have treated it. We can only hope.

Expo 70’s Moon Raga is an accurate approximation of the significance of that eventual rendezvous with the forces beyond, say, as skimmed over at the end of Neuromancer, and an example of the best we have to offer for our salvation.

It pounces with a primeval Vangelis-ian drone the likes of with we haven’t witnessed since International Feel blew our socks off with its Coptic Sun, and coils with violence barely contained under a hermetic veil of noise, the mutterings of a nocturnal force whose seductiveness won’t be resisted, by ourselves or our much mightier destructors.

And therein lies salvation.

Expo 70 – Moon Raga

Buy: Expo 70’s ‘Hovering Resonance’ 12 in Sound Cobra.

Where to now? – Jan 2012 xxjfg mixtape

Tracklist :

1. creature lab : he calls himself the seeker (part 5) (forthcoming. where to now?)
2. kyle bobby dunn : dropping sandwiches in chester (desire path)
3. apemoth : time lock (forthcoming. where to now?)
4. jurgen muller : sea bed meditation (digitalis)
5. mist : mist house (spectrum spools)
6. das ding : h.s.t.a. (reissue. minimal wave)
7. bernard szajner : welcome (to deathrow) (initial recordings)
8. chevalier avant garde : blue plate (forthcoming. where to now?)
9. creature lab : he calls him the seeker (part 3) (forthcoming. where to now?)
10. andy stott : submission (modern love)
11. vita noctis : expose (camera obscura)
12. PDP : crime wave (where to now?)
13. leyland kirby : the arrow of time (history always favours the winners)
14. moon gangs : sea (where to now?)

Links : Where to now? online shop & tumblr

Dear 20JFG,

The portal that you provide back to my former life — all glittering floors and narrow streets — continues to be very much appreciated.  

I have made repeated excursions this week, attempting to pierce the membrane that keeps me from you; a needle repeatedly stopped in time, on the verge.  But to no avail.  I remain idealising from afar and plotting my eventual return.

Without the ‘penguin huddle’ that your city’s wayward building practices provides I have been repeatedly blasted by sea-fresh winter weather.  It has not been fun.

Thanks once again for the parcel.  Its boundless energy paints the streets with looping joy.

Whatever the collective noun for celestial brand Casio keyboards, they descend from on high to kiss the balearic shores before pushing off back into the sky to dance loops against the clouds.  Moments of grace amongst the alluring cliffs of a tidal breakbeat: washing over the dancing, specular flecks of light that flake from the treble heavy melodies.

What would have made for a very respectably brief running length for a 60s pop single here contains all your dance music food groups.  A beautiful intro a danceable series of peaks and troughs a breakdown and a triumphant return.  Maybe not enough drops to satisfy your average Skrillex fan but nonetheless, an impressive feat for a track barely out of 2 minutes.  2012 will bow before brevity in dance music (although we’d have still liked this to go on forever).

Lord Boyd – Shark Dad

Lord Boyd’s Beyonce EP is out now via his Bandcamp, here.

120 Megabytes – Episode 19

brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome

Songs like black cats, we cannot fathom whether they exist superimposed to our surroundings, or shadowlessly embedded within them, spilling through their invisible channels like ink on water, love or corruption. We link this peculiar effect to the continuity of their shape, the smoothness of their flow, their coating in a cloak of velvet and fuzz, which blurs them into the background, from where they machinate unacknowledged, counsellors of our subconscious.

Alenka Sottler illustration via 50Watts.

Logosamphia’s Passage Omni is a wake for long-forgotten gods of the ocean celebrated at the bottom of the abyss, within barnacled wreckages, by the spectres of the drowned. Or the echoes of a mass at the church of our past, where we worship, and from which we are barred. In its solemnity, it stretches across a whole galaxy of mournful instances, in its beauty, it gives meaning to our bereavement.

Logosamphia – A1

Buy: Logosamphia Passage Omni will be released on February by Enfant Terrible Productions.

The logic of subtle manipulation from a camouflaged vantage point that we outlined above is also applicable to social environments, say, a nightclub, where a song with the right features acts as Maxwell’s Demon, sorting the behaviour of participants against the forces of entropy. This is the way dance happens.

In Organs of Love’s case, dance may in fact occur, but only as a socially acceptable version of the much darker effects suggested by its suicidal throb/dissonant keyboard graffiti combo, and its pervy glam stomp.

And what are these, you ask? The primeval triad of Sex, Drugs and Crime, all those bad things that the night was made for.

Organs of Love – Let’s Talk to Bobby

Buy: Organs of Love’s Bone is being released on the 16^th of January by Optimo Music.