They sure liven things up, those visitors. We don’t see much people around nowadays. The farms only employ robots, and most of the youth moved to the coast, where the connection speeds are way faster. Those who have stayed work and live in the webs. They rarely leave their houses. Their bodies are here, but…
When we listen to albums like ‘Arp Navigators’, by 20Jazzfunkgreats heroes Food Pyramid & Roy Orb D. MT., there is one archetype that comes to mind, every time. It is the Warrior on the Edge of Time that Hawkwind photographed for the front-cover of the self-same album. Therein is condensed the vastness of feeling of…
Here in the UK our July 4th was marked by two events, inadvertently competing for the news cycle. On the one hand we have the barely comprehendible Libor fraud; perpetrated by those with a strong financial incentive to defraud; an environment of catastrophe in 2008 providing the old end-times opt-out of morality. If the world’s on fire, why…
It is fitting that we hear of Jean Giraud’s (aka Mœbius) passing away under a clear & warm spring sky, akin to those he so deftly depicted in his fantastic illustrations. We feel a great sadness, as if a gate into awesome universes had shut down forever. We feel gratitude that it ever opened, and…
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…
(Image sourced from the Phil Dick covers archive) Music is our alternate reality generator. It scaffolds the environments that we transverse and dwell on, splashing the masses with Romero red, Lang black, or Neo-Tokyo cell-shades, as we dodge them towards the toothbrush section of the drug-store. The semiotics of the dodging are themselves altered –…
(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,…
20jazzfunkgreats has been delving into the early history of computer graphics and animation – the way in which digits give life to moving images that eventually, touched by the finger of genius, are imbued with an illusion of intelligence and soul, arguably artifice for now (although who knows what those cowboys and astronauts get up…
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…
(He has all the answers) 20jazzfunkgreats has applied a sound-mining algorithm to its e-mail intake and established that, after filtering out the trash (90% overall), 45% of what remains falls within the loose boundaries of new age-new kosmische-new minimalism-new ambient or combinations thereof (this is after accounting for the longer average length of songs within…
(Otoman architecture via 50 Watts) As we descend parallel to the spike that impales the heart of the province over which our tower rises we reach a damp oubliette whose walls are covered in mysterious scribbles, the descent continues into the darkness, but we have never gone further, for an old man of foreboding countenance…
Ideas for sacred cows and discourse: The term krautrock is itself a derogatory and racist category invented by English music journalists. Tangerine dream is the music your dad/weird uncle/granddad made in their bedroom and kept trying to make you listen to. Faust were signed by Richard Branson, and their song Krautock is an in-joke on those who…
The chasers of the secret lore are a shady tribe who collect analogue relics from a bygone era, align their intricate switches in certain configurations like a gilded key into invisible lock to open the gates of humanity’s dream-state to all sorts of wonderful reveries and visitations. Food Pyramid are part of the crew, the…