XXJFG


28th November 2011

Terribly Capable People

Like that fixer extraordinaire Finn from 20jazzfunkgreats very own Silicon Bible, Chevalier Avant Garde curate their exclusive store with artefacts ransacked from a variety of periods.

In each of these converge powerful vectors of technological possibility, historical context and cultural imagination, they are combined within the insurrectional black box to define new possibilities full of weird spin and momentum.  These are not songs but the stuff that songs are made of – the cheeky melody of a Throbbing Gristle lullaby, the poetic cycle of a Kraftwerk automaton, Chicago’s soul machine code.

They haunt our present like the ideas of long defunct philosophers.

And they simmer with energy from the shelves of Chevalier Avant Garde’s  exclusive store, ectoplasmic echoes of an awesome exercise in post-punk feng shui. We are trapped within their invisible web, we await for the spider.

Chevalier Avant Garde – Canyons

Canyons is included in CAG’s ‘A Difficult Whole’ cassette album, which you can get from Where to Now (chop chop, there are only 50 of these beauties available globally). We are celebrating this launch with a special podcast on Saturday.

If we were to update the naughty shenanigans of the teenage coven that terrorised the English countryside in Blood on Satan’s Claw to our inadvertently cybernetic present, we would stumble upon a situation akin that which is portrayed in ATM’s cavernous Slow Fade cassette.

In Bad Blood, the opener, we find our darkly protagonists chasing elusive effluvia of carnage in an abandoned abattoir, and in the process awakening something in between Christopher Lee’s gurning Dracula, the big satanic goat of medieval lore, and Henry Ford’s forbidden techno-erotic fantasies. It crawls like one of This Heat’s 24 loops, it howls like the forlorn followers of Crash Course in Science’s religion, it is damn sexy too.

ATM – Bad Blood

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25th November 2011

Delightfully Odd Music

Deep Earth return to the pages of 20JFG with a track from their split with Food Pyramid (who took the time to leave a lengthy comment on Monday’s post — both post and comment are well worth reading).

Kontraband teases as a synth led Miami Vice Balearic stormer, all mid-2000′s slo-disco swagger.  Yet the Bladerunner synths that wash over tracts of the first third cast all that revivalist neon in a slightly odd glow.  If anything the entire track crumbles in on itself for an extended breakdown (in both senses of the word), taking in some almost minimalist Mediterranean shuffles and, is that an ever so slightly funky bassline in there?  That is before those mournful future noir synths surge back in on the back of a wonderfully deployed horn solo (thus playing into 20JFG’s secret love of horn sections in dance music — I’m looking at you Etienne Jaumet)

So, delightfully odd in a way that restores our faith in delightfully odd music.  So kind of Finders Keepers in 7″ form or, more prosaically: not a million miles from Aeroplane‘s debut and the promise that held.

Deep Earth – Kontraband

Kontraband as we may have mentioned, is a split with the awesome Food Pyramid.  Out on the equally awesome Moon Glyph Records.  Get it here.

This wondrous image was taken from the wonderful Sci-fi-o-rama and it’s by Kilian Eng

Another returning 20JFG shock-troops recaptures these pages, this time in the form of Lord Boyd.  Taking in all the foreign lands he’s conquered visited, Lord Boyd’s remix Time Wharp‘s Cuspcake pulls in the early house synth obsession from UK Bass, the chopped RnB from, well, modern RnB.  The original‘s chip-tune p-funk come blissed out end-of-level boss on a yacht (rock) made of cocaine…ness, is reshaped as something altogether more smooth.  Wonderfully hyperactive while seeming to glide through a parallax scrolling night of two-stepping possibilities.

Time Wharp – cuspcake [Lord Boyd rmx]

This is taken from the Later.RMX album available here.

Lord Boyd also has a track on Egyptian Maraccas curated comp of remixes from which this next track by Ben Aqua is taken.

SNAP’s new-age-y Rave anthem Exterminate is made to look positively somnambulistic as Ben Aqua manages the same trick as Lord Boyd above: marshalling a feeling of hyperactivity while simultaneously creating that molasses slow narcotic haze that would be quite terrifying divorced from the vocals and drum programming.  Something of the Weenknd’s mournful RnB drifts over the proceeding further dragging the feeling of speed in a dozen directions at once.  Multiple tempo changes later, the effect is dizzying.

In a good way.

Ben Aqua – Exterminate

As mentioned above this track’s taken from the Egyptian Maraccas remix album available here.

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24th November 2011

Thanksgiving

Featuring:

Adam Curtis

120mb is taking a break this week for some American thing called thanksgiving. Instead we present Adam Curtis’s The Century Of The Self. Essential viewing.

Happy holidays you US of A people!

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  1. I don’t usually comment on any blogs, but I’m just really glad you posted this documentary. It’s excellent, and one of my favorite films, period. Happy Thanksgiving, consumers


    Yours sincerely

    m0ny b@llaz

    24th November 2011


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