Dear Santa,

Thank you for all the treasures that you hid across our Deep Labyrinth of Madness last year. We had a great time finding all of them, and conveying them to our wonderful readers. We do appreciate your commitment to this way of doing things in spite of the high casualty rate amongst the elven guards that accompany you, and your traditional loss of fingers at the Pit and the Pendulum replica room. We could tell that one was yours because of the golden spider ring in it, how come you left it there? Will you ever learn?

Anyway, we look forward to whatever it is you may regale us with this year. Just a couple of ‘low hanging fruits’ for you to work on– we’d greatly appreciate it this time around there were less high-concept songs describable in a couple of catchphrases. They never work for us. Also, we are rarely compelled by bland press release blurbs, or lame references to previous features in vaguely renowned Internet outlets. Ditch those. We like to interact with humans, or Turing approved AIs.

And we want more politics – the world is going down the drain, and we need music addressing the dynamics of this descent. We know that you are a corporate-affiliated mythical creature, but also that your security measures are feeble to say the least, so you better deliver, or else. And please please please, give us at least another gig as great as the Factory Floor Chris Carter thing at Primavera last May.

Oh, there’s Ortho (do you remember Ortho, the Adept Necromancer we hired to take care of the Halls of the Penumbra of Despair?), he just arrived with some of your goodies, first of the year! Really excited! Thank you!

All the best,

Your threatening 20jazzfunkgreats pals.

What better way to start the 20jazzfunkgreats calendar than with another treat from our comrades at Dramatic Records? There is none, believe.

We are proud to introduce you to the leading anthropologist of explorers Gabo Gulbenkian, who has a valise of goodies coming up in the aforementioned label. Today we tease you with ‘Baron Muenchhausen’, an apology of that German nobleman and raconteur whose most famous innovation was, perhaps, the use of the cannonball as a medium of travel.

Here we fly with the man, through a 18^th century sky, past clouds of Goyan filigree and into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere where the mighty fist of gravity becomes the sleight of hand of a Zingari trickster, we float delighted under the benign gaze of the Queen Moon and the rest of her stellar court, an army of selenites salutes sternly from her pockmarked and mysterious face. We will be claimed back and fall, into silence. Until then, we dance with the silvery ghosts that inhabit the gates to our world.

Gabo Gulbenkian – Baron Muenchhausen

After such an exercise in proto-astronautics, nothing more advisable than an excursion under the warm crust of convalescent mother Earth, if only to equilibrate our verticality karma.

Guided by the astounding Chicagoans Fielded, we spelunk into a Cave of Forgotten Dreams like adventurous figments in the imagination of Jules Verne’s psychedelean doppelganger. This is a Four-dimensional experience across space and time that culminates at the hollow core of our planet, where metallic dinosaurs reign supreme, and the lost tribe of Kobaia choreographs a set of complex rituals around the wooden framework of the Horse, forgotten totem of propulsion, motor of our spaceship’s furious journey.

Fielded – The Horse

Buy: Alex Barnett/Fielded split from the excellent Nihilist Records.