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.

To the capital’s glamorous West End, then, and the Opening Night Gala of this year’s London Film Festival at the Odeon Leicester Square. Introducing this film adaptation of his novel Never Let Me Go, the author Kazuo Ishiguro hailed the film’s stars – Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield – as being at the forefront of a new generation of actors. Arguably, Ishiguro was whipping up a bit of hyperbole, but Never Let Me Go is part of a slow shift away from heritage Brit drama towards a more subversive and questioning style of movie-making. I suppose it would be easy to compare Never Let Me Go to Atonement. Both films are based on acclaimed novels; both figure a typically photogenic stately home inside which secrets lie; both figure a typically photogenic stately Keira Knightley; both deal in feelings of guilt and the attempts of one character to redeem herself for past crimes. And, as with Atonement, Never Let Me Go initially presents a reassuringly familiar and comfortable set-up – only for the rug to get pulled out from underneath you. I should point out now that there’s going to be spoilers ahead. The stately home here is Hailsham, an elite English boarding school presided over by the imperious Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), where pupils are encouraged in artistic pursuits, their best work submitted to “the gallery” for approval. No one goes outside the school perimeter; we hear one story of a pupil who left the grounds and was later found tied to tree, their hands and feet having been cut off. There is little, if any contact with the outside world. In this strange, creepy place we meet Ruth, Kathy and Tommy. It’s the 1970s, and the three protagonists are young, not quite in their teens, but still they’re fumbling with nascent adolescent feelings; Ruth and Tommy for each other, while Kathy sets her sights on having Tommy for herself. You might think at this point we’re going to flash forward 10 or 15 years and fall into a thoughtful, high-end relationship drama, with some stiff upper lippery and plenty of unrequited love. Which we sort of do, but not quite as you might expect. This isn’t England as we know it; this is a sort of alternate reality, an England where the state has eradicated illness and disease by cloning human beings and farming out their organs until such time as they “complete” – Ishiguro’s euphemism for death. The children of Hailsham are bred specifically to save lives. But what of their own lives and their own feelings? Their eventual fate is revealed to them while they’re still at Hailsham, and what follows – when the adult Ruth (Knightley), Kathy (Mulligan) and Tommy (Garfield) are living in remote “cottages”, still shielded from the real world – provides moments of heartbreak, tenderness and false hopes. Mulligan, who apart from an early role in a Doctor Who episode, is not an actress I warm to tremendously – she was, frankly, punchable in An Education – and Knightley has rarely offered much suggestion of range. Garfield, though, who was tremendous in The Social Network, is equally good here, as the slow-witted, vulnerable centre of the love triangle. He works hard with Mulligan to create a believable dynamic; she becomes a “carer”, looking after donors as they undergo their operations, and you suspect it’s her childhood relationship with the boy Tommy that brought this out in her. Knightley, as the manipulative Ruth, does a lot to move beyond her comfort zone; the scenes where she’s in hospital, her body beginning to fail from multiple donations, clinging on to a walking frame, is – for once – proper acting. Ruth's own moment of atonement, to let Kathy and Tommy be together, is beautifully pitched. And the glimmer of hope – that Kathy and Tommy can defer donating by proving that they love each other – is heartbreakingly played out by Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland. There is, intriguingly, no ethical debate here. Ishiguro and Garland make the tacit point that if we grow up with a particular horror - in this case, farmed human beings - then human nature will accept it. Most of the Hailsham students, it seems, accept their fate, because they know no other set of circumstances. When Kathy and Tommy visit Miss Emily, she says there is no lung cancer, no breast cancer, anymore - who would want to return to darker times when such diseases existed? That she says all this from a wheelchair seems strangely incongruous, but no matter. Romanek shoots the Hailsham scenes in warm, summer tones; the children basking in the apparent promise of youth. Later, when they reach adulthood, everything is shot in muted, shabby beiges and greys. It perpetually rains. It’s like a Morrissey b-side, particularly when they take a day trip to the Norfolk coast and spend an afternoon on a desolate, windswept pier. It all feels dreadfully hopeless. I suspect it’s not the kind of period drama that will travel – remember, of course, Ishiguro’s more traditional The Remains Of The Day picked up eight Academy Award nominations. This is too a bleak film, however tasteful and restrained Romanek makes it. Never Let Me Go opens in the UK on January 21, 2011

Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects. A couple more good ones from them today, beginning with a split vinyl from Magic Lantern and a British musician called Ben Nash. Magic Lantern, and especially Cameron ‘Sun Araw’ Stallones from the band, have figured here plenty over the past year or so, and sketching out my albums of the year the other day, their valedictory “Platoon” looked it’d be sitting pretty high. After “Platoon”, word was that Magic Lantern had gone on hiatus, Stallones concentrating his energies on Sun Araw. The two big tracks here don’t exactly contradict that – “Mosquito Coast” dates from 2008, “Long Way Down” from 2009 – but they do hold out the promise that there may be more to come from the archive. Listening to these two, it’s strange to think they were recorded a year apart, since they work together so neatly. “Mosquito Coast” is essentially a percolating warm-up, a scene-setter, a jamming band coming into focus, which acts as a low-key overture for “Long Way Down”, a more obviously produced piece, recorded by Best Coast's Bobb Bruno. “Long Way Down” is one of those heavy, trancey processionals so beloved of Stallones; an obliterated march/trudge with Crazy Horse beats, Black Ark organ and fx, muffled incantations and a thicket of guitars that owe something, at a push, to Funkadelic. It’s his familiar trick, but no less potent here. On the flip, Ben Nash is a new name on me, but his micro-detailed, droneish pieces are mighty effective, too (the second, “For Johnny Standon/Caradon Figure”, features Cam Deas, who’s also got an interesting newish album on Blackest Rainbow). Better still, though, is “Alchemy”, a CD Nash has out in collaboration with Sophie Cooper. Two tracks, each clocking in between 15 and 20 minutes, and both some of the best drone/out/free folk stuff I’ve heard in a while. “Alchemy” itself starts placidly enough, a clinking and scraping meditation, with pipes and guitars, in the neighbourhood of the Dream Syndicate, possibly with some affinities to the Vibracathedral Orchestra. Towards the midpoint, however, it subtly shifts towards something more discomforting, as sustained keyboard tones come to the fore. “Natural Liberation Through Naked Vision” is marvellous too, initially dominated by some kind of disconsolate horn (I’m reminded of Kim Gordon’s playing on “Lightnin’”), before Nash’s guitar takes over for a lovely passage reminiscent of Ben Chasny. Need to find out more about Nash and Cooper, I guess.