A couple of days ago, I asked here whether anyone had seen the Michael Rother & Friends/Hallogallo 2010 show yet. Olmanal was one person who responded. The show in Ghent was great, he said, but noted, “‘Deluxe (Immer Wieder)’ with Steve Shelley pounding away on the drums, may not be exactly how you remember it.” Watching Rother, Shelley and bassist Aaron Mullan (listed as from Tall Firs, though I prefer his other band, Glass Rock) at the Barbican in London last night, Olmanal’s warning turned out to be something of an understatement. When “Deluxe” hoves into view, you can still pick out that immeasurably beautiful, serene melody from the Harmonia original. But around it, the music is much more bombastic and heavy, and it feels as if the grace has been sacrificed for quite a lot of rock heft. This turns out to be the plot for most of the show. Michael Rother, encamped behind a desk with laptop, water bottles and FX, begins a song with a splutter of electronics and loops, then carves out a frictional, meaty version of one of his strafed riffs. Shelley locks into a generally steroidal version of motorik, so loud that it often dwarfs Rother’s work. Aaron Mullan, mainly, is hard to pick up. At times, the sound they make is genuinely rousing. But more often (and I suspect, judging by most reactions, that I’m very much in the minority with the caveats), it leaves me a little frustrated. There’s much to be admired in Rother’s treatment of his old songs as open-ended; that their arrangements shouldn’t be preserved in aspic, but allowed to evolve over the years. If we continue to celebrate Neu! as a forward-thinking band, it stands to reason we should applaud Rother for handling his mighty consistent music in a contemporary way. But I have to say, I prefer the clean lines and elegant simplicity of the originals to what amounts, cruelly, as a technobludgeoning. “Silberstreif”, for example, still begins with one of those lovely, twanging lines that Rother perfected on his early solo albums. Again and again, though, Shelley’s drumming leaves the delicacies in his dust. He’s a tremendous player, no doubt, and parts of the show feel like a celebration of his resolute, linear pummelling. But for some reason, he plays in a very mechanical way – following the “endless line”, for sure, but in a muscular and somewhat mechanical fashion which misses the bounce – the funkiness, of sorts – provided by Klaus Dinger and Jaki Liebezeit. I kept thinking what a different, lighter tack Joe Dilworth, from Th’Faith Healers and Stereolab, would’ve brought to the show. I have a hunch why Hallogallo 2010 sounds like this, and it comes down not to Shelley’s technique (God knows I’ve seen him play much more subtly many times over the years with Sonic Youth), but to Rother’s musical preferences over the past few years. Time and again, Rother has talked about his love of Secret Machines (Ben Curtis, once of that band, even figured in an early version of Hallogallo 2010, I think), and consequently, he seems to have reconfigured many of his quicksilver old tunes in the thudding image of that band; a kind of bruising, stadium rock revamp of motorik, and not one I particularly liked. It’s only in the encore, really, that the approach totally works for me, when Hallogallo 2010 have a go at one of Neu!’s heaviest, most grinding tunes, “Negativland”. Here, the faintly industrial scrapes, the sheet metal guitar sound, are tremendously effective, and Shelley and Mullan are brilliant at pulling off the lurching changes of speed that punctuate the piece. For the rest: well, I guess I’m just a bit of a lightweight.

How to find a way through the arcane catalogue of the Sun City Girls? Last time I tried to count, there seemed to be around 60-odd releases, mostly rare as hen’s teeth, compounding the mythology of the band as among the most challenging and elusive of the past 20 or 30 years. Now, some three years after the death of Charles Gocher, there’s one last unexpected SCG album, and with characteristically perverse logic, expert word is that it may be their most accessible. I certainly can’t pretend to be an expert, but “Funeral Mariachi” is without doubt the most approachable album I’ve personally heard from SCG. The playfulness is still there, but it comes with an almost elegaic quality that’s far from quirky. There’s little evidence, too, of that pranksterish imperative which often led the trio to attack what they deemed as political correctness and/or good taste, and which never really worked for me. Posthumous work, of course, always comes freighted with a certain set of listener expectations - intimations of mortality and so on – which can be hard to avoid, even with such a wilfully unsentimental bunch as SCG. Consequently, “Funeral Mariachi”, from that title on down, seems to have a recurring atmosphere of twilit melancholy, as the second half of the album fills up with ominous twangs and piano-led nocturnes that privilege ambience over abrasion. That said, this terrific album starts pretty abrasively, with “Ben’s Radio” appearing to be the trio’s organic reconstruction of one of the collage-like comps of oriental street pop on the affiliated Sublime Frequencies label. Among all the chatter, there’s a brief chant of “Rangda! Rangda!”, a sign of where Richard Bishop has subsequently headed (pretty frustrated, incidentally, that the next Bishop/Chasny/Corsano Rangda gig in London clashes with the Wooden Shjips/Howlin Rain double-header) Initially, “Funeral Mariachi” seems to be a mellower reiteration of SCG’s super-intuitive, irreverent take on world musics, throwing in a little eastern, uncommonly graceful, exotica (“Black Orchid”); an eccentric trinket that evolves into a gorgeous acoustic piece reminiscent of the Sumatran devotional group Suarasama (“The Imam”); and a mighty stealthy desert blues (“This Is My Name”) that faintly resembles Tinariwen, allbeit punctuated by waves of east-facing psychedelia. By the end of Side One, though, “Vine Street Piano” is introducing the dominant tone of “Funeral Mariachi”: piano-led, reflective and that most unexpected thing for an SCG record, tender. Side Two asserts this intensively, mixing up similar pieces with a couple of Morricone excursions: one genuine (“Come Maddalena”), one forged (“Blue West”). There’s also “Holy Ground”, a keening and reliably macabre incantation that seems indebted to Syd Barrett and, finally, the title track; not exactly a mariachi, but with a trumpet line (from David Carter) that transforms blasted territory into something not a million miles from “Sketches Of Spain”. With their track record, many would’ve expected SCG’s send-off to Gocher to be full of enterprising vulgarity. How strange, finally, that “Funeral Mariachi” should be poignant, of all things?

A fairly inhospitable place to be on a Sunday night: just on the edge of the City, near Old Street roundabout, in the cellar of what used to be an almost permanently empty Chinese restaurant. This is the venue for, I think, only the second London show by Emeralds, a night subtitled “A Brave New World In Sound”. First, though, at this Futureology #2 night, a couple of pretty fine support acts. Neon Pulse is a synth-jockey from Oxford, apparently, who starts off with some diffident, jazzy touches that seem to posit him as a kosmische Bill Evans. Soon enough, though, he starts piling on grainy beats and plenty of distortion, earmarking him as a fellow traveller to Fuck Buttons, though not quite so self-consciously epic in scope. Dean McPhee I’ve already written about here, when I got hold of his “Brown Bear” EP. Live, his solo guitar is clear and unusually loud for this kind of thing, with a little bit of discreet delay backing up his calm, arcing melody lines. Last time, Nick and Matt both identified a certain kinship with Vini Reilly, which makes some sense again tonight: again, while it’s a kneejerk to bracket McPhee alongside players like James Blackshaw or Rick Tomlinson, he seems harder to categorise, less obviously schooled in the whole Takoma/New Primitive Guitar tradition. Reilly comes to mind again, a little, watching Emeralds, as Mark McGuire bends into one filigree freakout after another. There’s another vintage Factory reference, too, in that there’s something here a little reminiscent of New Order circa “Lowlife”, specifically “Elegia”; a full-bore, saturated grandeur, at once celestial and overloaded. It’s not, perhaps, the sort of comparison you’d expect to make, since Emeralds have been pigeonholed pretty tightly, alongside Oneohtrix Point Never, as part of a kind of New Age revival, a retro-futurist (or possibly hypnagogic?) trio with deep kosmische impulses: ambient music, after a fashion, for noise fans looking for something less abrasive. That stereotype, though, doesn’t really do justice to exactly how rich and intense their records can be, this year’s “Does It Look Like I’m Here”, especially. And it definitely gets blown to pieces when Emeralds finally start their set. There are three of them: one guy studiously working his electronics; McGuire in the middle, an unlikely guitar hero swaying back and forth; and another electronics operative, with his back to the audience, who headbangs vigorously throughout. Occasionally, he’ll turn and check out the audience or his bandmates, and fiercely punch the air. It’s quite a rock spectacle, and one that more or less suits the ramped-up music that they’re making. The Emeralds set lasts about 45 minutes, and works as one continuous piece, though it’s not, as I expected, an unfamiliar jam, but something which features recognisable pieces. For a start, they pile into a spectacularly pummelling “Genetic” from “Does It Look Like…”, all turbo-Bach arpeggios and a treatment of psychedelia that verges on punkish (with all the macho headbanging and air-punching, it’s a lot easier to figure out their Wolf Eyes-ish noise roots). This goes on for the best part of 20 minutes, frantically looping round and round, as ornate as it is relentless. A lot of writers have compared McGuire’s playing – on his solo records too (the new “Living With Yourself” is great, if at times almost post-rock) - with the likes of Manuel Gottsching or Achim Reichel. But, less fashionably, there’s as much Mike Oldfield in there, too (maybe that’s just me: “Hergest Ridge” has been, unexpectedly, a big personal favourite these past few months). Eventually, “Genetic” subsides into a long passage of percolating threat, before eventually it resolves into what may be “Now You See Me”, with McGuire turning in some really lyrical folk-rockish riffs that remind me of an old Michio Kurihara solo album I have somewhere. Came with a free guitar pick, if I remember right.