Friday Cankun Gold

Here is a Friday night fry-out for you. I think this actually came out in 2014 (or at the latest early 2015) but Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold, from Vincent Caylet’s electronic sultan outlet Cankun, is a bursting blast of hypnotic bliss. I picked it up from French label Hands In The Dark a little in the New Year binge (when looking to buy Housewives’ brilliant record Work – a much belated review soon, seeing as it was one of my fave albums of 2015). There is a sonorous drone ever-present in Cankun’s music, which can either send off psych fumes of hedonism and galactic excess (‘System’), or delve into a more intoxicated RnB spiralled drawl (‘Tyreu’). But there is a maudlin side to these woozy sojourns, a wistful stasis of weighed-down chagrin, that punctures some of the more upbeat (albeit laid-out) jams. ‘Moyit’ seems intent to lurk in the murkier shadows of melancholy before breaking out into a disco shudder; ‘Cuts’ uses its first minute for a sepulchral buzz and incongrouous hustled beat before the sunlight breaks the surface. The truest change in direction for me is penultimate ‘Trezz’, an oscillating rumination with gentle piano and languid, ricocheting guitar warbles with looped feedback drowning in the ether – it’s like listening to a yacht rock groove caught in a submarine marooned in a Bermuda Triangle of buzzing disparate parts. An unexpectedly febrile find, you can pick up Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold here – see off the week in a phaser blaze.

Phasing Out Exhaustion

Nothing like some exhaustion to start a Black Friday... Melbourne noise heads Exhaustion present new EP Phased Out following on from their Biker LP and their collaboration with Kris Wanders over the past 12 months. The four tracks exhibited here continues the gnarled noise in an inexorable centrifugal free fall, with added industrial destruction from Mark Barrage. The title track is the soundtrack to subterranean tribal law, pagan horror made out of metal and glass, sepulchral figures of feedback fury. Unhinged? Not really; the propulsive metronomic nature of the drums/machine underscore the moans and howls. 'Colleague' offers more abhorrent synthetic scree and anodyne mantras - it fits in with the blackened minimal maximalism that My Disco have taken to their aesthetic on current album Severe, or Perth's Snowman at their basest. These scorched rhythm onslaughts are dissected in the B-side of the EP, with wunderkinds Mikey Young and Stacey Wilson (in Rites Wild mode) taking the reins. Young's 'Phased Out' is laid out like some of the Europunk leather techno that has been entrancing the Australian gutters of recent years (think Multiple Man or Pleasure Symbols, actually cold in Berlin, more earnest, less grimy, more creepy). Rites Wild takes Exhaustion into darker waves, sounding like the techno drone of Yaws or the darkest, desirous regions of Not Not Fun. Put out by Austin label 12XU, Phased Out is yet another transformative experience from one of the best bands in Australia.

Ill Winds Of Forlorn Change

I'm always slow to hit you with what Not Not Fun are up to - to the point that many of the releases I dig are sold out before I get out of the wormholes they put me in to write about em. This is the case also for the self-titled cassette from Berlin/Oz collective Ill Winds. It is a gloomy dirge into the backwaters of grey-stained despair, taking post-punk disdain into withering self-flagellating depths. Everything is destructive; everyone is doomed. Everything plods and scrapes at depressing regularity, with Jack Dibben chanting concrete schisms of truth in a world-worn dirge, as if the end of the world happened eons ago and this music is his perpetual penance, an eternity in the making. The weird thing is how addictive this is - creating a cocoon of crushing defeat eventually numbs, plies you with the inevitability of the shitstorm that is life, and you may as well get into the slipstream and make do and mend.

Small Time Sunhoods

Here is something I am pretty excited about (and have been for a few months - sorry about the late post guys!). As you know, one of my favourite releases of last year (and out of the Not Not Fun oeuvre also) was Sunk by UK recluse Blackhoods. Now there isn't new Blackhoods material to get excited about (yet...) but he has joined forces with fellow tantric droner Sun Skeletons to become the slow jam Sunhoods. The duo put out a cassette, Vol 1, through Double Dot Dash. The guys call their collaboration "freewheelin’ shahi baaja meets deep ocean slow jams." Listen and watch 'Small Time' below, and I can't really make a better comment. Grab Vol 1 here - let's hope we get them down to London real soon!

Daughters Of The Legendary Hearts

A failure to communicate saw my final two Not Not Fun write-ups for last week fail to materialise - that and some awful work-related meltdowns and the lack of Internet-inal attachment. So here they are, jammed into the one...

What I love about Ride To Die, Minneapolis band Daughters of the Sun's fourth album, is how it simultaneously feels like an extraneous entry to the Not Not Fun roster and yet an indelibly intrinsic totem. The trio are effectively a kraut-psych wet dream, filtered through the VHS gloss of early 80s Viacom cyber-sci-fi genre hybrid films. And it's this later part that comes to pass on tracks such as 'Fly By', a lysergic trance mantra that besmirches the more gargantuan psych numbers that bookend it. Don't get me wrong, the psych numbers are what get me humming here - yet even the titular 'Ride To Die', a blasted hallucinogenic bomb with its phasers set to kill, starts with warbled tetravision synth. Meanwhile 'Sater's Ghost' feels like stepping into a Kraftwerk bad dream, marionetting around a circular black hole, the strings manned by Gary Numan.  And the flayed sworl of 'Reigns Of Iron' mirrors the Robedoor black drift spirit, yet with more metallurgic pulse. But it's the inexorable pull to the damned unknown that really hooks you in, and the majority of that power must go to Collin Gorman Weiland's synth wasteland. Check out his and percussionist Bennett Johnson's Dreamweapon too while you are at it. Grab Ride To Die here - it's killer.

And it's nice to end Not Not Fun week with something Australian too. Melbourne duo Legendary Hearts have just released Aerial Views, and it's a swirling hyperventilation under an cloud of opium dreams. The vapours drift effortlessly, whether it be the nebulous guitar lines on 'Vanishing Point', the waveforms that drift over the pastel sunset tones of a romantic comedown that is 'Distance & Desire' or the warped amalgamation of 80s backlit ballads and being caught in a lava lamp that percolates throughout 'Acceleration'. These narcotic inducing songs all pulse with an energy and drive that is often missing from music of this ilk: it's fun yet purposeful; sensuous yet playful. With a dash of sadism in there for that exotic taste of the wild side. Aerial Views is in fact a very sexual record in that regard, and is probably soundtracking the entire spectrum of the Kinsey scale as we speak. Grab it here.

The Magic Eye Of Babylon

Another day, another narcoleptic synapse burner from the Not Not Fun stable. This one is from Edinburgh cryo-pop trio Magic Eye. Babylon is a breezy-yet-blazed pop odyssey, the slightly murky production and otherworldly vocals/samples evoking a time capsule quality; long forgotten scores to long abandoned 80s VHS also-rans. This album helped save me today though. I'm currently looking for a “day job” – having lots of time on my hands has been great, but no money is fun only up to a point – and today has been a particularly obstacle-strewn calamity. The broken-yet-decadent dreams of Babylon though has a soothing quality to it; a nebulous embolism of yearning emotions that proffers familiarity and therein a modicum of sonorous hope, especially the penultimate title track, its multitudinous sounds of voice and submerged guitar lines soaring and intertwining into a uplifting crescendo.

You can get Babylon here.

Softening The Low Life Feeling Afterhours

LA dude Afterhours has offered a mid-tempo comedown capsule with his Lowlife album (out through - you guessed it - Not Not Fun). It is a timeloop, reminding you of the cerebral highs and cushioning the head-crushing lows. Samples weave in and out of each other, melding together into a narcotic syrup, an amber treacle to trap the ride before it ends the way it probably should. After all, you put that in your body, right? Its an album that is easy to loop back in itself also - a neverending playlist of pharmaceutical solvents for your bruised synapses, caressing your shattered psyche, crooning to your gutted ego. Exultant in the soothing throes of sunrise before retiring into the cocoon of a blackened bedroom, Lowlife is likely to extend your life - at least for another night, anyway.

Lowlife is here.

Sunk Deep In Blackhoods

Not Not Fun often are the barometer for what drone artists are coming into acute focus of their powers, and Blackhoods’ Sunk record/cassette (SOLD OUT) is one to take notice of. Of course this isn’t acute drone – there are enough lysergic beats underscoring tracks like ‘Doomhound’ that tip Blackhoods into a more demented dub realm – but the undulating guitar and effects that warble in and out of focus, scratched and scuffed beyond repair, a scorched sojourn into the darkest recesses, allows this to climb to the upper echelons of current releases of its ilk. ‘Sunk Bone’ and ‘Dead Calm’ are muted bookends to the leviathan that is ‘Doomhound’, with the occasional minimal note breaking the surface – the former heralding the doom that is about to unfold, whilst the latter smooths out, a grey placation. ‘Constant Wrestle’ and ‘Adriana’ are different beasts, dipping into the reservoirs of the subconscious - the former plumbing the depths of subliminal groove with slight unease percolating throughout (does anyone hear the bastard cousin of a Stone Roses riff here?), whilst the latter offers further suppression, an undulating mantra of industrial malaise. (And if you can give me more information on these guys, that'd be GREATLY appreciated!).



Grab Sunk in MP3 form here.

The Passenger With The Delicate Features

I received this in the mail last week, and it is an embarrassing reminder that I have quite a few Not Not Fun Records releases and fail to write about them. So starting with Delicate Features, I'm going to write a post a day this week about just a few of the many killer releases that the LA left-fielders constantly knock out.

Delicate Features is a duo from St Petersberg, Russia, and their somnambulist cruise through rose-painted prisms that is The Passenger is an aural dreamstate of petals and illicit desires. There is a haunted romanticism to these ten tracks that makes them somehow simultaneously lovingly romanticised, formally sensuous and heartbreakingly desolate. Kate Bush if she grew up in frozen tundra environs with ancient symbolism, archaic computers and a snow globe that holds a long-lost emotional connection to the time that love was irrevocably lost. Stunning Siren music for the tortured soul. Grab The Passenger here.

Throwing Gold Shade On World War 4

Sam Wightman and Roland Hlavka have a lot of time on their hands. Not content to have second LP WORLD WIDE WEBBS out (through Sonic Masala Records no less - get at it here), the duo are involved in a myriad other projects. The most prolific of those is Hlavka's solo outfit Barbiturates (often with Cobwebbs drummer Elliot D'Arcy at his beck and call), whilst Wightman's Police Force continues to get better and more malignant. Yet there are other, more festered outlets for these boys to let the demons out (these guys have a hard drive of material that may never see the light of day), and Canberra-based label Moontown Tapes has seen fit to give undead life to two of them. A split that is fused through communal spit and unease, the cassette opens with Wightman's World War 4 - and first track 'X-Ray Visitor' is the cleanest thing I think he has ever committed himself to. Drone crawl from the bottom floor, invading the senses, hip hop beats and lysergic treats for the narcoleptic dranker in us all. Then there is Hlavka's Gold Shade, a even more twisted chemtrail of an excursion, burning across the ozone like a VHS nightmare in neon chrome. 'Super Survivor' could be a Not Not Fun banger hit of the apocalyptic summer. Yes, these guys are in too many bands. Yes, they are all varying levels of awesome. Get this now - it's too good to ignore.

No Longer Searching For Contrepoison

I used to have a lot of animosity towards the cult that seemed to rise around Cold Cave and the label coldwave. It seemed like such a cultured, deliberate style and system, without much soul – a meticulously created zeitgeist. Of course my interests were directed elsewhere at the time, namely drawn to the likes of Times New Viking and other lo-fi guitar pop wailers, so my opinions aren’t entirely objective (and I never claim them to be). But the desolation and seduction of the electronic act sounds less synthetic in an inauthentic sense to me, and has found some footholds in my recent musical fascinations, especially as I delve into the AVANT!, NNA and NNF label rosters.

 One guy that I have always found interesting however is Pierre-Marc Tremblay, AKA Contrepoison. His dark orchestral electronics seem balanced to take the hauntological tropes and fixations that some of these leather-clad heathens emblazon so desperately and bury them in a damaged soul. In fact, although I do love much of the output that LA wunderkinds Not Not Fun Records induce, there is a truer sense of purpose and soul in a Contrepoison release. Take in point I Keep On Searching, the recent EP to come out on AVANT! Records. For me the kicker is the one-two punch on the B-side of the title track and ‘Nectar of Destiny’ – the former an electronic swarm of burbling white noise out of the abyss, impassioned vocals echoing over the top, Gothic rocking in the foetal position, searching for enlightenment or avoiding madness, it all means the same; whilst the latter shows dappled light appearing through the broken heavens, a march to heaven or to purgatories unknown, Tremblay’s vocals a bastion to oblivion, the synth both uplifting and heartrending. The emotional core my change shape, a chimera of sensation, but it is there, and it’s that attachment that makes this EP a great release.

Grab I Keep On Searching here.

Raising Umberto's Prophecy

This is an old album, but seeing as Prophecy Of The Black Widow has reared its ugly/beautiful head some few years after its black-rainbow birth on Sonic Meditations, all the better. LA based synth seducer Umberto has crafted a true midnight opus here, filled to the hilt with Giallo garishness, latex love, tantric trance, ethereal ebullience – it’s a glorious ride into a forbidden unknown, made for lurid 80s video obscurities and arthouse extravagance. The acrid smell of hard gloss made aural flesh. I am not giving the right amount of noise for how awesome this record is – to me this is a bona-fide classic. And thanks to Not Not Fun, you can now grab Prophecy Of The Black Widow on vinyl from here. The perfect perverted present for your illicit loved one.

Southpaw Women Look At The Mirror

This isn't so new now - most Australian websites mentioned this about a month ago - but Sydney band Mere Women (whose Old Life album of last year was an underrated gem) have a little release coming out soon on American label Southpaw Records (who've put out gear from the likes of Ty Segall, Warm Soda and Bare Wires - excellent garage rock, in other words). Not the kind of avenue I would expect to pick up the band at the best of times; furthermore, the track they are airing from it, 'Hands & Face', was NOT what I expected. That faint, sinuous synth for starters is something you expect to hear emanating out of a Not Not Fun cassette. This is all lysergic menace, with spectral guitar moaning in the background, Amy Wilson's vocals elegiac yet defiant. It's a cavernous slowburner - and I never expected to use either of those superlatives to describe Mere Women, but there you go. And you know what? I goddamn love it. What this means for the weird, cantankerous trio for the future remains to be seen, but if they can balance this kind of track with more virile fare, then 2014 should be a huge one.

Blissing Out On The White Poppy

Cristal Dorval has been exploring the heady terrain of the aural narcotic drift for some time now, first as part of My Friend Wallis and now under the nom de plume of White Poppy. Her self-titled record, out now on Not Not Fun, is the closest yet she has reached to distilling the ephemeral gauzy dreamstates of her mind into a mesmeric worldview. Equal parts New Age-aping guitar-as-spaced-synth circling loops (something akin to Mark McGuire), early Deerhunter youthful stargaze, fallen angel anguish and exhausted elegies - White Poppy is a blissful slide into a kaleidoscopic realm that doesn't shimmer so much as explode, a sonorous opiate mainlined through the mind. Dorval threatens to drown in her own dazzling vortex, yet it is all a ploy - she is the master of her domain, a Machiavellian Syren drawing unassuming listeners into the abyss. White Poppy is darkness disguised as light, and vice versa - a cunningly ambiguous yet seductive wraith of an album.

Enough with the amorphous euphemisms. White Poppy is the real deal, a lysergic fever dream stuck between heaven and hell, and you need to get it now.

Hits From The Box #73 - The End Is Nigh

It has been a few weeks to try and digest the fact that this once great nation is doomed. Sure, I would be writing this Hits From The Box even if Labor had've been sworn in to run the country, as I hate Kevin Rudd sooooooo much, but Tony Abbott? REALLY? The Libs have some pretty awful ideas too - don't expect too much creative stimulation to happen over the next four years. But I don't want to get too political here. Instead, Ive chosen six bands that I think helps exemplify how I feel about the state of affairs. Hey, if music can't tell it like it is, what can?

The Wrong Man - well, this is a misnomer, really - the Kruddster was the lesser of two evils in many people's mind, yet I felt like he and Abbott proved that the Antichrist actually came in a pair. Nevertheless there had to be a better person to take the mantle? So let's leave it up to Brisbane's cantankerous one-man-garage-magnate (once sworn in as Fred Wood) and his six garrulous ditties he's released on Long Gone Records. 'Evil Mind' takes on a whole new meaning in this environment...

Tyranny Is Tyranny - again, it's all in the name. Doesn't matter what label you put on it, many policies here are blatant disregard for the welfare of the majority of the nation. The Wisconsin crew are ardent political subversives too, their raging tracks rife with baited vitriol. Let It Come From Whom It May (an apt title, and a mantra that might be a good one to take on...) is coming out on Phatry Records, you can pre-order it here.

Invisible Path - Who knows where the next four years will lead us, and whether we will make it out OK. At least Not Not Fun Records has us in a state of gauzy hypnosis in the form of Invisible Path's The Levitating Mirror. The project for Michael Bailey (ex-Barn Owl) is a lysergic sojourn into glossy midnight territory - the perfect soundtrack to slink in the shadows with your now hunted creatives. Seriously though, as tenuous as this link is, The Levitating Mirror is a bubbling masterclass in synth-entwined heart. I'm a big fan.

Huge Rat Attacks - OK, this is a bit of an erratic choice, but a friend of mine said only last week that she'd rather lie in a box filled with rats than be in the company of Abbott. That's a big call. But you do get a sense that there is a a sense of throwback urgency from this Minneapolis four-piece with a proclivity for dirge. They obviously like the subversive heaviness and absurdity that The Melvins bring to their craft, yet with a technicality more akin to Young Widows albeit with a more widespread stoner vibe - it's a pretty rad album, deserved of its own post if not for my friend's comment. Blame Illy.

Giga Herbs - and since we are staying tenuous, why not admit that it's going to take some alternate reality to get us through the upcoming battles? And what better thing to take us there than something of the herbal variety... The NY outcasts play almost straight-up indie pop, yet there is a simplistic Wayne Coyne/Nick Thorburn effect on much of these tracks that give it the tweak into the (mad) weird that we all want and need. Help us get away from here!

Overseas - so there is little we can do of course but rage against the machine, or find a way to work through it. Although another viable option is to simply get the fuck outta Dodge, something I am actually seriously contemplating. It also feels fitting that Overseas features one David Bazan - yes, the Pedro the Lion dude. If I have to flee the country like an inverse boat person that the Australian populace apparently hate so much, it may as well be with Bazan and his crew. So if the boat drowns, ill be blissfully unaware - and might get a five minute hate spot on Today Tonight. You can buy the self-titled album here.



Happy Wednesday everyone???

Gagged In The Russian Boonies

We've gone angry; let's get lysergic. Russian Tsarlag offers the kind of cough syrup melancholy that oozes all over the floor, congeals into a gelatinous mass that creeps its way towards you, rippling up over your bootlaces, up under your jeans and seeps into your pores, rendering you blissfully catatonic. Gagged In Boonsville has a Medusa on the cover, and it's that sort of insidious alchemy that plays between the bars in each of these tracks. Echoing from the abyss, the beats and samples slowed down to melting point, almost monotone lyrics begging, imploring, resisting, relenting. It may feed into the seedy underbelly of many of the avant artistes that reside on LA label Not Not Fun, but there is also something undeniably soothing and real about the album that makes it a far more immersible endeavour. The samples too - slowed down vocals, ghostly piano plinks, TV stubble, maniacal laughter - it's a blender of unreality that could only be steeped in the now.

You can buy Gagged In Boonsville here.

Riding The High Wolf

French sonic shaman High Wolf has cast another excellent record with Kairos:Chronos (out through Not Not Fun). It was pretty special getting to see him play here in Brisbane last year - I had already been a fan, and to bathe in the crystalline waters of his discombobulations was a high watermark of the year. And I have always maintained that his aural experiments have worked well on record. Yet this latest excursion raises the bar exponentially - a spiritual tapestry that entwines his pagan sensibilities with insistent drones and incessant repetition that it is impossible to not become enmeshed in the machinations of the work. Because High Wolf works in mysterious yet ultimately holistic ways - his music needs to be an experience, a mood, an atmosphere, a universe; kaleidoscopic, foreign of this or any land, an aurora borealis of the third eye. These synth-laden concentric numbers aren't made to bind us, though - we are not enslaved, but emancipated.

You can buy Kairos: Chronos here.

Rippled Ensemble Fever Dreams

I'm writing this with mixed emotions. I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Brian Pyle’s newest release under his nom de plume Ensemble Economique (Fever Logic, out through Not Not Fun), and it arrived in the mail yesterday. I opened the parcel…to find the vinyl had warped in transit! So saddened by this… At least the Robedoor Pacific Drift 7" I had also bought was in mint condition, or I would have been inconsolable. But despite its inferiority, you can’t warp a digital soundbyte (can you?), so I have still managed to spend the day listening to the album – and it’s an absolute killer.

Pyle surprises from the onset with Fever Logic with the overbearing presence of vocals throughout these six tracks. Not that Pyle hasn't sung before - but the vocals are rather claustrophobic, complementing with the swirling synth and rhythms to present a mode of pregnant foreboding in monochrome - vignettes of  barely bridled anguish drenched in gloss and buried in the corridors of Anton Corbijn photolens photography. Each song benefits from the way they bleed into view, as if walking into a smoke-filled, mirror-walled theatre mid-act, the ritualistic events depicted out of context yet fully-formed nonetheless. Its a nightmarish malaise, garish thoughts caught in amber, where nothing and everything makes sense - thus the title couldn't be more apt.

Fever Logic is out now. The first 210 copies are in maroon vinyl (as is mine, despite the warped state), then 240 in virgin black. It is a truly mesmerising work, and well worth the time. Probably worth trying in its rippled state, to be honest...

Ensemble Economique - We Come Spinning Out Of Control

Two Pharaohs

At the peak and the immediate decline of the ancient Egyptian kingdom, the leaders of the country - the pharaohs - started to forego their simple presence as being the human incarnate of the hawk god Horus (protector of the sky and land) and started to impress their own personality on their country. This essentially was the first time we saw "celebrity culture" take place. The fact that each pharaoh became the new embodiment of Horus didn't matter; it mattered only to have your individual name on things, your face on things, one hundred foot statues of yourself in cities you built in your image. The hypocrisy of such a notion struck no one - if the same god, why the need to individualise? To compete with who came before? It didn't matter - it just was.

LA's Pharaohs eschew a current trend to evoke tenuous Egyptian links with beach pop/rock acts yet still are an apocryphal entity, their focus and solidity wavering wraithlike from spliced genre to spliced genre, from day to day. There is no real connection to what the five-piece are doing on their two current releases - Manhunter through Intercoastal Records, and Replicant Moods on 100% Silk - to a form of individualistic legacy, yet niether is the band look to merely emulate past mentors - which is what makes their trajectory so intriguing. Take Manhunter's approach - three slabs of confetti gristle; burning the coals of early languid EDM, stoking that fire with ghosted kosmiche and the occasional brazen act of depravity - that sax on 'Nature Lovers' should have it's own phone line to be inundated with listeners who fall off the wagon into sexual despair after it is played. These are dance tracks, aimed at getting you filling the floor, but not necessarily as a willing participant - that uneasy feeling that something isn't quite right continually pervades the record

Then there is Replicant Moods, which would be a more straight-up, hammer-and-tongs disco belter if it wasn't so concerned with shifting parameters at each interim. There is a fuzzy hedonism imbued here, something that is spirited and vivacious. Pharaohs seem incapable of taking the process seriously, intent on filtering their synth melange through variants of genre staples until their form is no longer rigid - a malleable trance that can peak and dive at whim. Replicant Moods is an effective moniker - it appears to play on the notions of the past, dance music ticked off via chronological nitpicking, yet as if done by someone who has not lived it, has not experienced it, a Cro-Magnon Man for the disco field.

So who actually IS Pharaohs? It's hard to say - the face is interchangeable; they seem content to rewrite their stelas, their manifestos, after each campaign. But that is OK - because if they are always the embodiment of Horus, then their will is good, right? RIGHT?

You can buy Manhunter here, and Replicant Moods here.

Pharaohs - Nature Lovers (from Manhunter)

Pharaohs - Replicant Moods (from Replicant Moods)

Four Pieces Of Silken Fun

I realise that the following releases from Not Not Fun Records and its 100% Silk subsidiary have been around for a little bit, and aren't the kind of sounds that usually grace these hallowed halls (especially the second two releases - HOUSE!) but after BPB and Mick Turner got me down, i need some synthetic fun times to claw even further out of this hazed fugue state - come at me Jonas Reinhardt!

Mask Of The Maker is pretty much kinetic genius - a series of tracks designed purely for logarithmic dancehalls of the 2300s, albeit with a sardonic wedge of faux Germanic fetishism thrown in for good measure. How a track like 'Elimination Street' can sound ultra-futuristic and retroactive at the same time is confounding, yet commendable. Jesse Reiner's synth patterns mold into a monotonic ouroborous, chasing its own tail in a cyclical beat that rejuvenates by eating itself whole - total immersion. This kind of music never really crosses my turntable for more than a cursory stopover - Mask of the Maker has been a mainstay. Welcome back to the future.

Jonas Reinhardt - Jungle Jah

Very similar in sonics is Xander Harris, and whilst his The New Dark Age Of Love doesn't strike me as immediately as Mask of the Maker, it has its sensual moments. The Texan (AKA Justin Sweatt) really strikes gold in his attempts at darker synth alchemy, such as the incessant creeping march (think the T-1000, in metallic sonic form, yet being more seductive and less rapey) of 'Tristitia' or the slow-core grindout of 'Legacies' that transforms into a dense soul stirrer - the sun rising over a frozen horizon just as all hope seemed lost. The New Wave about-turns on the likes of 'I Still Look Young In The Dark' don't really do it for me though. But hey, Xander Harris is responsible for "scoring" Neal Stephenson's seminal steampunk-noir novel Snow Crash - the dude can do whatever the fuck he wants.

Xander Harris - Tristitia

Octo Octa's Between Two Selves is an 8-track LP that wavers between displacement and warmth, a disconcerting yet eloquent combination. The Brooklyn artist is crowned as the heir apparent of modern house, which of course is evident in his music but is just as reactive to the genre as it is embracing it, utilising field recordings and altruistic flourishes that showcase a much more intuitive production ideal. 'Fear' really stands out to me because it seems to perfectly encapsulate that inherent schizophrenic outlook that Octo Octa harbours, and why he is a pretty special prospect.

Octo Octa - Fear

The least likely to have grabbed my attention though is this 6-track cassette also out on 100% Silk, City Life 88, from London's Jupiter Jax (AKA Rudi Aguis). Why? Because this isn't just close to house music - this IS house. And I hate most versions/genres/whatever attribute to house. Yet there is something plaintive, unadorned, with City Life 88 that really appeals, as if Jupiter Jax doesn't need the gloss to discover the deepest core of the dancefloor and have people drawn inexorably towards it. A visceral journey through temporal glitter trails. You can grab the cassette here.

Jupiter Jax - Soulless City

Looks like I'm going out tonight, then...