Not an immediately familiar name, perhaps, but Koen Holtkamp might be more familiar, at least to regular readers, if we described him as one half of Mountains, a New York-based duo that I’ve written about a fair bit here in the last year or so. “Gravity/Bees” is, I must confess, the first Holtkamp solo record I’ve heard, and shouldn’t come as too much of a culture shock to those of you who’ve dug Mountains albums like “Choral” and, especially, last year’s rendering of a live set, “Etching”. In fact, some unusually specific and thorough biographical notes that came with my download reveal that the first of the two new tracks, "In The Absence Of Gravity…" is “A side-long piece based around a 2008 solo performance in Brighton.” Holtkamp, it seems, used a system “somewhat inspired by Terry Riley's 'time-lag accumulator' pieces” – much like the intricate loops and delays he and Brendon Anderegg employed at their Club Uncut show last year, then mixed the live recording with more studio work. “The work,” it says here, “is built mainly around processed acoustic guitar, analog synthesizers, and electronics but also incorporates recordings of harmonica, electric organ, small percussion objects, and an unlikely glass of ginger ale.” The results, as Mountain fans might expect, is a very graceful 15 minute piece which gradually builds in density and intensity as it goes along. Predictably, there’s a droning ambient aspect to “Gravity”, though once again it feels very organically constructed, quite different from a lot of the kosmische-inspired music around at the moment, the Michael Rotherish electric guitar climax notwithstanding. Listening again this morning on the way to work, it struck me that there are actually quite a lot of affinities with the more gaseous end of post-rock, beyond the self-consciously verbose title: the slow build and restrained, aesthetic climax have a little of Mogwai’s “New Paths To Helicon”, maybe? The second track on “Gravity/Bees” was created using a different, studio-based methodology, though it also seemed to involve some pretty radical close micing of bees inside a hive which, given the way of these things, isn’t immediately detectable amid the general pleasing drone of “Loosely Based On Bees”. Instead, the synths are more dominant here: I’d possibly cite Tangerine Dream as well as a contemporary like Oneohtrix Point Never, though there’ a granular texture there, too (the bees?). The structure, though, isn’t superficially dissimilar to that of “Gravity”, which means the last section comes with another hefty layer of electric guitar, more frictional this time, and reminiscent (thanks John) of Robert Fripp on “No Pussyfooting”. Hard to write about this stuff without being ethereal and woolly or referential/technical, but good stuff, all the same.

Just looking back through my archives, I found something on Sharon Van Etten’s “Because I Was In Love”, a mighty hushed album of folkish singer-songwritery which was produced by Greg Weeks of Espers, and certainly sounded like it was part of Espers’ fairly spectral world. I compared “Because I Was In Love”, specifically, to solo stuff by Espers’ Meg Baird, and it turns out that Baird turns up on the new SVE album, “Epic”, singing backing vocals. The general vibe of this one, though, is quite different: for a start, there’s a line on the sleeve which reads, “Dedicated to Fleetwood Mac. You changed my world.” “Epic” doesn’t quite go in that direction in an obvious way, but it’s certainly a bolder, louder, poppier record, a swift collection of seven very good songs written and delivered with a palpable focus and confidence. According to the ever-reliable press notes, the last of these songs, “Love More”, has been covered by some hook-up between Bon Iver and The National, and there’s something about collaborations with The Antlers and so on which seems to place Van Etten as a part of grown-up Brooklyn contemporary indie. “Epic” doesn’t much sound like that, though, perhaps fortunately. In fact, I keep thinking of early ‘90s American indie-rock when I play it, though I’m not always sure what, specifically, Van Etten’s elegantly crafted songs and strong but unshowy voice remind me of. Maybe it’s Kristin Hersh, circa “Hips And Makers”, on the opening “A Crime”? Or possibly Madder Rose. There’s a terrific song here called “Save Yourself”, a heavy-lidded but purposeful country-rock roller wherein Van Etten’s vocals are tracked by Meg Baird and a couple of other singers, Cat Martino and She Keeps Bees’ Jessica Larrabee. It’s one of those songs that seems stylistically if not melodically familiar, yet hard to place precisely. “Epic”’s other standout is equally tricky to place, though there’s definitely something of the Cocteau Twins in the precious, windswept atmospherics of “Don’t Do It” and the way the vocals warble and soar. There’s a linear drive rarely found in the Cocteaus, though, which reminds me of the first, good Martha Wainwright record. Funny, though, how sometimes you can usefully fail to spot the most glaring comparisons. As “Don’t Do It” has just been playing, virtually everyone else in the office has, in some cases independently, pointed out how much it sounds The Cranberries and “Linger”. They’re right: how can I make this look good, exactly?

One of my favourite labels of 2010 thus far has been Three Lobed Recordings, thanks in no small part to the amazing “Honest Strings” comp, in honour of Jack Rose, and the Hans Chew set I’ve been raving about these past few weeks. More evidence arrived the other day in the shape of “Sand City”, a duo album between Steve Gunn, a guitarist whose “Boerum Palace” record got a few mentions from contributors here last year, and John Truscinski. I must admit I haven’t come across Truscinski before, but he seems to be a percussionist on the free/improv underground scene in the States, who sits in really well with Gunn’s fluid style. The thing that struck one of my workmates when I put these deep jams on for the first time was the kinship to Sandy Bull and Billy Higgins’ playing on something like “Blend” and there’s undoubtedly a strong link in the way Gunn’s folk/raga explorations are carefully and imaginatively tracked by a jazz drummer. I can catch a little of Peter Walker and “Rainy Day Ragas”, too, which I’ve been meaning to mention again for a while, since it’s just been reissued after a pretty long period of orthodox unavailability. Obviously, there are plenty of contemporary guitarists working in this zone; God knows I’ve covered dozens on this blog. Gunn is right up there, though, and there are some profound moments in “Wythe Raag” (too short at 13 minutes), when his guitar comes magically close to reproducing the calm ululations of a raga singer like Pandit Pran Nath. All the while on “Wythe Raag”, Truscinski is working his way round his percussion tools, applying empathetic scrabble, rumble, roll and clang: I guess that reductive ideas of free drumming would suggest that such improvisations would detract from Gunn’s serene progress. But that’s clearly not the case. The best comparison I can make is with Chris Corsano, both in some of his mellower collaborations with Mick Flower and, especially, in his work in Rangda. “Wythe Raag” pairs up nicely with that band’s amazing “Plain Of Jars”: free devotional jams, where extreme virtuosity is carried off with a transcendental lightness of touch.

To be honest, a few alarm bells went off when I read this quote. “I wanted [Neil Young] to understand that I’ve spent years dedicated to the sonics in my home and that I wanted to give him something he’d never heard before,” said Daniel Lanois the other week. “He picked up that instrument, which had everything — an acoustic sound, electronica, bass sounds — and he knew as soon as he played it that we had taken the acoustic guitar to a new level. It’s hard to come up with a new sound at the back end of 50 years of rock and roll, but I think we did it.” I’ve long been wary of Lanois’ somewhat portentous way of talking about music he’s involved with, and have been generally equivocal about the cushioned echo chambers he often creates for his production clients. As an amused fan of “Fork In The Road”, “Living With War” and “Greendale”, and someone less enamoured with “Prairie Wind”, I tend to think that latterday Neil Young, though always interesting, is at his best when he’s at his rawest and most unfettered, not embarking on a notionally more formatted project with production, studios and so on. Which I guess is a long-winded way of saying that I feared the worst when word started circulating about his collaboration with Lanois, initially flagged up as “Twisted Road”. Bootlegs of the new songs as performed on the “Twisted Road” tour were strong, sure, but personally, I thought Lanois basically mugged and smothered some of Dylan’s best late-period songs on “Time Out Of Mind”. What would he do here? What did he really consider to be a “new sound”? And wasn’t Neil’s wallowing, splenetic, endlessly capricious old sound radical enough? Well, it transpires that it mostly was. I can’t really explain the technical preparations that Lanois made before Neil Young picked up the electric and acoustic guitars that are the solitary instruments on “Le Noise”. Mostly, though, he lets them crank and spit and reverberate with a healthy amount of space around them, layering on the delays and effects with relative subtlety. Most importantly, it doesn’t sound as if Lanois has worried the sound to death, as seems to be his habit. Rather, the vituperative spontaneity of Neil’s current schtick comes across strongly: once again, these are songs that flaunt their rough edges, that feel as if he completed them mere moments before recording began. A solo record, even a predominantly electric one, often leads you to expect a bunch of ballads, but “Le Noise” mainly consists of seething rockers: a couple of songs that figured on the “Twisted Road” tour, “You Never Call” and “Leia”, were reportedly left off the final tracklisting because they’d have made the album top-heavy with ballads. In the end, “Love And War” and “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” were deemed enough. It’s a good call, and it means that gnarly songs like the opening “Walk With Me” set the tone: an uncommonly angry-sounding love song where the tender words of long-term companionship and love come bagged up in all manner of clank and hiss. Towards the end, just before the noise becomes clipped and processed in a way that’s as reminiscent of a Fennesz record as it is “Dead Man” or “Arc Weld”, you can hear Young howling, “I lost some people I was travelling with.” Suddenly, the motivation becomes clearer: bereavement - the loss of LA Johnson in particular, presumably – has pushed Young to cling to what he has with an even greater fury and intensity. That sentiment – sentimentality, in a certain light – continues in the tremendous “Sign Of Love”. We’ve talked about this song being kin to “Cinnamon Girl” and “Drive Back”, but what it most reminds me of right now is “Tonight’s The Night”; a comparison which posits “Le Noise” as a sequel of sorts to the Ditch Trilogy, only one where an angry contemplation of mortality has led to a celebration of his marriage. Young’s vocals sound very first take here, and on the subsequent “Someone’s Gonna Rescue You”, which makes him sound more vulnerable than ever when assailed by the humming hall-of-mirror guitar effects that Lanois has cued up. It all works a treat, though occasionally the sacreligious thought occurs that these – “Sign Of Love” especially – are songs that deserve a straightforward – whatever that is, of course - band treatment rather than an idiosyncratic one. If “Fork In The Road” felt like a completely spur-of-the-moment dispatch, much of “Le Noise” seems to be a response to a period where he’s been immersed in the Archives. As with “Chrome Dreams II”, there is material that was started and abandoned decades ago – in this case, the wonderful “Hitchhiker”, a vivid autobiography of drug experiences and attendant paranoias that tells his story more directly and articulately than most of his interviews. As I’m playing “Le Noise” this afternoon, though, I’m beginning to wonder whether “Love And War” might be the best song of the lot: an attempt to understand his creative responses to, well, love and war that calmly unravels in the tradition of “Ambulance Blues” or that Archived solo version of “Last Trip To Tulsa”. Playing “Ambulance Blues”, I think I’d prefer an untreated acoustic sound to Lanois’ comparatively spectral rendering. But the point is, I guess, that these songs are strong enough to flourish under any circumstances (the mind boggles at what he might do to them next live), and that Lanois’ flourishes are pretty restrained, under the circumstances. The result is a gripping record that, while fairly radical in its approach, and raw in its core performances, should also be Young’s most successful in a while. For those of us who enjoy his wanderings and digressions, it works great. For those of you who got fed up with all the mucking about a while back, it might well prove to be a way back into the fold.

I guess a lot of people have a John Peel epiphany, and mine definitely came at some point in the early ‘80s when, for no obvious reason, he dug out “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” by The Pop Group. Within a few seconds I was snared, and hit the ‘record’ button on my cassette player to tape the rest of the track. For over 20 years, due no doubt to some baffling personal incompetence, that taped version was my only copy of “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”: a cranky, next-level dub mix of sorts, with the sound dipping in and out as my recorder compensated for its failing batteries. It is to The Pop Group’s credit that, nearly three decades on, they still sound as volatile and exciting, at this first London show in a small clutch of reunion shows. Further dates and a new album are being promised, but it may be unwise to expect these things to roll out in a logical fashion: there are, after all, the small matters of Bristolian working practises and infinite layers of political and creative opinion to negotiate first. It’s a small surprise, too, that the clatter of Cecil Taylorish piano from Gareth Sager that opens the show soon resolves itself into an old song – the thought occurred, on the way to the gig, that The Pop Group’s fierce and enduring ideologies might mitigate against anything so formulaic and nostalgic as the act of playing 30 year old tunes. The song they’re playing, though, has always had its built-in, self-flagellating ironies, being “We Are All Prostitutes”, which Mark Stewart bellows while occasionally checking lyrics on a lectern and looking like a giant vampiric Morrissey. Stewart’s manic and compelling stage presence is something of a shock, too, for those of us who’ve never seen him before. I guess I’d expected someone stern and paranoid, not one who relentlessly shadowboxes, thrashes a towel around his head, and, during “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”, initiates a kind of carnivalesque breakdown with a whistle. Stewart appears to be having quite a time of it, or at least is significantly convulsed by his enthusiasms (this fairly remarkable interview gives an indication of where he is, more or less, right now). He is blessed, too, with a band – Sager, Dan Catsis, Bruce Smith (borrowed back from Public Image Ltd) and a new second guitarist – who are, well, slick would be the wrong word for such a skree of noise, but they’re certainly very tight and well-drilled. The idea that Pop Group shows might be a discourse between bandmembers of freeform ideas turns out to be wide of the mark: there’s always the imperative to be a funk band at the heart of what they do. And a dub band, after a fashion, so the mix has a critical role, too, in translating the playing into something yet more disorienting: a brilliant version of “Thief Of Fire” finds great caverns of echo opening up beneath Stewart, while Sager picks up a soprano sax and blasts wave after wave of tinnitus-inducing interference. Sager is terrific throughout, actually: there’s one wall-of-knives guitar solo in “Colour Blind” that pretty much throws virtually all of the post-punk/punk-funk/no-wave revivalism of the early 21st Century into very stark context. It’s typical, too, of how The Pop Group’s music is so open-ended that it can revive itself in ways that remain confrontational and imaginative, making for a reunion, and an ongoing interpretation of the notion of ‘punk’, much different to most of their contemporaries. Witness the encore: on one level a good, if not altogether revolutionary, funk jam, but one gradually assailed by obliterating noise and the bullish, oddly jovial presence of Stewart. For a while, he sings into a mic which seems to be turned off; the soundman, perhaps, is so intent on crafting the dub space that he doesn’t notice Stewart has stopped dancing and is trying to join in. Then the mic gets switched on, and it transpires Stewart is having another go at “We Are All Prostitutes”. Clearly, in spite of everything, here’s a man who loves his work.