Apologies for not posting much new stuff over the past few days; we’ve been wrapping up the next issue of Uncut. One thing I have written, though, is this piece about, sort of, Raphael Saadiq, which was destined to be my Wild Mercury Sound column in the mag until various advertising movements rendered it, perhaps fortunately, surplus to requirements. A pretty convoluted path to “Stone Rollin’”, but just about worth posting, I think… A strange month, this one, considering that the most forward-thinking music I played turned out to be nearly two decades old. "EPs 1991-2002" by Autechre packs five CDs of synapse-knotting electronica into an austere grey box that could be passed off as a 2001 monolith. Countless moonlighting physicists may have subsequently had a go at replicating Autechre’s granular processes, but much of "EPs 1991-2002" still sounds fiendishly, uncompromisingly alien. In contrast, a lot of new electronic releases feel comfortingly familiar, envisioning the future in a very old-fashioned way. There have been plenty of recommendations in this column over the past year or so for music indebted to the throbbing ‘70s ambience of Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Manuel Gottsching and so on. This month, it feels as if the kosmische revival has reached some kind of critical mass, with decent to excellent releases from Mountains, Rene Hell, Roll The Dice, Mark McGuire, Mist, Forma and Hatchback, plus a bunch of things in the same zone that I haven’t checked out yet. Science-fiction nostalgia, it seems, is the default setting for a good few avant-garde musicians at the moment. It’d be churlish of me to complain about this, of course. A neurotic pursuit of the new hardly guarantees great records, and I’d struggle to hold down a job at Uncut if I only wrote about musicians who actively strived to distance themselves from the possibilities offered by history and tradition. Nevertheless, plenty of people would argue that the past, ultimately, might prove to be an evolutionary dead end. It’s a criticism which has been fired at Raphael Saadiq frequently over the years, and one which I must admit I’ve used myself against a bunch of his backwards-looking soul contemporaries like Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed, Aloe Blacc and Sharon Jones. Evidently, and not a little hypocritically, I must prefer retro-futurism to mere revivalism. Saadiq is not an obvious fit for a column that purports to focus on underground music: he was first seen in the multi-million-selling ‘80s R&B group, Tony! Toni! Toné!, and was recently spotted playing a Solomon Burke song at the Grammys alongside Mick Jagger. I last saw him onstage in London a few years back, sheepishly leading the band behind a mentally disintegrating Joss Stone. To be honest, I’ve sketchy coherent argument for including Saadiq here – I guess one or two tracks on his new album, Stone Rollin’, have a notionally psychedelic shimmer – or for privileging him over those aforementioned soul revivalists. Other than to say that "Stone Rollin’" is tremendous. Saadiq’s recent solo records have positioned him as a kind of vigorous archivist, assiduously referencing vintage, sharp-suited soul in his impeccable new songs, climaxing with 2008’s terrific and Motown-rich "The Way I See It". "Stone Rollin’" doesn’t exactly find Saadiq abandoning this remit, but he does spread the net a little wider to draw conscious inspiration from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, “What’s Goin’ On”, The Temptations and southern soul (the burnished slouch of “Good Man” would work pretty nicely as a soundbed for a Ghostface Killah rap). Saadiq plays most everything on the album, but this time he pushes his guitar to the fore, so that a few frenetically twanging tracks (chiefly “Radio”, oddly redolent of The Surfaris’ “Wipeout”) also suggest he’s taken to studying The White Stripes as much as Stevie Wonder. Perhaps he’s re-imagining the past rather than creating a pastiche of it? Or perhaps I’m just struggling to explain why "Stone Rollin’" is such an uncomplicated pleasure, derivative or otherwise?

This month, I’ve been listening a lot to a band (or solo project; it’s not entirely clear) called Purling Hiss. It’s been fun but, at times, quite a challenge, even for those of us who can deal with lo-fidelity music that’s disseminated through several thick coats of distortion. In the past year, it seems as if Purling Hiss (read it as a spoonerism) have released three albums, which frequently sound like they were recorded on a tape recorder buried under a pile of cushions, using degraded tape that’s been dubbed over a dozen times, then transferred onto vinyl, warped into the shape of an ashtray, and played through blown-out speakers. It’s an aesthetic, I guess. Lo-fi has long been a signifier of music that’s somehow ‘authentic’, unmediated by studio vulgarities. How better to tap into supposedly honest expression, than by hearing an artist recorded, unadorned, in their bedroom? "Public Service Announcement" by Purling Hiss (on the Woodsist label) does not, however, attempt any such emo con trick. As the guitar bends further and further out of tune on “Don’t Even Try It”, or wanders off on a cosmic noodle over sketchy drumbox on “Porch Dude/Slight Return”, it’s clear that Mike Pollize, the Philadelphia-based musician behind these records, is experimenting with chance and friction and audio detritus in quite an audacious way. There’s a fair bit of this about at the moment: all the blog-hyped hypnagogic pop practitioners like James Ferraro, whose submerged, disorienting melodies are designed to evoke half-remembered hits from the ‘80s, broadcast on a staticky radio in a distant room – or distant era. But while Pollize’s treatments occasionally resemble those used by Ariel Pink on his earliest home recordings, his music is rather different. I’ve been stuck on “Run From The City” for days now, a nagging riff that keeps straining to turn itself into a guitar solo, and which vaguely makes me think of Big Star growing up alongside the MC5 in Detroit. For all the modish textures of "Public Service Announcement", one suspects Pollize is a virtuoso rocker at heart. That’s confirmed by a listen to his other band, a power trio called Birds Of Maya whose scuzzy and lysergic blues would’ve gone down rather well in Ladbroke Grove circa 1970. The other two Purling Hiss albums are closer in spirit to this, and fractionally higher-fi. The self-titled album on Permanent consists mostly of maxed-out jams that range from longform space-rock (“Purple Hiss”, 14:28) to blitzed psych-punk (“Dui”, 1:17). Not totally ideal for headphone listening, but highly recommended for anyone who thinks Comets On Fire wussed out after "Field Recordings From The Sun". Maybe best of the bunch, though, is the four-track "Hissteria" (Richie), which melds the freeform attack of "Purling Hiss" with the vague melodic structure of "Public Service Announcement". Briefly, this means that a good deal of it fits neatly – though neatly may not be the exact word – into the Stooges/Mudhoney continuum, while the molten choogle of “Down On The Delaware River” suggests that Status Quo are as big an influence as any number of brute Japanese noise bands. I wonder what Levon Helm and Syl Johnson will make of it all when they share a bill with Purling Hiss at the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts this June?