There’s something a little daunting about writing on the subject of the Black Twig Pickers: an awareness, I guess, that I’m dealing with a world of knowledge and experience that comically exceeds my own. There’s a quote on their website which reads innocuously enough: “Exciting old-time music at its finest.” But it comes from some evidently specialist publication called Bluegrass Unlimited: the Black Twigs might attract dabblers in old-time music, but they privilege, understandably, those who know what they’re talking about. The thing is, the Black Twig Pickers move in places where a bunch of neophytes may well come into contact with their excellent music. Back home in South West Virginia, they play presumably fairly wild dances. Tonight, though, they’re playing a hushed and genteel jazz club in Dalston, and their new album, “Ironto Special” is out on Thrill Jockey - a terrific and varied label, but not one which has been home to that many deep roots artists. One exception, of course, is the late Jack Rose, and I assume the Black Twigs came onto Thrill Jockey’s radar thanks to their long association with Rose: both from a shared past in drone outfit Pelt, and as bandmates on the great “Jack Rose And The Black Twig Pickers” disc of a year or so back. Guitarist Charlie Parr has been sitting in with them on some recent gigs, but for this show, the band are down to their core trio: Mike Gangloff, a genial scholar and host who mainly plays fiddle; Isak Howell, a guitarist who provides nimble shunting rhythms rather than leads; and Nathan Bowles, a banjo player with washboard, bones and, intriguingly, fiddlesticks. It’s a mark of my ignorance that I didn’t actually know what fiddlesticks were until I see Bowles drum on the neck of Gangloff’s fiddle with them. Describing “Smoker Wedding March” in the invaluable sleevenotes to “Ironto Special”, Gangloff writes, “Nathan takes a set of chopsticks to strings I’m not bowing. My fiddles are long-suffering.” The sound, though, on this and “Love My Honey I Do” is extraordinarily delicate, even harplike. It’s a contrast with the bowing tone of Gangloff’s fiddle, a deliberately harsh sound which gives the Black Twigs a real rawness, a sense that this is music which vigorously avoids gentrification. It’s also incredibly specific music. Over two longish, compelling sets, Gangloff talks a lot about the local music and musicians of their South-West Virginian neighbourhood, pointing up micro-scenes within the area: the second set features a run of what he calls Copper Hills tunes, curious, he notes, for the fact that their titles – “Never Miss Your Mother ‘Til She’s Gone”, for example – are more or less the only lyrics in the incredible versions. By the end of the session, it feels like you’ve been inducted in an ancient culture by a trio of good-time missionaries – three musicians who only stop, it seems, when the audience stops making requests – for waltzes rather than specific songs, quaintly – and starts thinning out, prey to the whims of public transport. Given any opportunity, I suspect the Black Twig Pickers would play all night. There would be worse ordeals.

Mentioning Forest Swords the other week, the brilliantly named Soren Lorenson posted to say how much they reminded him of Matt Elliott’s Third Eye Foundation. I’ve written at length about Forest Swords in the new issue of Uncut (and subsequently discovered that their “Dagger Paths” is getting a formal UK issue on No Pain In Pop). But serendipitously, the first new Third Eye album in ten years turned up the other day, too, an expansive and rather addictive disc with the characteristically gloomy title of “The Dark”. In the space between Third Eye releases, Matt Elliott has made some nice enough records, with more of a singer-songwriter bent and less general noise than on his earlier records. “The Dark”, though, finds him playing again to what I think are his strengths: slow, somewhat classical melodies overlaid with ebbing waves of noise and complex drum patterns often indebted to drum’n’bass. On “The Dark”, another of Third Eye’s finest tricks – a backdrop of banshee howls – makes a welcome return. This time, though, Elliott intersperses frenzied and skittering drum’n’bass passages with sprung beats that betray a predictable interest in the dystopian possibilities of dubstep (or darkstep, I suppose). The scale of the operation, too, has increased. “The Dark” has five tracks, not all of them easy to name, thanks to the spidery handwriting on the sleeve. In effect, though, this is one epic piece of music in five movements. At times, the blasted symphonics come to the fore, especially on the first couple of tracks, and the fourth (I think this reads “Closure”), which emphasises a certain kinship with Gavin Bryars by having an antique, ghostly quality of the band playing as the Titanic goes down. The same simple refrain is battered and warped throughout, though, and by the finale – titled, in a vintage Elliott provocation, “If You Treat Us All Like Terrorists We Will Become Terrorists” – the beats have gone haywire and the noise has become obliterating. Exhilarating, too.

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?