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Vice Blog

LONDON - 20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS ON GATEKEEPER AND TELEPATHE (AGAIN)

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.

Gatekeeper - "Optimus Maximus"

Our remix/video project with Telepathe [London can't get enough of Telepathe; we here in New York, on the other hand, are already sick of 'em -Ed.] 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.

Telepathe - "Devil's Trident" (XIII Foals mix)

XXJFG