This one arrived a couple of days ago and it’s been hard to stop playing ever since. It’s the debut solo album of a French guy previously known as half of the Zombie Zombie duo, who I vaguely recall as being Krautrockish, but not as interesting as they were made out to be. I need to check them out again, I think. Because “Night Music” is a giant cosmic electronic throb which works pretty tremendously, all told. The opening 20-minute track, “For Falling Asleep”, sets out Etienne Jaumet’s stall rather brilliantly, placing him deep in the territory of Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Schulze and, more recently, Lindstrøm circa “Where You Go I Go Too” (Lindstrøm has a new one coming, with a singer, Christabelle, that I should be getting next week, by the way). If Lindstrøm powers his kosmische fantasias with disco beats, however, Jaumet seems to favour gliding Detroit techno as his motor, and in this he’s assisted by Carl Craig, credited here as producer (According to the credits, “Mix directed and imagined by Carl Craig,” which I assume means production). The last album I can recall working this way was Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom’s “Days Of Mars” on DFA, though I think Russom’s latest incarnation as Black Meteoric Star is this way inclined, too (I need to hear that album out, too). Jaumet is less minimalist, mind, and keeps piling on the good stuff: great banks of slow timelag saxophone that very obviously connect with the Terry Riley of “Poppy Nogood” or “Happy Ending”; vigorous ululations from Emmanuelle Parrenin, who also contributes some Alan Stivell-ish harp to the final comedown minutes of “For Falling Asleep”. “For Falling Asleep”, in fact, sets a terrifying standard for the following four tracks, but they’re still fairly excellent. As “Mental Vortex” (for God’s sake…) moves into, well, “Entropy”, there’s a sense Jaumet is progressing towards more orthodox, modernish electronica; well, late ‘80s/early ‘90s as opposed to ‘70s. On “Through The Strata”, you can just make out Parrenin’s ecstatic groans beneath the thudding beats, sundry cosmic ephemera, and a quavering drone melody that sounds like a synthetic equivalent of bagpipes; Breton ones, maybe, which when combined with Parrenin’s presence, suggests Jaumet has a taste for the French equivalent of psych-folk. If anyone has any leads and recommendations with regard to Parrenin, please let me know – a brief Google makes her look fascinating. Finally, the Terry Riley saxes come back with a vengeance in “At The Crack Of Dawn”, for the requisite levitational closer. “Entropy” is playing at Etienne Jaumet’s Myspace, along with some other stuff.

Just in case you haven’t come across it yet, the first song to surface from Vampire Weekend’s forthcoming “Contra” album (due early January, I believe) turned up on their website yesterday. You can download “Horchata” for free here, without even bothering to register, and it’s well worth it. When I wrote about Vampire Weekend’s debut album last year, I mentioned the insidious quality of their songs, the nagging way Ezra Koenig’s vocal lines tend to wedge themselves into your memory. “Horchata” is very much like that, though the skinniness of the debut’s sound has been replaced by a fuller, though no less eccentric sound (and, judging by the fleeting sneak preview I’ve had of “Contra”, it’s typical of the whole album in that respect). The wiry guitars are nowhere to be seen: the closest relative to “Horchata” on “Vampire Weekend” is “M79”, especially when the lush synthesised chamber strings arrive in the latter half of the song. Three things dominate “Horchata”, though. The brilliant tune, that continually seems to be twisting away from the expected, but remains aggressively memorable. Koenig’s lyrics; eccentric snippets from a lost and vivid text about Mexican winter breaks? Or endearingly aphoristic nonsense? I’m not sure, but this morning, “In December, drinking Horchata/I look psychotic in a balaclava,” seems a preposterously, dorkishly excellent opening couplet. And a new, enhanced production, that privileges a lively arsenal of electronic percussion: great barrages of drums that recall those big Brazilian samba drum ensembles; clicking, glockenspiel-like effects. Most of all, with the tinny reverb on some of the beats and the sprung, clackety resonance of a recurring sound that resembles thumb-pianos, it suggests that their artful appropriation of African music has now moved on to Congo, and Konono No 1. Have a listen, and let me know what you think.

The new Broadcast album, in the company of Julian House’s Focus Group, has proved to be one of those records that resist, in some way, being written about. Perhaps it may be something to do with how “Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age” is a slippery, fragmentary listen; a collage of 23 disjointed, often dislocated snippets that feel as if they’ve been harvested from a dusty collection of neglected old soundtracks. An album that slips in and out of focus and of your attention, sneaking up when you least expect it. Which, I suppose, is at least some of the point, and something which has a lot to do with the hauntology micro-genre which it so comfortably inhabits. I’ve been very wary of the hauntology term in the past, often thinking of the scene as the confection of some occasionally over-wrought critics who are, essentially, striving to give some intellectual legitimacy to a) being nostalgic for TV soundtracks from their ‘70s childhoods; and b) remembering that some of them could be pretty discomforting. In other words: wow, wasn’t “Children Of The Stones” creepy? A fair point, of course. There’s a good argument to be made about the subversive and creative aspects of making somewhat uncanny music inspired by semi-kitsch TV shows and unreliable memories; it’s certainly more imaginative, or at least post-modern, than the more orthodox mystical fascinations of many of the folk and psych artists I write about here. But hauntology seems to have an orthodoxy all of its own; I can barely recall a genre, however minuscule, that has embraced a critical rhetoric and a compunction to define itself so keenly. That aesthetic has clearly spread to Broadcast; ironically, really, since you could argue that their crotchety, bewitching brand of retro-futurism, their obsessive mining of lost library recordings, was one of the key inspirations of the artists gathered around House’s Ghost Box label. “Witch Cults”, then, buys into the whole haunt-ideology wholesale. And, if it feels a bit tortuously over-conceptualised at times, it also sounds largely great and compelling. Where once Broadcast appeared to be soundtracking a cocktail party on the wheel in space (I think I drew that allusion in maybe their first NME review, self-referentially enough), now the vibes are much more arcane. Eerie playground chants sometimes emerge out of the crackly morass. Harpsichords and pipes flutter unsteadily through the mix, sometimes facing off against dazed, jazzy breaks. A slightly dank atmosphere predominates, redolent in some ways of Geoff Barrow’s current Beak> project. Broadcast’s old habit/asset of writing most of their songs in waltz time has been solved – by them not writing many things that could be adequately called songs. When they do – most notably on the second track, “The Be Colony”, blessed with a rare and lovely Trish Keenan vocal – the unavoidable reference point remains the United States Of America. Broadcast’s links to Joseph Byrd’s band are now so strong and enduring, it seems churlish to see them as being under an influence. Maybe, more kindly, Broadcast have assiduously pursued the sound that Byrd, Dorothy Moskowitz and the others abandoned so prematurely. It’s a terrific song, anyhow, which soon enough dissolves into a haphazard clutch of potent, odd, rapidly-discarded ideas. For a while, it’s easy to drift away from properly listening to the album, then something will drag you back: the drones, breaks and panpipe freakout of “Ritual/Looking In”, maybe, that kicks off the quite brilliant last third of the “Witch Cults” where many of the preceding ideas come to a very cinematic fruition. The plot, of course, is obscure. But when the determinedly spooked chant of “What I Saw” emerges out of various field recordings, liminal melodies, clank and creak, it’s hard not to think of “The Maypole Song” and “The Wicker Man” in general. Soon enough, though, some glass breaks, a toy squeaks, and a severely warped choir carries on into “Oh Joy”. The title, I think, may be ironic.

Following on from yesterday’s catch-up session (thanks for the Gothenburg report on J Tillman and dulcimer, by the way), another bunch of stuff today that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Blues Control are a New York duo whose previous records have been interesting, but hard to pin down; slippery, evasive, faintly noisy jams that have precious little to do, overtly, with the blues. On the excellent “Local Flavor”, however, it’s fractionally easier to get a handle on them. There’s a distinct kosmische vibe to plenty of these four tracks, though their tools aren’t always typical – a lot of piano and squitting drum machines floating through the lo-fi synthscapes, and some disruptive guitar turned down in the background. “Good Morning”, featuring Kurt Vile of all people on trumpet, is crudely akin to ambient garage rock, while “Rest On Water” is a needling reimagining of, maybe, an old Budd/Eno jam. A grower, for sure. As is the appealingly-titled new one from MV & EE, “Barn Nova”. I mentioned this the other day on a blog about their current labelmates Hush Arbors, and it’s starting to bed in now. You’ve got to be pretty intensely dedicated to keep up with MV/EE releases, and I must admit I only really know their more overground things, but this is fairly typical of those, being impressively frayed outsider freak-outs that sit somewhere between Neil Young, the Dead, Royal Trux and perhaps, especially when you hear Matt Valentine’s high, unsteadily questing vocals, a Mercury Rev shorn of gloss and pomp. New Boredoms-related activity is always welcome, and “Armonico Hewa”, the latest from Yoshimi’s band OOIOO, is typically up to scratch; a playful, no-wave iteration of her other band’s tribal leanings. Pummelling polyrhythms, severe ebbing riffs and a lot of vocal exuberance here, though – as I’ve mentioned in an extended column about the whole Boredoms in this month’s Uncut – it’s maybe not quite one of their best albums. Finally, Shrinebuilder, a self-proclaimed supergroup from the underground metal/doom scene. Consisting of Wino from Spirit Caravan etc, Al Cisneros (Om), Dale Crover of The Melvins and Scott Kelly (Neurosis), “Shrinebuilder” is an enjoyably crunchy debut, maybe a deal more energised and feisty than certain stoner rock reputations might suggest, and fairly prog in places, too. Being a bit of a dabbler in these things, it’s hard not to resort to old Sabbath references out of ignorance but, of course, there’s no harm in that.