A few years ago, I came across an album called "Love, Peace & Poetry 9: Turkish Psychedelic Music", one of those compilations that suddenly opens up a new corridor of musical investigation. At around the same time in the late ‘60s as British and American bands were appropriating vaguely Eastern influences into their music, it revealed that a bunch of Turkish artists were taking the trip in reverse. On these tracks, Anatolian folk influences and traditional instruments – like the saz, a kind of Turkish bouzouki – became electrified and thrown into battle with blazing rock, and some extraordinary musicians emerged, notably Erkin Koray (whose "Elektronik Turkular" I can wholeheartedly recommend). As is the way with some of these things, however, it can be hard to work out how these musical scenes moved on, and what their local legacies are today. Like the Brazilian Tropicalia uprising of the same time, it’s embarrassingly convenient for us to fence a scene off, consign it to history, or concentrate on how it influenced UK and American artists (Beck and Devendra Banhart in the case of Tropicalia; Voice Of The Seven Thunders with the Turkish stuff). At the end of last year, however, an album turned up in the Uncut offices from a new band called Hayvanlar Alemi (“Animal Kingdom” in translation, apparently), which logically suggested that a psychedelic scene had continued to develop in Turkish over the intervening three or four decades. "Guarana Superpower" is released on the Sublime Frequencies label, the Sun City Girls’ outlet for putting out a frequently intoxicating mix of field recordings, informal ethnomusical surveys, and artist albums by the likes of Group Doueh (from the Western Sahara) and the frenetic Syrian bandleader, Omar Souleyman. Initially, it’s easy to imagine that Hayvanlar Alemi are a prank concocted by the fertile minds of Alan and Richard Bishop. If the Sun City Girls raided countless musical traditions with a certain vigorous irreverence, Hayvanlar appear to operate in an uncannily similar way. Guarana Superpower draws on North African jams and Far-Eastern pop as well as an Anatolian psych tradition, while the likes of “Mega Lambada” have very strong affinities with the Sun City Girls themselves circa "Torch Of The Mystics" – or, indeed, with Richard Bishop’s current unit, Rangda. Occasionally, too, the guitarist Ozum Itez seems to be channelling the wild desert twang of Dick Dale (“Snakesurfing”, especially, is pure Tarantino catnip). It’s a great record and, once you’ve penetrated Sublime Frequencies’ customary haze, it proves to be the tip of an iceberg. A few minutes on www.myspace.com/hayvanlaralemi reveals Sun City-esque levels of productivity, twinned with a demystifying spirit of generosity. "Guarana Superstar" is their second “proper” album, mostly culled from a bunch of low-key releases that are available to be downloaded for free. Hayvanlar Alemi’s 2006 debut, "Gaga", on sale at iTunes, is revealed to be a brooding, post-rockish salvo. Of the others, I can only suggest caution with regard to "Visions Of A Psychedelic Ankara", which looks promising but actually consists of crusty dub reggae, which may provoke mildly distressing flashbacks to a far-flung corner of the Glastonbury Festival in about 1992. Here, though, is a band with a rich hinterland, and a musical agenda that reflects but, ultimately, transcends their cultural origins. And if we need any final proof that they’re not a Bishop brothers hoax, Hayvanlar Alemi are set to play at London’s Barbican on May 13, supporting Group Doueh.

Perhaps you’ve already picked this up, but the title track from Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” has popped up as a free download at the band’s website in the last day. Will save my powder until I write about the whole album, but I think this is terrific: all the charm of the first record, but with a new depth and elaboration (less whimsical, perhaps). It feels like a very comfortable evolution, and one that places Robin Pecknold and his bandmates in a kind of serendipitous middle ground between Grizzly Bear and Joanna Newsom. Give it a play or three and let me know what you think.

Plenty of interesting psych stuff accumulated here over the past few weeks, while I’ve been distracted by a bunch of other things. A bit of a roundup today, kicking off with Daughters Of The Sun, whose “Ghost With Chains” is forthcoming on Not Not Fun. The label’s significant, because NNF seem to have found a sub for the recently-demised Pocahaunted, given that “Ghost With Chains” draws from the same well of strung-out, washed-out, groan-heavy hypno-dirge. Not sure they’ll be making cute indie-pop in a couple of years like Best Coast: Daughters Of The Sun come from Minneapolis (two Minnesota bands in two days must be a record, and this is my 801st post, incidentally) and appear to have been around a while. Good band; if anyone has more info/knowledge, please share. I’m on safer ground, I guess, with Metal Mountains and “Golden Trees”, out about now on Amish. Metal Mountains are essentially three survivors of the ‘90s band Tower Recordings, often – and justifiably – cited as key precursors of the latterday proliferation of homebaked underground bands on a, for want of a better phrase, acid-folk trip. Maybe the best known of the three Metal Mountains players, alongside Helen Rush and the much-employed violinist Samara Lubelski, is Pat Gubler, whose records as PG Six have been very important to me these past few years. It’s Rush here, though, who seems to be taking the lead, pulling the band through some pleasingly-adjusted, brackish reveries that bear comparison, perhaps, with Espers. From “Structures In The Sun” on, there’s a great feel of tempered, candlelit freakout, maybe a fraction heavier on atmosphere than tune, but that’s not a problem. Not much tempered about The Psychic Paramount, as you might imagine from the name. “The Psychic Paramount II”, on No Quarter (home of Endless Boogie, among other things) begins with a great eruptive roar, and initially seems kin to the blast and flail tradition of Monoshock and early Comets On Fire. Soon enough, though, a plot emerges, locating the trio (from New York, I think) as closer to Yamamotor-era Boredoms, when the chaos took on the form of ecstatic ritual circa “Super Æ”. If anything, there might actually be a tiny bit too much form for my taste in places, where the Psychic Paramount’s hard-driving spacerock takes on a mathematical aspect, a little more like, say, Kinski or Mugstar. But this is pretty cool; wonder how it works live?

Since I saw them play a series of shows at the Union Chapel in Highbury a good decade ago, I’ve always felt that Low’s music suited churches. Not because of the religious connotations as such, more because they were so suited to the space, stillness and reverberations inherent in those kind of buildings. It makes sense, then, that Low’s new album, “C’Mon”, has been recorded in a church close to their home in Duluth, Minnesota, the better to capture the trio’s monumental gravities. Unlike the frictional, treated environments of “Drums And Guns”, “C’Mon” represents a kind of return to a notionally purer Low, to the sound of an enormously controlled and self-contained band playing in a very big room. It captures a lot of what many of us cherish most about the band; a sound which has incrementally evolved over the space of 15-odd years, but still remained utterly identifiable. While not touching on the more experimental textures of the band represented on “Drums And Guns”, “Songs For A Dead Pilot”, “Bombscare” and so on, “C’Mon” would work pretty well as an introduction to this most stately and moving of contemporary American bands. One of the things that’s so interesting about their sound is how it identifiably emerges from an obliterated post-punk/post-hardcore continuum, but simultaneously flaunts affinities with a much longer lineage of classic folk-rock. When I listen to Low, I often end up thinking a lot about Neil Young, and how they seem to instinctively grasp his stunned dynamics, his uncanny harmonies, on a level that’s far more profound than most of his descendants (please check their collaboration with The Dirty Three on “Down By The River” if you can, an object lesson in impactful understatement). Alan Sparhawk might more overtly reference Young in his work with the Retribution Gospel Choir, but I hear resonances all through “C’Mon”. Sparhawk has recently talked up the new record as akin to Richard & Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out The Lights”, as an anatomy of a relationship, though the prevailing theme – the trials and consolations of a long-term relationshop, as far as I can tell – is maybe closer to something like Yo La Tengo’s “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out”. The Linda Thompson reference isn’t bad, though, at pinpointing the appeal of Mimi Parker’s voice: its affectingly muscular purity. I frequently think of Parker as kin to Judy Collins, which is a bit baffling, since while I love Parker’s voice, Collins tends to come across as cloying and sanctimonious to me. Even by her standards, she has some extraordinary songs on “C’Mon”: “Especially Me” and “You See Everything”, the latter having, I think, faint echoes of Young’s “Round And Round”. At this point, “C’Mon” feels like the Low album I’ve liked most since “Things We Lost In The Fire”; no mean praise. Pivotal to this are a couple of Sparhawk-fronted songs: “Nothing But Heart”, one of those hard-punching, epically repetitive Low songs, this time elevated further by a solo from Nels Cline. Then there’s “Witches”, which taps into that luxuriant Youngian wallow again and finds Sparhawk dealing with visions, childhood nightmares and a confusing frustration with men who “act like Al Green”, something which evidently makes him so angry he can’t articulate exactly what the problem is. It’s a magnificent song, one of the best I’ve heard in a while, and one, I think, of the best songs in a catalogue that has stealthily built up into one of the strongest of the past two decades. A good few of these songs are out there in live versions on Youtube, I think; if you have time, hunt them down and drop me a line.