Features

It's the last day of summer, as Van Dyke Parks tells us, repeatedly. He's right, of course, but it's also true that there are still two days left of End Of The Road, pretty much the last festival of 2012.

50 years is a long time to wait for a book. In September 1956, Alan Garner started writing his debut novel, a children’s book set among the landscape and folklore he’d known all his life – Alderley Edge in Cheshire, 12 miles south of Manchester. First published in 1960, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen followed the adventures of 12 year-old twins, Colin and Susan, on the Edge – “a long-backed hill… high and sombre and black.”

One bright morning a couple of weeks ago, I was unpacking CDs in my new house and found Four Tet’s “Pause” as an ideal soundtrack. Eleven years old, it still sounded wonderful: beatific but fleet of foot; contemporary in spite of folktronica, or whatever it was called (the pricelessly daft “Idylltronica” was even better), being a very fleeting fad. I think Kieran Hebden once blamed me for coming up with that folktronica tag; wrongly, I hope.

The first set of Zappa’s mammoth series of reissues is reviewed in the new issue of Uncut, dated October 2012, and in shops now. To accompany David Cavanagh’s in-depth, three-page examination of the dozen re-releases, here’s a feature from November 2010’s Uncut (Take 162), in which members of the guitarist and composer’s various bands recall the madness and precision that went into some of his most important works. Interviews: John Lewis __________________________

This is one film that's stuck with me since I first saw it a month or so back. Principally, it's a spin on low-rent 70s Italian horror movies; a film that both celebrates and mimics the tropes of murky gialli from filmmakers like Dario Argento.

A good week, in that I wrote a couple of new blogs about the Allah-Las and Dan Deacon albums, finally tracked down a copy of “Meet “Mississippi” Charles Bevel”, and heard the Baird Sisters’ beautiful record (one of them is Meg Baird from Espers) and Four Tet’s “Pink” comp.

On www.allah-las.com, the Los Angeles band of the same name have posted a bunch of unusually excellent mixtapes. The latest, “Reverberation #25”, is pretty typical, taking in the likes of Jim Sullivan and Tim Hardin as well as the group’s backwards-facing contemporaries: White Fence, Sonny & The Sunsets and another bunch out of what always seems to be an unbelievably small and cliquey LA indie scene, The Beachwood