If you haven’t experienced the maximalist, John Carpenter freestyle magik of Chicago’s Gatekeeper yet then you really need to acquaint yourselves now. Designed to make you want to trance-dance naked inside opulent giallo cathedrals as the sky darkens outside and demonic shadows conjure in the clouds, Gatekeeper’s music plays like a fever-dream of half-remembered horror movies from the 1980s. It’s all smudged lipstick, faceless men in trench coats that conceal horrific secrets, and sacrificial voodoo halls painted in blood hidden away in a vast and ominous metropolis overseen by men with black eyes and sharp suits.
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Our remix/video project with Telepathe has yielded M.R. James influenced glitch fantasies, kosmiche dream-weave odysseys and baroque goth Victoriana chamber jaunts, and the good stuff still keeps on materialising out of the ether. This time around XIII aka Jack Bevan, the dude who does a pretty awesome job of bleeding over the skins in Foals, has tinkered around inside Telepathe’s music box and transformed the shoegazer B-girl mantra that is ‘Devil’s Trident’ into a expansive, pulsating discotheque beast that channels the original strains through a filter of cold Teutonic techno pop. It evokes the kind of jagged, glacial majesty embodied by vintage Kompakt which transports you to an ornate glass palace haunted by echoing incantations that slowly, but consistently, continue to crack and shatter as it floats across the tundra on a rapidly disintegrating iceberg whose every judder and groan causes rococo chandeliers to shower down in devastatingly snowstorms. In other words, another gold plated tooth to wear around your neck with the others.
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Telepathe - Devil’s Trident (XIII Foals mix)
Just to let everybody know, having decided to crawl out of our caves and commune with the outside world, February is going to be a busy one the XXJFG brethren. We’ve been riding on the vapor mists of Brighton and New York for some time now, so we thought it was about time we did the same in London, and so on Saturday 21st February, the ICA Bar will play host to our debut XXJFG night in the capital.
You probably know the score. Skullcrusher future-funk, codeine balladry, and feral disco jams. Come and say hello. Here’s the obligatory Facebook thing.
Reader Comments
March 10th, 2009
11:46 am
love it