The Coombe’s self/titled EP on Mannequin has invaded the screen of our psychic radar like a flotilla of aeroplanes loaded with ghost-drugs that add extra layers to our sensory input. Depending on the song, this may be the muslin-like textures of the ectoplasm of Victorian mediums, iridescent bubbles dancing past the dada architectures of a…
A tiny sweaty man sits on a tiny sweaty box, thrown into shade by the violent stage lighting just behind him. A thick drape separates him from the expectant crowd. He dabs nervously at his forehead with a grubby handkerchief before — his hands pressing hard down on his knees — he rises. Rounding the…
So here is the thing: Brooding diva Mushy, who has darkened our days & made our nights blinding with poems of doom drafted in a crumbling ruin, that Mushy, she has constructed a music compilation from the bottom up. It is called The End of Civilization. Mannequin Label is releasing it in vinyl today. What…
Ancien Régime’s music arrives to us as if through vast expanses of space and time, faded by cosmic dust, purified by the Sun’s radiation. Turn the volume up, it expands sideways and engulfs you with the maximum bandwidth of a desperate dream. It is as if it had been birthed in an arid moon where…
Stranded, we gawk into the shadows of the Lair of the Minotaur. The only colour in this ruin is the ghostly glimmer of a golden chain we uncoil behind us, it connects us to the outside, or perhaps, across the millennia, to romantic audiences gawking into the shadows in the front-cover of a 4AD record,…
Transcription of the words in ‘Warning: Non weaponised memes’, an Arts Project video produced by Mona.Blue_0427_C for the 66.228.27.19X Biennale. Image from the latest Space Teriyaki at 50 Watts. [NB – this text is written in archaic English, and therefore nigh unintelligible for its intended audience. During the display at the Biennale, it was/is/will be…
Henrich Dressel’s Sighing Melodies Thru The Graves contains 5 very detailed & hero-proof schemata for world domination. They generally involve the assassination of high-ranking politicians, industrialists, civil servants and Secret Society leaders (remember, magic is real), and their replacement with psychologically conditioned and/or remotely controlled puppets, figureheads and Manchurian candidates. The identities of the victims…
There is something about the sword and sorcery genre that fascinates the 20jazzfunkgreats. Not the lore, or the tropes. We find lengthy disquisitions about genealogy and arcana tiresome and generally clunky, and roll our eyes at clichés, lazy tropes and Manichaeism. Yet we come back to it, for those moments that make our heart beat…
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…
Witness the return of existential heroes, plunging forward into their complex worlds. The hero’s engagement with it eroded by the vast Socio-corporate forces assaulting them at every turn. The alternative to the quick death of engagement and the long madness of paranoia: to drive. Xander Harris brings us the banging spectral harmonies and Night Drive…
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…
Imagine a 3D model of someone’s bedroom containing every single object within it, and every single bit of information concerning that object. Where it is positioned, how it arrived there, what was done with it, what was felt about it. Imagine it as a digital version of Georges Perec in Life: A User’s Manual. Photographs,…
Researcher Rusty David, of St. Louis, suggests that while the details of the current ballad support the Frankie Baker/Allen Britt story, in fact the ballad predates this murder, and describes a killing that took place in the same red-light district of St. Louis sometime around 1865-70. When the Baker/Britt killing took place, according to David,…
We’ve long championed Digits’ appropriation of various dancefloors in service of his hushed pop. A whispering sound from the ether that swirled around Arthur Russell back in his folk fuelled days. Digits’ latest feels familiarly strange in the way that Water Borders did on first listen. Brought up in a pre-internet land the idea that…
Antiguo Autómata Mexicano’s ‘Speed’ narrates the grievous spiritual journey of a civilisation of transcendental beings under attack from a cosmic virus that is chaos, unity in slavery, and never-ending hunger. This journey starts with the realisation of the severity of the threat, followed by the grim decision to face it with whatever weapons can be crafted…
Over the last handful of months, Mannequin records have experienced double-digit rates of growth in the impossible market exchange for hot record labels peddling beautiful and corrupted synth-wave. Having had privileged access to the fine output from Sixth June, the latest addition to Mannequin’s repertoire, your 1980s oversized spectacle wearing 20jazzfunkgreats Wail Street analyst has…