Features

There’s something a little daunting about writing on the subject of the Black Twig Pickers: an awareness, I guess, that I’m dealing with a world of knowledge and experience that comically exceeds my own. There’s a quote on their website which reads innocuously enough: “Exciting old-time music at its finest.” But it comes from some evidently specialist publication called Bluegrass Unlimited: the Black Twigs might attract dabblers in old-time music, but they privilege, understandably, those who know what they’re talking about.

Mentioning Forest Swords the other week, the brilliantly named Soren Lorenson posted to say how much they reminded him of Matt Elliott’s Third Eye Foundation.

Interesting bit of heat around the blog last week about Neil Young’s “Le Noise”, where as a result of expressing mild scepticism about Daniel Lanois’ production schtick, I learned that, “Such a lack of musical knowledge and understanding art is unforgivable.”

Not an immediately familiar name, perhaps, but Koen Holtkamp might be more familiar, at least to regular readers, if we described him as one half of Mountains, a New York-based duo that I’ve written about a fair bit here in the last year or so.

Just looking back through my archives, I found something on Sharon Van Etten’s “Because I Was In Love”, a mighty hushed album of folkish singer-songwritery which was produced by Greg Weeks of Espers, and certainly sounded like it was part of Espers’ fairly spectral world.

One of my favourite labels of 2010 thus far has been Three Lobed Recordings, thanks in no small part to the amazing “Honest Strings” comp, in honour of Jack Rose, and the Hans Chew set I’ve been raving about these past few weeks.

To be honest, a few alarm bells went off when I read this quote. “I wanted [Neil Young] to understand that I’ve spent years dedicated to the sonics in my home and that I wanted to give him something he’d never heard before,” said Daniel Lanois the other week.

As some of you guessed last week, Neil Young’s exceptional “Le Noise” was one of the mystery records in Playlist 34. I’ve now got clearance to blog about it so, all being well, I’ll post something here tomorrow, deadlines permitting. As you can see, “Le Noise” isn’t the only auspicious arrival this week.

I guess a lot of people have a John Peel epiphany, and mine definitely came at some point in the early ‘80s when, for no obvious reason, he dug out “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” by The Pop Group.

As you might have noticed, I’ve been banging on about this one a lot over the last couple of weeks, and it seems to be shaping up, alongside maybe Joanna Newsom and Magic Lantern and so on, as one of my favourites of 2010.