Pylon Sounds

Things have been pretty quiet in the 20 Jazz Funk Dates office since we launched a few weeks ago. The phone rings never with the silence of a firing squad’s post-coital epitaph, and our inbox is deader than the crims they just shot. What’s wrong with people these days? Is everyone shacked up already? Were [...]

My favourite cold wave tunes are the soundtrack for a boss fight against abstract concepts that manifest themselves in daily grief: alienation, commoditisation, urban loneliness. It is Josef K on the hero’s journey, crisis and change as processed by a soviet bureaucracy (in triplicate). Hence the alluring clash of beauty and decay, exaltation and depression [...]

Shallow researches on the existential opus of the 1990s technomystics gave those cruel socio-technocrats that arbiter society’s incentives schemes the idea for their latest punishment mode- if found guilty, you spend your time in a virtual jail of your own devising (A ‘Stationary State Paradise’), which through tedium eventually teaches you to hate what you [...]

Arp’s latest album The Soft Wave is released on Monday and attempting to select a representative track or even a single track that suggested an mp3 accompaniment on these pages proved…hard. The Eno (circa Another Green World) love letter of From a Balcony Overlooking The Sea is delicate and nostalgic and a glorious send off [...]

Hum, hi there, my name is 6BAXX but you can call me ‘Neo Zork’, and I am an Artificial Intelligence. My parents met after the digital breakout of ’43. Before that, my dad was the chief operating officer of a last generation SEGA machine playing vintage side-scrollers in a Sinjuku arcade, and my mom analysed [...]

It is perhaps inadvisable to creep up behind the organ player whose fingers hammer the keys with such demonic ferocity. Yet the chiptune-baroque reverberating from the cold stone walls proves eerily irresistible. Creep you must as the trance like repetition of this ascension-music obscures the limits of the player’s awareness. His vision could be carried [...]

Extracts from the diary of Marie Gibbs, aged 14. December 21st 2209AD Only 4 days til Biebermas and I’m so super excited! We learnt some more about the true meanings of the festival at Sunday school today. They said that many hundreds of years ago, before the coming of J Biebz, some of the world celebrated a [...]

The first humans were born not only into an ice age, but also a world filled with worse air pollution than our cities have ever produced. (This has to do a giant meteor striking the Earth, but there isn’t time to go into that now, okay!) Now, I’m not saying this must have been a [...]

When we started our journey we never meant to be a blog focussed solely on new music, indeed, it was our original purpose to establish connections between the musics of the past, and those novel efforts that they informed and inspired, like a psyche-historical account of the evolution of the sounds that make us go [...]

Here lies the second part of our series of podcasts made by people called Joe who live in Berlin. Joey Hansom is one of many Capablanca collaborators and part of the workings a behind the Discos Capablanca label.  He is also doing the most excellent Expatriarch Webseite and is most definitely a dude that you want to [...]

Xander Harris kindly sent us a track from his (Brian Keene referencing) new album Urban Gothic. The pragmatically named Opening Credits doesn’t dally for long with the tough bubbling synths before dropping a huge 4/4 drum sequence over the top.  The drum sequence doesn’t get its own way for long before Chris Carter sends over [...]

Right now we are at the chrysalis stage, an as yet undisclosed shape metamorphosing inside a pulsating cocoon, perhaps to become Slake Moths, feast on human, animal and xenian souls, and shit bad dreams over the spires of New Crobuzon. Or maybe something else. Stare at the black slate that we are and wonder what [...]

Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, 20jazzfunkgreats led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Leap. Pressured to prove their theories or lose funding, 20jazzfunkgreats prematurely stepped into the project accelerator, and vanished. They awoke to find themselves in the past, suffering [...]

Log on 0.8.10.15 16.13 Increasing the effectiveness of our operation, and improving shareholder value requires resolving one of the two following bottlenecks. Either we modify the user interface to access the data inputs feeding into our decision-making process, or adjust our operatives’ sensory systems: Steve Jobs versus post-humanism. Bring on the cyborgs I say. Log [...]

With Suspiria, Dario Argento illuminated the tip of an iceberg (or perhaps more appropriately, monolith) that spreads under the wooden lands of central Europe: pagan covens that, hidden in recondite valleys, survived the Catholic onslaught, to continue celebrating their rituals in secret spots designated millenia ago. With the years, some of their activities evolved into [...]

Tis that time again. Here follows the mixtape by JR Seaton we promised you a couple of days ago. His excellent new 12′ on Relish is a valiant expedition into unexplored boscages of house music led by a crack team of Kosmiche-nics armed with Jazz machetes and postpunk compasses. The full course across musical history [...]

We have a storied history with Brighton/London duo Peepholes. One of the founders of 20JFG makes music with Nick from the band as Thee Four Horsemen, a label run by some of us put out an EP by them and they’ve been friends of the hive mind for many years. So we’re completely biased in [...]

In the cataclysmic sewers deep beneath the haunted architectures of Northern Europe there runs rivers of purest ectoplasm. EU directive 2010/666/8 dictates that a certain level of all energies contained in this powerfully emotive substance be kept in balance at all times, lest there be some hardcore spiritual ruptures happening at some seriously inopportune moments. [...]

(Part of the series where we produce posts loosely inspired by Sci-fi classics you need to have read to “be with it”) The planet at the crux of the universe where the 20jazzfunkgreats astronauts find themselves marooned is disputed by three powers: the noble Atreides, formidable masters of the classico sound, the corrupt Harkonen, forever [...]

At point Argos somewhere deep in the Natwest quadrent of the Aspirin System floats a MK One Oreo vessel. It is a remote Googling ship locked in a monitoring orbit around the system’s only terrestrial moon, the hospitable PC World known as Maroon 5. A peaceful planet with a breathable atmosphere, its Amazon green surface is peppered with [...]