Finding it a bit hard to pay much attention to music beyond the new White Denim album these past couple of days (I’ll write about that next week). Nevertheless, it seems like a good time to flag up a few things I’ve neglected to blog on over the past few weeks. There are a bunch of really nice reissues and comps in the pipeline that I’ve been enjoying a lot, tapping into certain strains of Americana that I maybe don’t cover so much here. Yesterday brought a couple of winners: Sir Douglas Quintet’s “The Mono Singles ’68-‘72” on Sundazed, which flip-flops appealingly between Texas and California to draw on inspiration; and “Delta Swamp Rock: Songs From The South: At The Crossroads Of Rock, Country And Soul”. The latter doesn’t rock quite as much as the title promises, the presence of Lynrd Skynrd and Area Code 415’s hairy old Whistle Test theme notwithstanding. As ever with Soul Jazz comps, though, it’s a beautifully-constructed mix of familiar and unfamiliar, which will probably result in me digging out some old Bobbi Gentry things this weekend, and encourage a further tentative investigation of Leon Russell. Liking Billy Vera’s “I’m Leaving Here Tomorrow, Mama” very much, too. Somewhat embarrassingly, I first became aware of Mickey Newbury when Robert Forster covered “Frisco Depot” on “I Had A New York Girlfriend”. Slackly, though, I never followed him up properly, which means the riches of the “American Trilogy” boxset – containing “Looks Like Rain”, “’Frisco Mabel Joy” and “Heaven Help The Child” – have been a revelation these past few weeks. I guess, if anything, these records (especially the first two) have a kind of spectral quality that removes them to some degree from the hardworn male angst I was generally expecting. Great songs, delivered with a lot of space and restraint rather than grandstanding poignancy. The next issue of Uncut features a piece on Peter Bellamy, one of the less-remembered stalwarts of the ‘60s folk revival (I can thoroughly recommend the first two Young Tradition albums, at the very least). Not coincidentally, there’s an impressive tribute album called “Oak Ash Thorn” on Folk Police, on which a well-chosen cadre of newish folk artists tackle Bellamy’s Rudyard Kipling-derived songs from the early ‘70s. The opening salvo from John Boden isn’t much to my taste, but what follows directly after – from a new name to me, Olivia Chaney, and an American interloper, Charlie Parr – is tremendous. There’s fine stuff from Cath & Phil Tyler (whose “Dumb Supper” is getting a deserved reissue, by the way), tracks from The Unthanks and Trembling Bells that are better than most of the stuff on their - to my mind slightly disappointing – new albums, and the whole thing hangs together in a much more satisfying way than these comps often do. Special mention to Sam Lee – another artist I’m entirely ignorant of – whose take on “Puck’s Song” builds out of vintage recordings to become an incantatory drone.

One of those serendipitous music/environment moments this morning. As I was walking down Stamford Hill in a thickish mist, Colin Stetson’s fathomlessly deep saxophone came looming out of my headphones like a foghorn This is one of the first things you hear on “New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges”, a pretty unusual and excellent record that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Stetson is, predominantly, a sax player based in Montreal, who has played in the past with an eclectic CVful of musicians including Tom Waits, Bon Iver, Lou Reed, David Bowie, LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire and TV On The Radio. On “New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges”, he plays more or less alone, save a couple of vocal interventions from Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden. The backroom is also strong: Shahzad Ismaily , who I last saw playing bass with Will Oldham, co-produces; Efrim Menuck from Godspeed is involved, possibly engineering; and the mix is done by Ben Frost (never been that wild about his solo work, but he's involved in the excellent new Tim Hecker album, too). You’ll be hard-pressed, though, to accept much of this is a solo album recorded in real time, without overdubs. I’ve read a little about how Stetson achieved his dense, multi-faceted sound using a bunch of strategically placed microphones, body percussion and what I guess boils down to radical technique; a lot of circular breathing and so on. Nevertheless, these unnerving flurries, these grimy geometric rages, are baffling and astounding in their intricacy. Plenty of reviewers have mentioned Peter Brotzmann and Evan Parker in relation to Stetson, and while he’s clearly schooled in some seriously avant-garde jazz, “New History Warfare” rarely sounds much, to me at least, like a jazz record. More often, grasping for analogues, I find myself reaching beyond jazz, and beyond saxophones, too. There are a good few moments here – say, when “From No Part Of Me Could I Summon A Voice” flows into the Anderson-voiced “A Dream Of Water” – which remind me a lot more of systems music, of Philip Glass soundtracks especially. The presence of Anderson increases the general feel of old downtown New York experimentation, but there’s often a melancholy airiness that somehow calls to mind Arthur Russell. Then there are other tracks, like “Judges”, posssessed of a heaviness and cyclical intensity, that mean I fill my notebook with names like Alexander Tucker, Plastikman (“Red Horses (Judges 2)”, too, has an insistent, brutal pummelling that oddly correlates with techno) and even the Neil Young of “Le Noise”, with its fizzing afterburn to every note. Maybe a few of you have heard this and can help me out trying to articulate what’s going on here? I’d be really interested, too, if anyone has seen Stetson play solo live: I imagine it’d be some spectacle.

Not a record I’ve pulled down from the shelves in a while, but this weekend I was inspired to locate a handsome set called “Tibetan Buddhist Rites From The Monasteries Of Bhutan”. The motivation, I guess, was a certain preoccupation with “Totem 3” by The Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and its predecessor “Totem 2”. I first came across the Master Musicians around the time of their “Visible Sign Of The Invisible Order”, a set which made pretty blatant their friendships and affinities with The Sun City Girls. Like that other significant and eclectic band from the Pacific Northwest, the Master Musicians had clearly absorbed and reprocessed – and continue to do so – a vast range of generally ritualistic music from all over the globe. The spirit of the whole endeavour remains, half a decade on, very much of a piece with that of the Sun City Girls, too; at once devotional and irreverent. The unravelling “Totem” trilogy (full disclosure: I’ve not heard the first part) is dedicated to the Bishop brothers and the late Charles Gocher, and there are a bunch of specific parallels with the last SCG album, “Funeral Mariachi”, not least what I suspect is a newish addition to their exotic portfolio: Touareg blues on “Prophecy Of The White Camel/Namoutarre”. Alan Bishop plays on “Totem 3”. You get the impression a bunch of Tinariwen albums may have been circulating in the Seattle underground music community of late, since the last Earth album (Randall Dunn produces “Totem 3”) flagged up a connection, too. The Master Musicians are more explicit, though, and more obviously successful at adding a heavy Northwest hum to the snaking blues patterns. Like “Funeral Mariachi”, too, there’s a stately Morricone trip, in the shape of “6,000 Years Of Darkness”, though much of the album has a cinematic feel, right up to the closing John Carpenter homage of “Failed Future” (the Master Musicians have the candour, incidentally, to reference the Carpenter and Touareg influences in their press notes). The Tibetan rituals, meanwhile, were provoked by the expansively ominous opener, “Bardo Sidpa”, very much a continuation of “Totem 2” (though the Anatolian/Mediterranean vibes of that set are played down here). As ever with this sort of thing, I feel a faint discomfort when profound spiritual music is appropriated for other purposes, not least a certain subversive otherness. But there’s a seriousness and care with the way the Master Musicians Of Bukkake draw on and deploy such intense music; not for the first time, I can’t help suspecting that the pranksterish titillation of their name doesn’t do their frequently superb music many favours.