About three songs in to her set, Jana Hunter peers over the rims of her glasses, squints at the audience and asks: "Is there someone here called Neil that I know from Panama?" It would, of course, be wonderful to think folks had crossed continents and time zones to be here for this, the second night of Club Uncut's monthly residency at London's Borderline. We will, though, happily make do with the crowd we’ve got, wherever they’re from – the venue is packed, people standing on the stairs to get a glimpse of Hunter and tonight’s co-headliner, Phosphorescent, an intense hush in the room, everything pin-drop quiet. Watching Hunter and Phosphorescent – tonight, just the band’s Georgia-born mainman, Matthew Houck – makes me think of a point where American indie cinema meets alt.rock. I know we live in these enlightened times where the Juno soundtrack tops the Billboard charts and Kimya Dawson now graces the stereo at fashionable dinner parties around the world, but I can’t shake the image from my head of Thora Birch in Ghost World whenever I look at Hunter, in her t-shirt, baseball cap and geeky glasses. Houck, for his part, writes the kind of scuffed, lo-fi folk you would expect to hear on the soundtrack for a film that plays at the Sundance Film Festival, of non-existent budget and possibly featuring a cameo from Steve Buscemi. Hunter, who’s recorded principally for Devenda Banhart’s Gnomosong label, is a beguiling songwriter, and tonight she delivers a charming set of home-spun folk songs. I can’t find any immediate connection with the kind of whimsical freak folkery of Banhart; her songs have something of a pleasingly uncomplicated, backwoods vibe to them. Similarly, there’s something very rootsy about Houck’s music. His voice reminds me, principally, of Will Oldham, and “Ohio River Boat Song” pops into my mind on several occasions. Things do, however, turn a sharp left when he covers Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me” in a squall of feedback, bringing to mind Dinosaur Jr’s reading of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”, mostly, I guess, because Houck’s voice suddenly assumes a Mascis-like whine, like a wounded bloodhound howling in a back alley at midnight. It is, safe to say, something of a highlight. Anyway, we'll be back next month. Keep an eye out for announcements as to who's on the bill.

If the internet is to be trusted, the guitarist Peter Walker has not played a gig in the UK since 1962. In the interim, he has befriended Karen Dalton, Sandy Bull and Janis Joplin, provided instrumental accompaniment for Dr Timothy Leary’s early LSD experiments, learned the art of raga from Ravi Shankar in the same class as George Harrison, and spent nearly four decades in a truck in Woodstock, chiefly practising flamenco guitar. The full review's over at Wild Mercury Sound.

If the internet is to be trusted, the guitarist Peter Walker has not played a gig in the UK since 1962. In the interim, he has befriended Karen Dalton, Sandy Bull and Janis Joplin, provided instrumental accompaniment for Dr Timothy Leary’s early LSD experiments, learned the art of raga from Ravi Shankar in the same class as George Harrison, and spent nearly four decades in a truck in Woodstock, chiefly practising flamenco guitar. It’s an appealing story, an authentic case of an artist being so preoccupied with the scholarly aesthetic business of mastering his instrument that releases, or even much in the way of public performance, don’t seem necessary to them. Before Walker retreated, however, he recorded two albums for Vanguard in the ‘60s – “Second Poem To Karmela” and the extraordinary “Rainy Day Raga” – that conflated American folk and Indian devotional music just as effectively as contemporaneous work by John Fahey, Bull, Robbie Basho and all those other American Primitive guitarists that I love so much. In the past couple of years, however, Walker has ambled back into action, touring with an obvious disciple, Jack Rose (whose own lovely new album, “Dr Ragtime And Pals” is something I’ve mystifyingly failed to blog about), contributing to his own tribute album, “A Raga For Peter Walker”, and now preparing a bunch of new records. One is “Echo Of My Soul”, a manifestation of his obsession with flamenco, which is out pretty soon on Tompkins Square, and which is quite excellent. Then, later in the year, Megaphone will be putting out a raga set and an unreleased session from the late ‘60s. First, though, there’s the small matter of this fantastic gig, at a great new venue called Café Oto in Dalston. Walker sits behind a plate of candles, tells stories about the historical congruencies between flamenco and raga, and switches between a nylon string guitar for the Spanish stuff, and a steel-stringed one for the Indian-derived music. Walker’s virtuosity, in both disciplines, is pretty astonishing, but what’s also striking is how those long years of study and practise seem to have resulted in an intuitive understanding of the guitar and its possibilities; that an obsession with technique has created, unusually, a devotional take on traditional forms that is transcendent rather than hamstrung by muso perfectionism. After one fabulously intricate raga, he puts the guitar back into its case and casually notes that he sold the same guitar to Karen Dalton in 1962, then bought it back from her in 1990 for the same price (as a feature in next month’s Uncut reveals, Walker was actually with Dalton when she died). I can’t remember many gigs where I’ve felt so palpably, intimately connected with history. It’s a great night, and the sense of an experimental/mystical musical continuum is enhanced by the two young British support acts. Tom James Scott is a guitarist who my friend Yates described, not unreasonably, as “Reich folk”. Most of Scott’s playing is very spacey and minimal, but he’ll occasionally go into romantic, Bashovian passages, plus some quiet scrabble that reminds me a bit of an unplugged and unprocessed Christian Fennesz. Lavinia Blackwall, meanwhile, alternates between harp (a small one, Celtic I think, rather than the big concert type favoured by Joanna Newsom) and sings very austere and beautiful folk songs pitched somewhere between Shirley Collins (circa “Love, Death And The Lady”) and something more formal, early choral music perhaps. I’d like to see and hear more of both of them. Next up, Club Uncut tonight with Jana Hunter and Phosphorescent at the Borderline. See you there. . .