If you care about weird, celestial, underground music. If you've ever had a passing interest in electro, italo, garage rock or any music that sounds like dystopian badlands, then you'll have trawled 20jazzfunkgreats. They were the first blog to tell me about Crystal Castles, Salem and Teengirl Fantasy - always in their own eternally cerebral manner. They are also only one of about ten cool things to ever come out of Brighton. Now 20jazzfunkgreats have scuttled into Viceland to tell you (and let you hear) the most exciting music booming from under their office door. They'll be appearing every week, welcome XXJFG.
As regular plunderers of the discotheque tomb, Barbara Mason's silken sex serenade Give Me Your Love is definitely locked in our collective heart chambers. So you can understand our intrigue when we caught wind that a kindred spirit of XXJFG brothers in arms, Mi Ami had taken our beloved song and dragged it through the dead leaves in the twilight hours. In the process of rubbing dirt over the mirror ball, Lili Schulder aka 51717 sounds like she's spent a lot of her time hidden away deep inside a cave, her only company a disheveled and disturbed Timbaland she found roaming through the trees one day, distant, mute, without explanation, possessed by his own crushing genius for the mathematics of rhythm crouched in a dark corner banging on stalactites with sticks and bones, whilst she incessantly rocked back and forth to the new-age, mind splitting atmospherics of Ariel Kalma. Consequently she's concocted a beautiful kind of future forest-funk designed to hypnotize and lead you through the spaces between the leaves with blissful abandon.
Keeping disco music firmly in the glitzy, gilded, ever so slightly melancholy neon palaces of a 1980s Milan re-imagined for a Bladerunner future, where the italo sirens sit atop black and gold thrones shaped like panthers and watch as impressively coiffured Armani cyborg models sway and slowly malfunction at their feet, Pink Stallone have become firm favourites of ours. Transferring the moody movements of a Jan Hammer score into something thoroughly futuristic by immersing the pastel synth shades in waves of digital twitch it sends a comforting chill up our spines to imagine what else is yet to come from them.
Similarly Brooklyn based doom balladeers Prince & Pearl continue to mesmerise with their intoxicatingly grubby brand of cracked skull soul, which when listening to their music is akin to watching Low unexpectedly unleash upon the world a secret, sick admiration for the slow motion, creepy malevolence of sludge metal heroes Burning Witch that actually against all odds ends up making complete and utter sense.
On the blog we're continuing to unveil our video/remix project with Telepathe which ended up being something quite special indeed. For those who may not know yet, XXJFG in association with Merok Records commissioned some rather wonderful people to remix Telepathe's latest single, The Devils Trident. We were so happy with the results we were compelled to ask some other rather wonderful people to create videos to accompany them. A twelve inch of the Telepathe remixes is now available to pre-order from Merok, and if you want to lose yourselves in magical, Machen haunted forests and Lynchian bathrooms connected to parallel universes, hitch up on your brooms and head on over.
Robin Carolan - XXJFG
I was beginning to think this day would never arrive.The two wonderful-est websites in the whole of the interweb are getting sexy with each other.yay.xxxxx
Posted by: Saad | 05/12/2008 at 15:59
i like the reviews where you call the band/artists cunts and slide in a barely related anecdote about how your mate did a shit in a shoreditch skip once
Posted by: klnlknlknl | 05/12/2008 at 16:30
this is awesome stuff!!!
Posted by: krull | 05/12/2008 at 17:41
three cheers for this wondrous union. 20jazzmatizers were one of the first blogs to write about a little band called deerhunter. you've probably heard about them. they have more hits than misses of just about any other tune blog around. yippee!
Posted by: gordon | 05/12/2008 at 18:58
According to about eight besotted 3AM conversations I've had with him too many, Vice's own Baby Balls claims to have interviewed Deerhunter for the magazine months before anybody had written word one about them, but then lost the tape. Get over it you fucking spazz!
Posted by: jason | 05/12/2008 at 19:15
Fuck you, you cave-browed ape. You're the one who brought it up all those times. Last time I share anything with you at 3 AM.
Posted by: Balls | 05/12/2008 at 19:19
Pink Stalllllllonnnnneeeeeee.
Posted by: | 05/12/2008 at 19:37
in all truthfulness, though, deerhunter used to be such a mess of effects and wishwash that you couldn't tell what the fuck was going on anyway.
Posted by: bambi hunter | 05/12/2008 at 19:46
I can't work out if this a really good thing or a really bad tning.
Posted by: | 05/12/2008 at 20:08
Vice can't ruin 20jfg's taste. Those are some classy mothas.
Posted by: | 05/12/2008 at 20:10
We don't have anything to sell out, so it's a good deal.
Posted by: Juan | 05/12/2008 at 21:48
garbage
Posted by: | 05/12/2008 at 22:23
nah, don't think we'll post that.
Posted by: Juan | 05/12/2008 at 22:44
Fuck, now everything I like is related to Vice in some way. Can someone please tell me about something cool they've yet to get their hands on?
Posted by: Hi | 11/12/2008 at 16:04
XXJFG2GOOD4VICE! Good luck anyway ;) x
Posted by: Bob | 11/12/2008 at 16:29