In Preston’s seminal (yet unknown) novel ‘Verse-Chorus-Metaverse’, Prestwick L. Parallox makes no fewer than 8 appearances. They mainly describe a sub-plot where Prestwick is dropped by his publisher, only to be rescued by a bunch of Sci-Fi/Music zine writers, who are the only 4 people on Earth to have any reverence at all for his work. They showcase his work through a kind of interconnected computer network (this novel was written in 1983), and eventually he is picked up by a new publisher – for whom he writes his Nobel prize winning novel ‘You’re Only Free in Layer Three’.

‘You’re Only Free in Layer Three’ is a fictitious sci-fi novel written by a fictitious author, who himself is the creation of a fictitious sci-fi author in a fictitious novel. The plot focuses on a group of prisoners in a Gulag labour camp, who mange to construct a portal to a parallel dimension using various religious paraphernalia, kept hidden from the guards and contributed to the project by each prisoner. Their life in the new dimension is happy and trouble free, until they realise it’s only marginally different from their own, and they are captured by the Soviets for the second time.

Can they once again escape to the third layer? Will the same collection of religious paraphernalia and incantations open the portal to the mythical third layer? What will happen if they get there? You’ll just have to pick up a copy of ‘You’re Only Free in Level Three’ to find out.

We haven’t had anyone from Chicago on the blog for at least a couple of days, so let’s rectify that right now.

Windbreaker – Meat, Me on the Autostrade

Windbreaker is the solo project of Nick from Lazer Crystal – those immaculate automaton of arpeggiated bliss. As you’d expect from one facet of this Crystal – ‘Meat, Me on the Autostrade’ is a sumptuous feast of Drexciyan chords served upon a Robotnik platter by a cubist algorithm. The final course is a smooth dessert of C64 pastel-prog with a distant vibez of  Brassica, Hubbard and Moore dancing over your tongue, like squares of impregnated paper featuring the logo of the melodic illuminati that those three would surely form.

No release on info for this one, just bringing you the demos because we love you. There’s plenty more where that came from on his myspace (remember those?), and we heard there was some new Lazer Crystal coming very soon……

You can catch our very own conceptual Sci-Fi Author – Preston G Parallax – playing alongside Blondes, Xorzyzt and Black Black Gold at the Sameheads basement in Berlin this Saturday. Unless the party gets moved to Sam Heads basement in Layer 2, in which case Prestwick L. Parallox may turn up instead.

This post is dedicated to anyone who didn’t understand the plot of Inception.

It’s not so hard to take things to the next level. Let us lucubrate.

The population dynamics of a world infected by a zombie holocaust would clearly result in the extermination/retreat of the human race from large swathes of the territory. Potential scenarios following from this:

[1] A zombie famine perhaps slowed down by gory feasting on the thriving wildlife, or mass migration to new areas populated by humans. Only retarding the need for…

[2] A zombie enlightenment where the unthinking hordes develop some basic organisational skills, and start harvesting humans for their brains. And if not…

[3] A zombie lethargy, where the undead slip into a coma until humans come back from a safe haven where they have gathered in numbers to recover their strength. But of course we prefer…

[4] To assume that zombies derive nourishment not from alive flesh per se, but from intelligence stored in brains, which replenishes their decaying nervous systems with neuroelectrical energy. From this follows that, if by the time the zombie holocaust takes place, humans have managed to deliver on the promise of Artificial Intelligence, then zombies will move on to feed on the data infrastructure once they are done with real people. Zombies against robots. Moore vs Fulci. Biomechanical carnage. Come on people, this is surely someone’s wet dream. Make it happen.

Which brings us to today’s musicks. One would be hard pressed to find a more fitting candidate to soundtrack the industrial death clash of that final scenario than the psychic commandoes after whom this humble blog is named.  Throbbing Gristle. Yes. Savour the words like an innocent child after taking a bite from the putrid apple. We should do this more often, whenever we feel lacking in the energy required to make sense of modern culture, visit Gristle La and get purified.

Start the test.

Throbbing gristle – Adrenalin

Adrenalin was included in a 7’’ the other side of which was Distant Dreams (Part 2), which you may have heard in one of those era-defining Soul Jazz Compilations. It captures in its aerodynamic envelope the nihilistic momentum of the man machine synthesis with which life in this planet steps into the next level, to the stern metronomic crack of a dominatrix whip. Think Patrick Cowley’s Menergy, and then reverse the polarity.

And let us continue with the TG vibes down the ill-lit corridors of a hopefully abandoned abattoir, by the bony hand of German Army. They are a minimal synth project involving members of Bipolar Bear/Turrks and former Spits, and their Calypso Host is up there with the best cuts from Chi-town’s nocto-liminal renaissance (e.g. Beau Wanzer or Alex Barnett) – although they don’t hail from Chicago.

German Army – Calypso Host

Slash! This is the bit in Escape of LA where Snake slips into the cellar of the cosmetic surgery clinic hosting those faded celebrities who had their skeletons extracted, smooth is (supposed to be) beautiful. You can almost picture an H.R. Giger/Black Dice spawned reincarnation of Doctor Phibes freestyling on his organ, sounds refracted and distorted as they course through vats overflowing with sentient, abominable flesh.

Picture above is of course from Stalker, just imagine Snake Plissken somewhere in there.

The pit is a wormhole shield that conveys emotional energy into a frozen vacuum where it floats in stasis like the discoloured specimens of a crippled race. The pendulum is the razor-sharp condensation of molten dreams flowing inky from the alcove at the pinnacle of the witch house.  Mushy brandishes both weapons deftly, deviant chanteuse of the shadow gladiator arena.

Faded Heart is the field recording of a night of slo-mo psychic bloodshed at this crumbling coliseum, a debut of uncanny mystique and ghostly enigma accomplished beyond the glummest dreams of most drag apprentices.  It drenches pages torn off Zola Jesus’ grimoire in the thick waters of the swamp where Christine Baxter drowned, deep in the woods of a death country shrouded in thick ambient mist, roamed by shapeless beasts of Lynchian origin.

Mushy – Losing Days

Mushy’s Faded Heart is out on the 28^th in Mannequin Records, packing ace bonus remixes from Newclear Waves, Soft Metals, Heinrich Dressel and Crossover.

The first 20JFG Podcast of the year is a real smasher. Kruton is the DJ alias of our pal Milo, AKA Binary Chaffinch from the Dissident posse AKA Milo from the Chrome Hoof posse. Heavenz Gate, his most recent release on I’m a Cliche is a remarkable voyage through pretty much every style of dance music known to mankind (well, all the ones that 20JFG loves anyway). Due to its 20 minute span we were unable to post Heavenz Gate, so instead we are presenting this awesome DJ mix of ‘indie music’. Kruton’s ‘Indie Splice’ mix truly dusts off and enlightens forgotten corners of second hand record shops, drawing covert lines between previously unconnected themes (as any good DJ mix should), and is of course thoroughly entertaining throughout.

Kruton – Indie Splice Mix

1. Schneider with The Kick – Shout
2. Visage – We Move (Dance Mix)
3. Oscillation – Future Echo
4. Chrome Hoof – Body of Perfection (Inky Blackness Bitch Mix)
5. Paul W. Teebrooke – M42
6. Rick James – Ghetto Life
7. The Kinks – Where have all the Good Times Gone
8. Blackhorse – The Ping Pong
9. Loop – Spinning
10. Philip Boa and the Voodoo Club – Skull
11. Pearl Necklace – Rapid Bliss
12. Gang Star – Say Your Prayers (Inst.)
13. Renegade Soundwave – Blue Eyed Boy
14. Sammy Nestico – Shore Line Drive
15. Spirit – Turn to the Right
16. Eartha Kitt – Mountain High, Valley Low
17. Booze – Depresso-Funk
18. Kreeps – All I Wanna Do is Break Some Hearts
19. Foreigner – Urgent

On a warm Iberian island under purple skies.  On the gentle cliffs  above the glistening midnight blue sea.  On the flat roof-cum-balcony of a white washed villa.  On a wicker chair, padded with soft white cushions.  She sits.  And watches the stars unfold.

They twinkle infinitely in patterns of such astounding beauty that the only acceptable action is to recline and drink in the celestial display.

Below, a man glances up at the balcony — its occupant hidden from view — the sky unfolding above.  Golden hues spread across the endless purple night.  He sits, his head resting against a rock as the waves nearby lap against the shore in a sequence not unlike a blissful arpeggio.

Both of them, in unison, struck dumb with awe at the quiet beauty of the cosmos.

A balearic hymn to an unnamed Goddess that masters the art of gentle euphoria so completely, combines cosmic-disco tropes with such loving care, that it becomes, by the end of its seven minutes, one of the most moving thing we’ve heard in a long time.  Synth stabs, co-opted African rhythms, cooing male vocals under waves of arpegiated bliss: Bubble Club’s The Goddess is one of the very reasons we write this blog and we can’t praise it higher than that.

Bubble Club – The Goddess

International Feel will release Bubble Club’s quite unfathomably beautiful The Goddess on March 7th.  Bubble Club is Dan Keeling former head of A&R at Parlophone and former MD of Island Records…which I guess makes us total slackers.  The 12″ will come backed with an epic Quiet Village remix.

Lord Boyd graced these pages at the end of last year with the wonderfully titled Space Jordan 96, all tape warped eastern strings and dub beats.  Here his handiwork is applied to a an equally cut-up approach to western strings.  Swimming in the same channel as The Field and Gold Panda Lord Boyd’s Better Beedies loops and cuts end of the millennia string washes into a pre-dawn reverie, a half submerged glimpse of light flickering on the water.

Lord Boyd – Better Beedies

bottom image by El Lissitzky

Yes that’s right, never one to be left behind in the race to sell superfluous technology to people who don’t want it – last month 20 Jazz Funk Greats rolled out its very own App Store (without telling anyone). Unfortunately there have been a few teething problems. Apart from the our aggressively telepathic dock icon that went out with the last OS X update (Apple didn’t even notice), we maybe didn’t bother to run a background check on some of our suppliers, and we sure as hell didn’t bother to test out the suspicious beta versions they sent us. So we reiterate – DO NOT CLICK ON THAT BUTTON. But if you must, and because we value you – the 20JFG reader – in a sane and alive state, then here is a guide to some of the apps currently on offer that are best avoided.

FLAMEY

Flamey is a CURSE-APP that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Flamey also prevents the user from going to sleep by putting a huge yelling icon right in front of their face, and shooting (100% guaranteed real) flames out of the the side of their laptop. There’ll be no more late assignments of lack of productivity again, as every time you feel your eyes closing Flamey’s there yelling satanic incantations to ensure that you never, ever sleep again. Download now for £1.99.

TOPTASTIC

TOPTASTIC is a web service that helps the user to find out about new music based on whatever song got stuck in the user’s head that day. The TOPTASTIC app turns your isight camera into a a full fledged C.E.T. scanner that performs a full cranial scan, and dredges the required information into the TOPTASTIC server for analysis. The user should then be taken to a selection of relevant songs via the TOPTASTIC search engine. Unfortunately, the TOPTASTIC song database is a strictly controlled playlist of about 25 tracks, and if the user song doesn’t conform to any of these then the app will inflate the user’s head to around the size of a Space Hopper (TM) before exploding it Scanners (TM) style all over their macbook air. Download now for £1.99.

HELL PORTAL HD

From the makers of FLAMEY (TM) comes HELL PORTAL HD. Click on the HELL PORTAL HD dock icon and your laptop instantly turns into a inescapable wormhole to an unspeakable dimension, where hideous creatures are tortured by even more hideous creatures. Anyone sitting in the vicinity of the macbook pro when the HELLPORTAL app is opened will instantaneously be transported to this sickening dimension, where their souls will be forcibly removed with rusty pliers and used like a shamious leather to clean the limousine windows of the unimaginable ruler of the insanely unkind. Download now for £1.99.

We are very pleased for Golf Channel recordings to make their 20JFG debut today. Considering the ecstatic lengths of their cosmic output, quite how these guys escaped a mention before is a mystery. But then considering the chaotic lengths of our sporadic output, quite how anything does manage to get a mention on here is an equal mystery.

Ghost Note – Abularyo

Being broadcast v soon on the Golf Channel is the second EP from the mysterious Ghost Note. Wheras the A-side ‘Kapwa’ is the smoothest balaeric proffer we’ve heard in a while, Abularyo is it’s evil twin. Abularyo is a voodoo cursed steel drum troupe fast forwarding through a compilation of the tensest moments from John Carpenter’s career (except for maybe Vampires), whilst planning a collaboration with Massiera on the new soundtrack to the Tower of Terror. It’s thoroughly evil, and we love it.

You can pre-order the Ghost Note II EP here.

The deal is thus: We are a holographic projection of information encoded in the 2-dimensional event horizon enveloping a black hole in the deepest reaches of the Universe. What you hear are imperfectly translated shadows of a perfect pop architecture forged in the carcass of a Supernova, and endowed with just about enough energy to escape from the claws of its infinite gravity well, animating the dreams and muses of the quantically attuned. This is the sink where some of this cosmic debris precipitates, odd and beautiful.

Arrange a Beowulf cluster to parse a billion parallel lines of non-descript psychedelic trance music and compile their genealogy.

At the most basic level you will find the parameters of a joyful model long ago corrupted. Retrieve them from the land of Obliviorama and let them evolve in a synthetic world whose basic building blocks are the prose of Lord Dunsany, high resolution imaginary from deep space probes, and selected minimal composition scores.

After a few thousand iterations, a creature emerges from this data soup, with feathers of a shocking chromatic scale, like M83, and echoes of Lucky Dragons’ soothing purr. Its dominant survival strategy is love, and it drives the ecosystem into equilibrium.

Jesse Ruin – Better than Psycho

Better than Psycho is included in Jesse Ruins’ Split Tape with The Beauty in Cuz Me Pain.

Apply super-conducting electrodes to a 1980s psychic amalgamation, run the output through an open source game engine to recreate a poetic teenage bedroom wallpapered with images of obscure divas, chunky stereo system and a large mirror. Insert Konnichiwa into the tape deck, press play and let your super-eye-lined avatar dance through the night.

Konnichiwa – Maiden China

China Maiden taps into the same well of esoteric pop wonder as the Knife did in their pre-Silent Shout glimmering incarnation, but varnishing it with trebly Freestyle paraphernalia. An avalanche of non-linear reveries ensue, like A-Ha’s Take on Me if it had been penned by Yellow Magic Orchestra, which truly is something.

China Maiden is included in Konnichiwa’s Visions, in Rainbow Body records.

Fielded‘s Lindsay Powell hangs out on the balconies of a galactic parliament chamber, singing out a monologue over the epic processional music accompanying the opening of a new session of the star chamber.  Hidden behind a Venetian mask and shrouded in a black cloak Broadcast’s shadow looms over the ensuing ritual.

Fielded – Late Come to Stay

Late Come to Stay is taken from a four track 7″ on Sophomore Lounge Records available on March 1st.  Lindsay is also a member of Ga’an whose album 20JFG have been getting rather excited about over the last few weeks.  Yet more reasons to love Chicago.

One particular node of the 20JFG hive mind has been partially distracted of late with his video making activities.  Hopefully many of you have already seen this but if not, here’s the video for the lovely Echo Lake’s Young Silence.  Their début 12″ is released on No Pain in Pop on valentines day and you can pre-order it here.

Once again we open up 20JFG to the Endless House Foundation and Dramatic Records. If you’re unfamiliar with this occasional series then it begins here, and other episodes can be caught scattered around the rest of the internet. Today we feature an excerpt from their forthcoming book – “Sketches Of The Endless House” – a collection of miscellaneous editorial/episodic prose from the three fateful weeks of Endless House’s existence in 1973.

This particular piece is taken from an Italian journalist named Stefano Paolucci. Stefano was one of the very few ‘establishment’ journalists allowed to make the dauting trip to see Jiri Kantor’s project at first hand, and this particular extract captures a buoyant Rasmus Folk around the time of the aforementioned “Pavel” and, of course, the anthemic “Coupe’”

“…and then it was that I saw Rasmus himself, a vision of pastellised cosmopolitanism. Surrounded by a protective enclave of Kantor’s ’aesthetic engineers’, the man didn’t so much walk as Viennese W(w)altz through the House’s chrome corridors. Only on one occasion was I able to pierce his studied personal choreography, and then (im)purely by virtue of voyeurism. He had premiered “Coupe’” to delicious applause the evening before, and now I saw him at work on a new study he called “Pavel”. Engrossed, immersed, and flanked by the technical expertise of Klaus Pinter, this was a very different side to Rasmus. Without an exotic European cabriolet in sight, the Austrian was constructing something of an altogether weightier fabric. Pinter and he were discussing Graham Greene together. “I don’t want to be remembered for mere ‘entertainments’”, he quipped, “so let’s shock the Endless House with the weight of this song.”

Watching them work, it was if Folk was assuming a different mask, cutting away, almost violently, at the soft-focus optics of Coupe’. Pinter drove the technical process, applying similar editing processes to those that punctuated “Bewussseinweiterung”, but the ideas were decidely Folk’s.

Playing live drums fed through the squinting filters of an unmarked Soviet synthesizer, Rasmus and Klaus’s industry was to outlast my journalistic vigil. As I got up to leave my vantage point and my story, their final exchanges fluttered into my headspace: ”Nearly there, Klaus…You’re a splice away from rocking the world…or at least Walter Schnaffs!”

Rasmus Folk – Pavel

We are still loving the Endless House album very much, and you can get it from either Dramatic Records or Boomkat.

Expectations about the Dirtbombs cover album of Detroit electronic music classics, ‘Party Store’ (in In the Red), recently reached fever pitch in the camp of the believers where your 20jazzfunkgreats aficionados frolic.

We are happy to report that the promise made in the early leak of ‘Sharivari’ is in fact fulfilled in this triple vinyl beast you should make sure to acquire before selling out times. We are particularly keen on those tunes where Mick Collins’ vocal prowess is in display, from his technophile drone in their stomping cover version of Cybotron’s Cosmic Cars to the awesomeness which is their rendition of Inner City’s eternal classic ‘Good Life’.

The Dirtbombs – Good Life (Basement Roots Mix)

As the good folks of Edgeworld put it, ‘all sides of Detroit’ (Motown, Garage, Techno) are represented here, proudly condensed in a taut metronomic monster varnished in bouncy bass and sloppy guitars that can’t make up their mind about whether they are angular or latino. Collin’s soulful delivery is of course the killer, creating a space-time warp through which we slip into an alternative history where the abstract hedonism of  future electromancers fuels a sweaty boogie conflagration in some rare funk right-on basement.

Same as it ever was, which is the way it should be.

The 20jazzfunkgreats Intelligence Unit has been parsing some historical trends in the accumulation of inhuman capital in the American population between 1950 and 2010 using US Census data. We witness peaks in the number of enrolments in witchcraft colleges during the 1970s, probably associated to the high levels of experimentation with psychedelic drugs, the embrace of paganism amongst younger demographics, and the renaissance of American horror cinema. The net numbers aren’t so striking due to the high suicide rates amongst the cohort enrolling in dark arts courses.

Although the sad fate of many a sorcery apprentice may explain the decline between 1980 and 2000, we believe there are other factors at play, namely the growth in the MBA market, which attracted worthy candidates away from the Satanic arts and into financial services.

The trend reverses with the arrival of the new millennium. The financial crisis has decreased the attractiveness of casino banking as an outlet for darkly impulses, and the mass penetration of the Internet has made it possible for younger generations to access unholy texts and audiovisual content which only a decade before would have been almost impossible to source. The concerns of the god-fearing citizenship about the nefarious impacts of technology on the moral welfare of the youth may still be justified.

One interesting pattern in the most recent data is the significant correlation between peaks in enrolments and music releases by Steve Moore and his alter egos. We are still trying to elucidate the direction of causality between both factors. According to Hypothesis I, Mr. Moore’s activities are impacting on the propensity to practice witchcraft in the exposed population. Hypothesis II would suggest that an expansion in the stock of psychic bad vibes and thaumaturgic experimentation (driven by other hidden factors) contribute to Mr. Moore’s productivity. Either way, this link deserves further exploration. His most recent release, the soundtrack for ‘Star Vehicle’, under the guise of Italian giallo wiz Gianni Rossi lends support to Hypothesis I (see exhibit below).

Gianni Rossi – Star Vehicle

Grainy CCTV footage of a chrome stallion accelerating down an empty industrial grid segues into a first person view of the driver’s cabin under its aerodynamic chassis. Fake leather of a sickly white, a lusty purr communicating the muscular exertions of well-oiled pistons, fleeting rear view mirror glimpse of an aviator shaded face shrouded in cigarette smoke, splashed with the crimson reflections of a host of abstract LEDs, its murderously determined grimace a wordless description of the meaning of ‘cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

Get the album from Permanent Vacation, and check out more Steve Moore related awesomeness (including another tune from the Star Vehicle OST) at his Soundcloud.

Among many other good things, Silk Flowers’ excellent (and neatly sequenced) new album, LTD. Form, contains several jewels of Italian ancestry such as the utterly wonderful ‘Small Fortune’ that enchants us today. With its mid-tempo Carly Simon throwback riddim and power-synths refrains (the romantic equivalent of the theme tune for Rocky), it could have perfectly been the flip side of some obscure Venise 12’’ in Superradio records, as processed by the ectoplasmic oscillators of Hounds of Hate or John Maus. Total tunage, as we say in the bunker.

Silk Flowers – Small Fortune

It is coming out on Tuesday on Post Present Medium and you should definitely get it.

Forgetting to tell his distraught family where he was going for a whole year, they huddled around him whilst he embarked on the fantastical voyage, that would turn him from boy to man. For ever since he had first visited it, Nickodemus had planned to spend his erasmus year in the dream-space between Earth-Moon, and the reality-construct named Pho’gnyshugos. The place best known to us as St-ch - named in the Lexicon of Far Realms as the top 36th best place to visit in the Uggnd-delhab section.

Nickodemus Nathaniel Plyers could have spent his gap year on the Kibbutz. But instead, he devoted it on the unequivocal quest to find the mysterious aura of U-Uno……

Video directed by Aurora Halal

Future Times is back, Mister! We are feverishly excited (in a sublime kinda way) to present this world premiere of the new video and EP from Protect-U – those guys what make the love gush out of us, like a bucket of good vibes spilt across the kitchen floor of serenity.

Protect-U – U-Uno

Three times have we visited Protect-U, and 3 times have our minds been put through a Kaleidescopic inversion.  According to the Lexicon of Far Realms, U-Uno is a land where Dance Mania tough guys live happily together in a commune. A place where DJ Deeon and DJ Funk smoke a bowl o’ peace together and discuss women’s rights. A place where Waxmaster Maurice lets his mind unravel, and considers the nature of time itself. A place where Jammin Gerald produces tracks to the laws of Fibonacci instead of the rules of music. A place we never want to leave.

The incredible World Music EP is out now on the impeccable Future Times. Pre Order it in Europe via Rush Hour.

And while in the sector of ultra posi-tronic emissions so rare, we dug this one out from the archives.

Xynn – Computed Man

According to his website, Xynn was ‘Germany’s answer to David Bowie’. We kind of thought that David Bowie was Germany’s answer to David Bowie – but which ever way you look at it, this guy was seriously under-rated. ‘Computed Man‘ was the joyous discovery that levated us across the emotional chasm that is a traditional British Christmas. An enchanting sonic continuum made even lighter by it’s metronymic absence of any real percussion. An operatic boogie odyssey rendered by an over-imaginative team of IBM programmers – circa 1982. Basically, a big tune! This might also be the second sax solo we’ve featured in a couple of months…..

Check discogs to pick up a copy of Computed Man (the rest of this album is real good). Check his old vids too.

This post was written with some help from the Lovecraftian name generator.

(photo by Nicola Kuperus from Adult.)

Adult. were that blinding beacon of paranoia awaiting at home after a cocaine-fuelled night in the Electroclah Babylon. The half glimpsed hallucination of a Bauhaus tiger with stroboscopic eyes snarling from your surgical looking chaise longue.

Their greatness, never doubted, hit us again while we were picking some tunes for the most excellent T O N G U E S night a couple of weeks ago. It is a testament to the madness of the early noughts that they were considered a ‘party band’, when in all honesty they were cartographers of a geography of serrated edges, autobahns of modernity built on a regolith of psychosis and future shock.

Nausea (Restructured) may well be their ultimate hit (together with Hand to Phone as popularised in that epochal 2Many DJs mix). It basically is hi NRG music for Ballard obsessives, or Drexciya soundtracking an Argento film where everyone wishes they were dead, but murderous deliverance is left pending.

Adult -Nausea (Restructured) (2000)

Erotic Dissidents’ ‘Move your Ass and Feel the Beat’ has somehow arrived at your trusty 20jazzfunkgreats’ scribe playlist and he can’t for the love of god fathom its provenance. Has a sinister cadre of Belgian hackers infiltrated our mainframe to infect it with class-A dancefloor filth? We surely hope so!

What is clear is that these New Beat steppers deliver the goods with a single-minded piece of binary shrapnel built over a Bostich sample, the rest are collectivistic exhortations, Ida No style crooning, fucking around with the speed and levels, and throwing all sorts of stupid noises and the odd breakdown into the mix, all done with prodigious functionality to take you to the place they want you to go. A shining exemplar of what dance music should be about.

Erotic Dissidents – Move Your Ass And Feel The Beat (1988)

The video is quite special too.

Foehn Winds surges across still landscapes like a gang of existential cyborgs revelling on the cadence of their own suicide mission, the bass buzz of bike engines grafted into flesh tattooed with Peter Saville iconography makes flowers wilt, as they drive past the ghastly spot where the Youth of America crashed against the pitiless barricades of reality.

Horrid Red – Foehn Winds

Pink Flowers will be out soon in Soft Abuse. Dig the video from the title track.

Borghesia have been our favourite East European body funk warlords ever since Ben Atkins first told us about them in a bunker deep under Hamburg streets, fleeing the onslaught of a deathdrone swarm. We celebrate with the laser-focussed enthusiasm of the debauched the reissue of their debut LP Ljubav Je Hladnija Od Smrti by the excellent people at Dark Entries.

The trebly perv-boogie jewel which is ‘On’ comes across like the theme tune for Knightrider if Michael was into proper cruising. Ruthless electrobeat grammar dashed with lurid synth flourishes and mutant bass punctuation, black ink splatters out of the stereo most unhinged like ectoplasmic effusions of the sexual samizdat.

Borghesia-On

Go get. And here you have the video.

Bob Loop sat on a stool gazing absently at the sticky sheen that stretched over the long curved bar.  Comfortably oblivious to the other patrons save the odd bump to his back or temporary hand on his shoulder as they ebbed and flowed around him.  Bob’s perch afforded his easy access to Inigo Dick, the acne scarred barman who would occasionally dance the length of the bar to refill Bob’s glass with whatever he had to hand.

Bob, having long since built up an immunity to alcohol, wasn’t fussy.

Bob’s reverence for the process of drinking meant total devotion to the appearance of single minded oblivion his lone stool and familiarity with the barman suggested.  So effective was his appearance that people rarely attempted to engage with him on anything but the shallowest of levels.  Bob liked it that way.  It added to the whole affected mystique of the thing.

Bob’s stool slowly rocked under him.

Turning, Bob came face to face with Pearl Hammond, striking in a blue dress seemingly held aloft by the enormous shoulder pads that made her shoulders uniquely suited, so Bob thought, to the support of various bar snacks.

“Hello Bob.”

Bob Loop made a few mental calculations concerning the level of inebriation it was acceptable to project to dissuade this oddly familiar woman from continuing the nascent conversation.

“Why are you looking at me like that Bob?”

Perhaps a few more seconds of awkward silence.

“I’m really sorry, I thought you were someone else…obviously.”

Hiding the sense of victory behind a slurred, “s’ok,” Bob returned to staring at the sheen on the bar.

“It was just that you looked so familiar.”

Pearl’s eyes, fixed straight ahead, scanned the assorted bottles that Inigo occasionally stirs from their dusty slumber for his more adventurous patrons.

“I’m meeting some new old friends here tonight.  I guess in the excitement of it all…”

Bob’s brow furrowed instinctively.

“This is my first proper night out of the clinic.  I guess I’m a bit lightheaded still.  Everything’s a bit of a blur these days.”

The sense of victory long since passed Bob’s features prepare themselves for the coming onslaught.

“I’m Pearl.”

Turning slowly Bob again sits facing Pearl in her angular blue dress.

“Hi.”

“Sorry about the whole ‘Bob’ thing.  You don’t mind if sit with you a while?”

“Not at all,” lies Bob.

Bob and Pearl sit in silence for a moment, the bar having imperceptibly filled with the night’s traffic.  It was at approximately this point that Bob’s sobriety really started to weigh on him.

“There was all this talk of rebirth.  They went on and on about it at the consultation, at the pre-op, in all that stuff they plaster over the walls.  In the end though, if I’m honest, all it felt like was a very dull grey headache and an strange feeling of…’tightness’.”

It was at the tail end of this moment of awkward ‘sharing’ that the friends Pearl had referred to earlier descended on Bob’s beleaguered bar stool.  All oddly dressed, all youthfully beautiful in that odd way that suggests the entire ageing process in a smile yet anchors those lucky enough to gaze upon them in the enamoured present.

Bob had a horrible sense of foreboding.

“Pearl!”

“You look incredible!”

“How do you feel?”

Pearl sat there absorbing the attention of her new old friends.  Seemingly forgotten, Bob slowly returns to his contemplation of cheap alcohol’s ability to be both adhesive and reflective when applied to well worn wooden surfaces…

“Bob!”

“No, no.  That’s not Bob.  We’ve been through that.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.”

Bob doesn’t budge.

“I taught Bob Loop’s father, what, 80 years ago now.”

“How time flies.”

Ale Mania cropped up on (the excellent) Neu Magazine back last summer with the Garage Punk vibes of DC Rails.  They’re just about ready to unleash their debut album on Volar Records (whose Cold Pumas 7″  we featured a couple of weeks back).  The album is not representative of either of those reference points though, ranging from experimental synth tracks not a million miles from Water Borders covering Terry Riley through to this, a total New Order jam straight from Arthur Baker’s cocaine bunker.

Ale Mania – United States of Abamonation

Preston’s next victim was über-powerful publisher – John C. Criris. Now, having knelt fruitlessly at the throne of the publishing industry many times before, Preston knew he had to watch himself here – and so came with a different tack. One of the most coffee-stained and tattered pieces retrieved from his dank cave of ideas, was that for a self-help book.

Called simply ‘Marketing Your Own Madness’, the 466 page tome would describe, in the most excruciating detail, how a range of minor psychological ailments could be turned into cash. The book would be divided into two sections. The first section would give the reader implicit instructions on how they could turn their ‘madness’ into a series of objects or ideas. The second would offer advice on how they could promote and sell these object in a range of different markets. When asked by John C. what kind of ‘objects’ Preston had in mind, he told that sometimes, when he was feeling a bit crazy, he would make a song or write a poem or something – and as it sucks to feel a bit crazy sometimes, it would just be nice to make a little money out of it.

Rather than tell Preston that his book proposal merely described a process know as ‘the creative industries’- a process that had already existed for 100 of years, John C. Criris told Preston that he would ‘think about it’, made his excuses and quickly sauntered off the the toilet.

Preston’s swansong pitch took place at the buffet table. Mega powerful film producer Brenda Thompson thought the food was off until she turned around to find the acrid source. The acrid source had an idea for her. It was an idea for a UK Rom-Com that Preston had long dreamed of. Starring Hugh Grant and with a working title of ‘Listen to Nelson’ the story begins with a couple leaving a classical concert at Royal Festival Hall. They fight and argue till eventually they decide to break up. A dejected Hugh Grant takes a seat opposite the Nelson Mandela bust that lies outside RFH and suddenly hears a voice – which apparently no-one else can here. The voice offers him comfort and advice about his break up. Eventually he realises the voice is coming from the Nelson Mandela bust (which is actually voiced by Nelson himself). Hugh Grant asks the bust if can help him get back with girl and it agrees – and so follows a heartwarming tale of love and reunion centered around Royal Festival Hall, Hugh Grant and a psychic Nelson Mandela bust.

Preston was forcibly ejected from the building.

We’re going in deep today. Captcha records have already blinded us with releases by Ga’an (featured last week), Mahjonng and Chandeliers, and this week’s release by Chicago’s onYou welcomely shines a laser into the retinas of our taste in similar manner.

OnYou – Sight/Seen

OnYou make incredible low-slung motorik propositions, that 20JFG of course readily accepts. Imagine Neu! if they were a bunch of country slackers, abducted and reprogrammed by aliens wishing to know more about the human psyche. Sight/Seen is like a lost version of HalloGallo that transmits into your dreams like the apocalyptic future in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness – what it tells us on the surface is unclear, fluctuating – but on a another level guides and comforts to our inevitable destination. A place of increasingly undulating syncopations.

The White Waste EP is out this week on Captcha records.

Let us take a stroll though the audio junkyard scavenged by Yearning Kru.

Yearning Kru – Ryad

Maybe 20JFG doesn’t explore the genre know as ‘outer limits’ as often as it should. Yearning Kru is the project of our pal Chris, who has indirectly been responsible for a couple of 20JFG unearthments from the past year, and despite exploring territories that may lie sometimes outside 20JFG’s of jurisdiction, the DIYADH ep is totally awesome and deservedly posted here today. ’Ryad’ is the most conventionally narrative structure contain therein. The possible outcome of an alternate reality where James Ferraro produced the latest Autechre album (could happen), it describes a terminated battlefield where borg warriors exchange their battle legends around a datamoshed fire.

DIYADH is available as a free download from the Yearning Kru Tumblr.

Last minute annoucement!

20JFG (in association with our pals at Bananamania and DONUTS!) are very proud to be putting on the awesome Teengirl Fantasy at Raum 20 in Berlin this very sunday……..