At home poorly with a chest infection recently, I decided to gorge on duvet and movies. This included Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, a bunch of late-era Star Trek flicks that I'd somehow missed the first time round, but figured must be better than the screaming electric crapfrest that is JJ Abrams' The Wrath of Khan reboot - the clumsy passing of the torch from Kirk to Picard in Generations and the Cronenbourg-gone-PG Borg-porn of First Contact (both even more miserable than Into Darkness). I also dug out a film that puzzled me thoroughly as a child. Because [...]
Good music is innovative Good music is useful Good music is not understandable Good music is both obtrusive and unobtrusive Good music is honest Good music becomes long-lasting Good music is fascinating down to the last detail Good music can be as little music as possible All music is aesthetic Music is fun/difficult Innovation is fun/difficult Xxjfg are happy to stew in our own constantly evolving aesthetic of dividing you, dear readers, into the lovers and [...]
(This post was written before Iain Banks sublimed/was reassigned. It goes to him in any case. The artwork is by Trevor Naud via 50Watts .) After Iain Banks’ Transition and a delightful detour into music literature (with David Byrne’s ‘How Music Works’ ), 20JFG just started reading another book based on the premise of trans-dimensional movement of people and artefacts. No-one should be surprised to find that this topic is of interest for our coterie of fantasists, dippers into sonically augmented realities, also fans of video games which [...]
We must have become officially middle-aged, because today is about our very own yesterday. We feature two songs that, in the last week or so, have induced in us some memories, or fragments of memories, or empty spaces that should have been filled with memories, and instead are filled with lizardly flashbacks of muscular swing & release in the grim dance-floor of a hostile quasi-club in Brighton’s tatty quasi-seafront, in the company of ca. 10-20 like-minded individuals We are talking about The Do Club , which between 2005 and 2007 harnessed/bootstrapped a flesh-and-blood social network of believers [...]
There's something about the much maligned mid-90s genre of Handbag House that seems to inspire people to see a bizarre reflection in it (not to mention the rabbit-hole of handy sexism in that alliteration). Claire Denis ended her dissection of masculinity, Beau Travail - which is vying with Carpenter for being referenced on this site - with Denis Lavant dancing to The Rhythm of the Night. This isn't some revelatory moment glimpsed in the face of pop that Wenders went in for. This is the children of Italo uncovering the strangely maudlin in the relentlessly upbeat. [...]
We must have become officially middle-aged, because today is about our very own yesterday. We feature two songs that, in the last week or so, have induced in us some memories, or fragments of memories, or empty spaces that should have been filled with memories, and instead are filled with lizardly flashbacks of muscular swing & release in the grim dance-floor of a hostile quasi-club in Brighton’s tatty quasi-seafront, in the company of ca. 10-20 like-minded individuals We are talking about The Do Club , which between 2005 and 2007 harnessed/bootstrapped a flesh-and-blood social network of believers [...]
(Art is Cocaine Cobra by Paul Lobel. ) We originally meant to post this galactic rockin' party bangin' Space Dimension Controller joint weeks ago. We've been digging his album, Welcome To Mikrosector-50, for ages. But the time just never seemed right. And it still doesn't feel right. We're writing this right now with one eye on the news, watching the world rot through a television screen. Worries about a British Guantanamo in Afghanistan, while meanwhile the real Guantanamo is still open for business and as belligerent in the face [...]
(Art is Preemptive Nostalgia by Scott Scheidly. ) Fabric 69 has to be the most dense and claustrophobic in the entire series. Previously, DJs such as Optimo, Metro Area and Swayzak weren't above dropping a bit of Negativland, Fad Gadget, Xex, or even Ministry into their mixes, but it was all with an understanding of light and shade, matter and antimatter, Force and Dark Side. Basically, the mood music never came at the expense of dancefloor artillery. No matter how autre the selector, the journey was always one that even the most casual club goer [...]
(Art is Cocaine Cobra by Paul Lobel. ) We originally meant to post this galactic rockin' party bangin' Space Dimension Controller joint weeks ago. We've been digging his album, Welcome To Mikrosector-50, for ages. But the time just never seemed right. And it still doesn't feel right. We're writing this right now with one eye on the news, watching the world rot through a television screen. Worries about a British Guantanamo in Afghanistan, while meanwhile the real Guantanamo is still open for business and as belligerent in the face [...]
Illustration above by Gianmarco Magnani , via Sci-fi-o-rama . Iain Banks Transitioneers flit between an infinity of possible universes. They occupy a body for a short period, undertake a task, deliver a parcel, send a message, assassinate a foe, or one who would one day become a foe. They are endowed with a special sense of the history of a place called Fragre, which they use to orient themselves as they navigate the many worlds. 20JFG are transitioneers in a way, they drify between the infinity of [...]
(Art is by the excellent Gordan Shark .) It's like getting really, really close up to a Roy Lichtenstein painting - smudging your face up against the glass and crossing and uncrossing your eyes, focusing on a cluster of dots at a time and rocking your head back and forth to approximate some sort of internal zoom lens. I wonder if that's how Chris Smith of Fractal Skulls sees the world - like Yayoi Kusama must do. All softly flaring and then fading points of colour. His gentle, precise synthesizer poems [...]
The debut Fantomas album - Patton’s first major release since leaving Faith No More - was intended as a literal musical transcription of a comic book, one which the listener is not privy to, but instead has to decode in the stampeding drums, electric-shock guitar-bursts and gibbered vocals - all postmodern ‘KAPOW’s and ‘KERRUNCH!’s Delirium Cordia was a wordless opera based around an implied story about surgery sans anaesthesia. Suspended Animation tried to make a sonic cartoon about the month of April - each ‘song’ another Tom and Jerry-style japefest depicting an individual day, and sounding fairly accurately like Carl [...]
This post is dedicated to our friend Matt. We have long known that good science fiction isn’t really about the future but about the present. Contemporary situations, concerns and trajectories of development are stretched to fit an altered framework, and from this strange viewpoint, we reach new insights. This means that good science fiction isn’t prediction, but a reflection about today’s zeitgeist and the qualities of the new world encoded in it. Also architecture fiction, a usability test of potential realities that may help us make decisions today – is that the kind of world we [...]
Following the 20JFG company outing to gaze in awe at Chris & Cosey last week, a certain amount of spring cleaning has been going on. Emotionally and physically destroyed by the experience at Heaven we have retreated into the depths of our cavernous backlog to wait out the tinnitus. Sorting through the selected ambient works and the brittle minimal synth melodies, we stumbled into a warm Psyche embrace. 2013 Psyche to be more precise. Tjutjuna to be blunt. Mousetrap, the first track on Tjutjuna's album Westerner is nothing if it's not coiled intent. The gentle bobbing [...]
The sun's stumbled drunkenly through the door, muttering incoherently about being late. How it's very sorry; lost track of the time; won't do it again. And we sigh and forgive it because with the windows open and the heating off we can indulge in late night communiques with the stars. The most ethereal of music can flourish without the wind ripping it from the sky. The arrival in Brighton of the sun can do funny things to a city built around the summer. Tables bud around pubs and artisan ice cream shops visibly relax on their foundations - [...]
(Photography by Kevin Baluff .) In 2013, minimalism is making a lot of sense. Fire, too. It's hard to describe why brass can sometimes be such a great communicator, but certainly in the right hands and lungs a honking saxophone can be supremely lyrical. This horn's thudding, pulsing bleats are industrial and rusty. It sounds like sunken submarines and rotting war weapons singing. Its overtones are caustic. Weird how this voice can sound even more human when it's forced through the factory-like valves and bends of a baritone sax, when it [...]
Having spent almost two weeks trapped in the throbbing FTL Drive of Stellar OM Source’s Joy One Mile has led us to develop a theory about the constitution of its sound. Here we outline this theory, contrast it with the reality of its making, and find a poetic way of integrating both things. The theory : There is something about the elements of Joy One Mile and how they fit together that fascinates us. Their essence is artificial but their form is organic. They define the framework for a dance, but the [...]
Having spent almost two weeks trapped in the throbbing FTL Drive of Stellar OM Source’s Joy One Mile has led us to develop a theory about the constitution of its sound. Here we outline this theory, contrast it with the reality of its making, and find a poetic way of integrating both things. The theory : There is something about the elements of Joy One Mile and how they fit together that fascinates us. Their essence is artificial but their form is organic. They define the framework for a dance, but the [...]
This is a post about mid-90s Asian cinema, late-80s cyberpunk and Footwork. This is how it goes down. Though Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express was often pilloried for its sentimentality, its true calling was as a mainline to a vision of Hong Kong beneath all the hyper-capitalism. While the idea of Tokyo as a living embodiment of Cyberpunk was pretty well established as a trope by now, it was the street level bustle of Hong Kong that nailed the feel. Cyberpunk's appeal was never really its science. Wetware and the Matrix were undoubtedly fucking cool but [...]
(Art is by the excellent Gordan Shark .) It's like getting really, really close up to a Roy Lichtenstein painting - smudging your face up against the glass and crossing and uncrossing your eyes, focusing on a cluster of dots at a time and rocking your head back and forth to approximate some sort of internal zoom lens. I wonder if that's how Chris Smith of Fractal Skulls sees the world - like Yayoi Kusama must do. All softly flaring and then fading points of colour. His gentle, precise synthesizer poems [...]
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Frau – Tarian Sari (stream)
Franz Ferdinand plot tour, share behind-the-scenes video
