Not one to apply layers of personal mystification to his music, the Cambridge musician C Joynes is telling the crowd at Club Uncut about his phlegm issues. Personable enough, he’s also a terrific guitarist, albeit one who it’d be more or less impossible to write about without mentioning John Fahey (which I did last time, writing about his, ahem, “Revenants, Prodigies And The Restless Dead”). Joynes makes for an ideal start to a fine and adventurous show: he has an exploratory jauntiness which locates the spirit as much as the spirituality in the Takoma school’s music, similar to the way Jack Rose handled tradition. He’s followed by Alexander Tucker, whose customary habit of building a melodic thicket of sound out of various loops and delays has become ever more artful in the couple of years since I last saw him. As usual, Tucker begins tentatively, picking out a doomy blues progression on his guitar. Soon, though, he’s picked up a cello and is layering sombre drones into the mix, as well as his high, keening vocals. At one point, there’s a high, screeching firestorm which reminds me of Tony Conrad, maybe, then a curious and brilliant passage where Tucker appears to be playing heavy metal on some kind of electric mandolin. This goes on, alternately dense and stark, for about 30 compelling minutes, as Tucker concentrates more and more on his cello. I’m not sure how much of his performances are improvised, and how much composed, but it’s as impressive as ever. As is Sir Richard Bishop, who mixes wry entreaties to be put on Uncut’s cover (“When you run out of rock’n’roll icons”) with some mindblowing solo electric guitar jams. A few years ago, I interviewed Richard Thompson in a Santa Monica guitar shop, and watched as he picked up various instruments and nonchalantly played amazingly complicated things on them, in a way which seemed absent-minded, if anything. Bishops’s playing is nothing like that of Thompson: among other names in my notebook, I can identify Sandy Bull, Django Rheinhardt, Dick Dale, Omar Khorshid. But what reminds me of Thompson is a similar effortless virtuosity. His skill at blending multiple global influences into a holistic style is pretty amazing, marking him out as a kind of gnostic explorer. He also has a fairly wicked sense of humour, essaying a few cranky vocal pieces – at least one, a jokey incest memoir, explicitly credited to the late Charles Gocher – that may well have been salvaged from the infinite back catalogue of the Sun City Girls. The highlights, though, come on those instrumental pieces: North African-rooted pieces from “The Freak Of Araby”; Hot Club-like flurries from “Polytheistic Fragments”; expansive psychedelic studies, delivered with a ringing clarity of tone; beautiful lyrical tunes, studded with unexpectedly bluesy controlled explosions (a hint of his forthcoming Rangda project with Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano, maybe) that eventually resolve themselves into, I think, the Beatles’ “She Loves You”. He also accedes to a request for “Black Eyed Blue”, then determinedly claims it’s a Black-Eyed Peas cover. There’s also a loop of some chanting that he deploys a couple of times between tracks, in lieu of his occasional whistling breaks. “In case you didn’t get the message the first time,” he says, “I think they’ve just purified all your ritual objects.”

First off today, a quick reminder that Sir Richard Bishop is gracing Club Uncut at the Borderline tonight (March 1), with really strong support from Alexander Tucker and C Joynes. Tickets still available from Seetickets.com or on the door. See you there, hopefully. Meanwhile, Sleepy Sun’s “Embrace” was a big favourite last year, so it’s nice to report that its follow-up, “Fever”, pretty much takes off where that one ended. “Marina” is right up there with “New Age”, a capacious, blasted, shapeshifting psych-blues that again points up the Santa Cruz band’s affinities with Black Mountain. About four minutes in, though, “Marina” suddenly transforms into a tribal shakedown reminiscent of “Tusk”-era Fleetwood Mac. Soon enough, the stoner lurch returns, intensified and amplified. Nevertheless, it’s a palpable influence that crops up at intervals through the whole record – not least on the silvery boy/girl folk-pop of track two, “Rigamaroo” – that suggests Sleepy Sun are playing a different, possibly bigger, game than many of their psych contemporaries. What’s remarkable about “Fever”, perhaps – apart from the generally terrific music - is how neatly the band manage to fuse this crystalline pop (well, pop-ish, from a certain ‘70s rockist perspective) imperative with some monolithic desert jams that are heavy enough to match up to those of Dead Meadow. Re-reading my blog on “Embrace”, it strikes me I’m hitting on a lot of similar reference points but, again, I’m constantly reminded of Black Mountain, as the band switch back and forth from foot-down crunch to stark and airy spaces in which Rachael Williams can really breathe and stretch out. There’s a more countrified feel this time out on, say, the relatively brief “Ooh Boy”, where the molten guitars are left to seethe in the distance, a model of more-or-less restraint. Soon enough, though, they’ve moved further upfront into “Acid Love”, where fuzzy afterburn in the tradition of Earth backs up a distrait gospel sigh not dissimilar to Spiritualized (I guess this is where I drop the Brightblack Morning Light tag again). It’s easy to take the whole album – indeed, maybe all of Sleepy Sun’s two albums – as one continuous slow-burn, but there are also enough dynamic switches and neat ideas to promise that the band won’t get stuck in a rut anytime soon. The formula of reveries followed by rock-outs might be predictable – albeit hugely enjoyable – but the way they make some of the transitions can be imaginative: wait for the harmonica and breakbeat interlude that ushers in the final thrust of “Desert God”, particularly. Probably said this before as well, but I really ought to see this lot live…

This is pretty good, I think. Wasn’t terribly enamoured by the last thing I heard from Karen Elson, the Mildred & The Mice seven-inch, but this is nice, faintly menaced country pop, with some kinship, perhaps, to Neko Case. [youtube]WsNhwMDC1yM[/youtube] Looks like a full album’s on the way, produced by Jack White, presumably employing that somewhat underused band. Decent run for Third Man at the moment, after the Smoke Fairies, Wanda Jackson and Black Belles singles.

One of the albums I played most in 2009 was “II” by Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, and in fact I got pretty hooked on everything Hans-Peter Lindstrøm had done. It was easy to assume that Lindstrøm, allegedly the musician, was the more prog and kosmische inclined, while Prins Thomas, allegedly the DJ, brought the disco imperative. Listening to this wonderful new Prins Thomas solo album, though, the distinction isn’t quite so clear. While Lindstrøm’s recently taken a path that ups the ‘80s and disco influences, “Prins Thomas” basically takes off where the percolating soundscapes of “II” left off. There’s plentiful live instrumentation, not least the martial breaks and heavy bass on the really wonderful “Uggebugg”, which feels very much like a sequel to the previous album’s “Cisco”. When I wrote about “II”, I mentioned in passing an affinity with the first batch of Michael Rother solo albums, which comes much more to the fore here. “Uggebugg” shares with much of “II” a feeling of infinite build, an indulgence of entirely justifiable noodling. But around 3.45 minutes in, it resolves into a languidly twanging guitar line which feels like that kind of refracted surf sound Rother on, say, “Flammende Herzen” or “Sterntaler”. It’s still unequivocally dance music, but there’s a sense that Thomas has penetrated ever deeper into the sounds of ‘70s Germany, a clean and linear take on cosmic music that can sometimes switch up into dronemusic of a kind: the ten minutes of, ahem, “Sauerkraut” pulse away like a mellower, warmer version of Kraftwerk’s motorik circa “Autobahn”, albeit with an unexpectedly louche guitar solo. “Wendy Not Walter” (a reference to Wendy/Walter Carlos presumably) edges closer to the less rockist disco sound of the earlier Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas records – in fact, it’s the one track where Lindstrøm turns up, on piano. But I can’t help thinking this album might alienate a few of the duo’s old dance fans, while Krautrock dorks like myself lap it up. In a similar vein, a quick mention for the new Jonas Reinhardt album on Kranky, “Powers Of Audition”, which summons up the same kind of synthy pomp-kosmische located so well by Oneohtrix Point Never last year. Check him out here.