'BADE THE ANGELS DISAPPEAR' (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Click here for yet another Spotify playlist.

There's themes of politics and religion, and how the area where those venn diagrams bisect is normally where the money's kept. That's when the theme isn't death ...any idea of a theme is probably just in my head, to be honest with you.

Portishead: Half Day Closing
Patti Smith Group: Spell (live)
Lou Reed: Dime Store Mystery
Woody Guthrie: Tom Joad (Part 2)
The Tiger Lillies: The Story of Cruel Frederick
The Flaming Lips: Free Radicals
James White & The Blacks: Contort Yourself
Gang Of Four: Capital (It Fails Us Now)
Mark Stewart & Mafia: Beneath The City Streets
Hybrid Kids (aka Morgan Fisher): Coventry
Camper Van Beethoven: When I Win The Lottery
Rydell: My Life in Motion
Gorillaz: New Genius (Brother)
Blyth Power: Under The Sea Wind
Kyuss: Apothecaries' Weight
Mission Of Burma: Weatherbox
Rites of Spring: Deeper Than Inside
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: Clear Spot

“That all our sins may rest concealed,

And all our stomachs duly filled”

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY VISITS VULCANO

Continuing our set of pictures from the Aeolian islands, off the south coast of Italy. As ever, full set on Flickr.

Proper posting will be resumed... um... sometime.

BLOG HOLS

We're all going on a blogging holiday,
No more posting for a week or two.

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY FINALLY LEAVES SICILY BEHIND...

...and moves instead to the Aeolian Islands. (A few miles to their North.) Full set to be found on Flickr here.

Flickr's new look is frankly pretty rubbish, and seems designed to look as much like Google Image Search as is possible. Which is daft, not only for the reason that Google Image Search is already doing that. Google Image Search never looks very tidy, it's jumble of images look like you've tipped a load of old photos out of an envelope. And that's fine for what it is, you sift through it looking for some image to take your eye.

Perhaps the individual pictures should have been displayed larger in Flickr, but it looked like that it was – the on-line version of a personal photo album. Now it looks like you've just dumped your photos somewhere. For your best viewing pleasure, click on the first image to get the black background, then use the nav-chevrons.

I would seem to be not the only critic of these changes. The change seems so desperate I suspect Yahoo will either drop it or go down themselves. But I may as well keep uploading to it for now. So in other words...

Coming soon! More pictures of Sicily and the Aeolian Islands.

PATTI SMITH + TONY SHANAHAN (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

St. George's Church, Brighton, Fri 9th Aug

This marks, by my reckoning, the fifth time I've managed to see Patti Smith and every time just seems to enrich the overall experience. Returns multiply rather than diminish.

The time before last, I confidently stated that her music was at root about transformation. Though perhaps 'generalised' would be a better term. Inevitably, for someone so keen on such a suubject, she was never going to stick to just that.

Transformation is a description which best fits her first two albums, 'Horses' and 'Radio Ethiopia'. They're made up less of songs or compositions than tracks; hallucongenic poetry cross-bred with the convulsive storm of electric instruments, until the desired systematic derangement of the senses arrives. You know instinctively, even on first hearing, they're tapping into something incohate. What you have isn't a finished work so much as just one mainifestation from a potentially infinite variety. The two albums finish the only way they could, in the primordial chaos of 'Abyssinia', Smith less delivering lines than outpouring shards of imagery.

This night however, was much more focused on what Patti did next – become a classic, if unorothodox, songwriter. Perfectly suited to it's Church venue, grand yet initimite, it was an acoustic affair. The drummer didn't even show up on stage until several songs in, and sat on a stiff-backed chair behind his one drum. There were only two tracks from those early albums, the more song-based 'Redondo Beach' (with lyrics rewritten on the fly to reflect Brighton beach) and the classic 'Pissing In a River'. (The latter, which has always been something of a gospel number, working particularly well.)

This threw an emphasis on Smith's singing and words, often drowned in the multi-tracked cacophony of the early albums. Billed 'an evening of music and words', it also featured readings from her autobiography 'Just Kids'. (Which I have to confess to being yet to read.)

It was probably most similar to the Bexhill gig. (Ironically the performance which led to my ruminations on transformation) It had the same impromptu feel, with Smith claiming breezily she'd bumped into one band member on the beach. At the start of the encore, she stopped to ask if anyone in the audience could play guitar, then promptly handed the volunteer hers. He stayed onstage for the rest of the night, and took his bow with them. But overall it was better than Bexhill; smoother, more relaxed, it's chances more talking flight, it's road less bumpy.

Smith has a penchent for throwing in unexpected cover versions, and as ever these arrived like curveballs. 'Summertime Blues' was infectious fun, but for example a cover of Lennon's 'Beautiful Boy' (apparantly first performed at Meltdown) didn't add much to one of his weaker numbers. While you should expect the unexpected with Smith, at such times I couldn't help but reflect on all the numbers we weren't getting. (For example no 'Paths That Cross', a personal favourite which would have suited the line-up.)

Notably, however, the whole audience kept a keen ear. While everything was well-received, it was the highlights which won the most rapt applause. Perhaps they were just hard to miss. If you didn't get goose-bumps during 'Pissing In a River' or 'Beneath The Southern Cross', you probably don't have a pulse.

In 'My Blakean Year', she sings of the road paved with gold and the road that's “just a road.” There are not many butter adverts to contend with when it comes to Patti Smith. She's walked the long road for decades now, with no sign of stumbling. If she's not an inspiration, I can't imagine what is.

In the unlikely event of anyone being interested, here's what I said last time.

There seems a dearth of footage of this gig, perhaps because of her open antagonism to being photographed onstage. This version of 'Beneath the Southern Cross', from Palermo earlier in the month, looks to be a semi- acoustic break in an electric gig but may convey some of the feeling...

 

LANDFALL (LAURIE ANDERSON + THE KRONOS QUARTET)

Barbican Centre, London, Fri 28th June

'Landfall: Scenes From My New Novel', to give it's full title, is a new compositon by Laurie Anderson in its European premiere. The programme itself pointed out what an unusual combination this was. For Anderson isn't a composer or even really much of a musician. She's more an artist and performer following her own muse, which at times takes on the form of music. It's even described as a novel in it's own title!

While, for all their commisioning of scores and ceaseless boundary-pushing, the Kronos Quartet are at root a string quartet whose business is to perform recitals from scores. (I previously saw them in this very room, hammering at scraps at metalwhile still diligently referring to those scores.)

Given which, what's perhaps strangest of all is that the majority of this piece is so conventionally harmonic. However, while strident modernists might hear those words and head for the exit door, it was for the most part exquisite and enthralling, the sort of score where you find yourself clinging to every note.

Anderson sometimes joined in with the quartet on her patented violin. At other, often overlapping, points she'd contribute electronic beats, washes and textures. The fuzzy thumps contrasted satisfyingly against the crystal-clear sound of the strings.

Perhaps the only serious musical criticism was that there wasn't enough of it! Themes and sections could pass by on speed dial, too quickly to properly absorb. One chanting piece, with something of the widescreen grandeur of Arabic pop, seemed to suggest at a whole new direction. But this path was abandoned after what felt like a few strides. Nor, at seventy-nine minutes, did the overall length seem too great, especially by Anderson's previous endurance-pushing standards.

Anderson also contributed some of her spoken word pieces. When I'd previously seen her at an old Brighton Festival, the words had worked as the bones of the piece, with the ambient music acting more as interludes. Here things were reversed, which perhaps did not work as well. Anderson's style is not poetic but conversational; her serene voices seduces you into believing you're being told something quite everyday, and everything lives in the lag as your brain catches up with your ear. The New York Times commented her work “suggested logic while defying sense.”

However anti-poetic words do not necessarily lend themselves to music, and I found my brain effectively having to switch gears between the vocal and the instrumental sections. In truth, at times those gears ground. I couldn't help but be reminded of reading a review of Bowie's live re-enactment of 'Low,' commenting how he'd intercut the songs and instrumentals, despite their being separate on record. Though the reviewer thought this an improvement, to me it seemed like cutting chalk with cheese. Ultimately, I found myself wishing 'Landfall' had emulated the recorded version, and kept the spoken word sections together.

The back projections, where software converted the notes of the quartet into words, made for an enjoyable and intriguing extra dimension. Though they also felt a little like an attempt to Polyfilla this separation.

Admittedly, it was clear why Anderson chose to pair the two up in terms of their content. The title 'Landfall' is (at least in part) a refrerence to her studio being flooded when Hurricane Sandy struck New York. At one point she recounts watching her belongings swirling in the water, and you cannot held but keep hold of that image as the strings roll through the final movement.

Though the storm, however mighty, is here no more than the pathetic fallacy. There's no attempt to convey its power through musical drama, or document events as 9/11 pieces have often done. In the genre of 'modernist disaster response composition', it works more metaphorically, more like Bryars' 'Sinking of the Titanic.'

Anderson's world is internal, contemplative, and the flooded studio evokes the anti-linearity of memory. Memories will break the waterline to swirl in your mind, appearing at times to coalesce into clumps, but only ever temporarily. Perhaps the music was supposed to itself represent the swelling water, subsuming the landmass of the words.

But despite caveats this work was highly effective overall. The Guardian review of the premiere in Adelade suggests it divided the audience. From where I sat in the Barbican it won an effusive round of applause from us.

SO WHAT SHOULD GO ON THE BRITISH BANKNOTE?

This story may have already become too poisoned a well to sup from, after a bunch of bullying thugs chose to gang up on campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez on Twitter. It is galling beyond belief that you should even need to say this. But threatening to rape a woman is pretty much the far frontier of not okay.

But, should it be possible to get back to the main issue, who is it who wants more women on banknotes? What sort of person identifies with banknotes in the first place? For most of us, aren't they things which take way too long to earn, then get pulled out of your fingers far too quickly? Do we actually keep hold of them long enough to start identifying with them?

We're in a time when study after study have shown how the ConDem cuts are having a disproportionately high effect on women. To the point where their class war on the poor could quite legitimately be called a gender war as well. To focus right now on (of all things) banknotes, like they can be seen as our joint property or something, seems bizarre in extremes.

It's a sadly familiar picture. Progressive social movements rightly choose horizontal structures. But despite that formal feature, it's still the privileged elements who come to dominate - with their social and networking skills, their unspoken confidence that they know what's best. The whole group comes to dance to their agenda, often without even noticing.

So how about a more appropriate suggestion for what goes on the British banknote? Let's cut out the arguments by dispensing with people altogether. Instead let's have a series of historical incidents – the great atrocities of the British Empire. The Fiver could kick off with a relatively minor massacre by its standards, such as Jallianwala Bagh where the death toll only hit triple figures. They could then work up to the invention of the concentration camp in the Boer War, which would look princely on the Fifty. Or perhaps we could incorporate the Iraq War, and start off with pound-denomination notes but switch to dollars as they got bigger?

Then, whenever we pulled a note out of our pockets, we could all be reminded where Britain got it's wealth. And wouldn't that just make you proud?

MEAT PUPPETS/ VIV ALBERTINE GROUP/ THE BLACK ANGELS/ MISSION OF BURMA/ AKRON/FAMILY (YEP, MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MEAT PUPPETS

The Haunt, Brighton, Mon 3rd June

Now, in a change of pace, let's look at a longstanding cult band I don't know very well...

The Meat Puppets are now chiefly rememered from the main duo, brothers Cris and Curt Kirwood, contributing to Nirvana's unplugged session. (Perhaps inevitably, Nirvana seemed the more common name on the pre-set audience's mind.) But post-punk chronicler Simon Reynolds cites them as an example (indeed as his favourite example) of a band who were first inspired by punk, but later found they had to escape hardcore's constraints. (They were signed to SST, the label which more than anyone defined hardcore's sound then spent the next few years getting the hell away from it.) What they did next Reynolds calls a “throwback to psychedelia”; he depicts them almost like latter-day Jim Morrisons, soaking up drug-induced visions from the desert.

Since then various members have fought drug problems and done jail time; at last count they've split and reformed twice. Back together since '06 they're now the Kirkwood brothers, Curt's son Elmo on guitar and non-original but repeat member drummer Shandon Sahmn.

The first half of the set is given over to hard-hitting country rock, the stuff which sometimes got dubbed cowpunk. It's a pretty virtuous combination. They play with hardcore's energy but with country's rootedness and scope. Then gradually more free-form instrumentals start to seep in, the three guitarists sometimes forming a circle to better capture the harmonics, microphones forgotten. I'm not sure any of it sounds psychedelic exactly, but it can get pretty out-there. At one point Curt grabs and pulls at his strings rather than play them.

But best of all those points never seem like breaks. It's unlike the noise rock sound of Sonic Youth or Big Black, an urban scene which was also urbane. Even with Neil Young (who they in some ways resemble) there's a feeling of instrumental sections being inserted into previously existing songs. Here they seem to spring from the music quite organically. It all stays rooted, even as it shoots off into outer space.

And the band come over pretty much like that in personality. The brothers look so much like mechanics from some backwater gas station I wondered if there'd been some wires-crossed booking, and there were simultaneously some guys in leather trousers and poodle perms hopelessly staring at a pickup engine out in Arizona. They have the same blue-collar, getting-the-job-done attitude as the Melvins. (Perhaps they talk to us slightly more. But then the Melvins didn't talk to the audience at all...)

For a band that's been around so long, they seemed to attract a suprisingly young audience. Who seemed to soak up the spacier stuff, if not the slower moments.

VIV ALBERTINE GROUP

Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Sat 8th June

As you know already so I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you, Viv Albertine was the guitarist in the seminal all-girl punk band The Slits. (A band much beloved here at Lucid Frenzy.) Recently, after years working as a TV director, she re-started her music career.

She refuses use of a (very Spinal Tap-like) dry ice machine by explaining they're “an edgy band”. She's kidding, but it's not such a bad description. They're based in the spiky sound of those post-punk days. Imagine pop songs as pop drinks, only laced with something more chemical. But perhaps the coolest thing is the lack of any Slits shadow over them. (There's not a single cover version, nor any dub influence. About the only connection is the female genitalia reference in the acronym.)

There's another point where, introducing the song 'Needles', she tells us she once claimed it was about heroin but had to come clean and admit it was really UVF. As I've said many times before, life is too short to spend it trying to recapture your youth. Singing about what's current in your life, but based on what you've done before, seems a better way to go.

In which case I should probably prefer Viv's approach to the time Ari Up reformed the Slits. But while what she's doing is certainly braver, and this is certainly a better set than their last time in Brighton (when about half the gig felt like warm-up), I'm not quite sure I could say that. It's good stuff, it's very good stuff and I might well see her again. Perhaps it is simply the wrong idea to compare the two, and you should love each for its unique features. But Ari seemed able to retain more of the reckless, barely-in-control spirit of old.

'I Don't Believe In Love' from London...

THE BLACK ANGELS

The Haunt, Brighton, Tues 25th June

Next up, a psychedelic band from Austin, Texas. Home, of course, to so much vintage psychedelia back in the day. And at times they seem to draw from that heritage. (They have for example, played with Roky Erickson of the Elevators.) But it's a particular well they're drawing from. They do have occasional forays into the world of retro-Sixtiesism, with swirling organ sounds and the odd shaken tambourine. At times there's even a discernible surf element, though who knows how far the nearest beach would be from Austin.

But mostly I am pleased to report they choose to sup from the poisoned well, conjouring Altamont more than Woodstock. (The clip below is called 'Bad Vibrations', which gives you a pretty good clue what they're up to.) Eerily underlit, like schookids telling ghost stories, they serve up lumbering riffs with twangy guitar overlays. A general mood of ominousness can break out into shitstorms of noise. Those riffs even suggest at a Fifties influence, the ghosts of Link Wray and Duane Eddy.

They wait for the encore before filling it with the longest and most involved track of the night; starting with just organ and vocals, then gradually ratcheting up into sheer white noise terror.

They certainly seem popular. The venue was rammed, the fullest of any of my recent visits. And everyone except me seemed to know each track as soon as it started up. I'd be tempted to call them "very good indeed", but that might be insufficiently Americanised. So instead I'll say they're "like totally awsome, bro".

In truth, the only thing I can really find to criticise is their name. Admittedly it's fitting and it's based not only on a Velvets song but one of my favourite ones. And Nico makes for a cool icon on their logo. But there's the rub! This growing tendency to name your band after a track by an existing band can feel like duplication. It's like those “then try this” sections on internet shopping sites, it's the re-enactment attitude to music that reaches it's nadir in Oasis' smudged photofit of the Beatles and Stones.

The irony being that, while they are perhaps one of the more openly influenced bands of my recent gig-going, Black Angels certainly aren't mere copyists and shouldn't be named as though they are. More soon! But better-named more.

Not from Brighton but London. 

And if you like that you may like this – a full set from Rockpalast. Haven't got round to watching all of this myself yet to be honest. Let me know if it's any good, would you?

MISSION OF BURMA

The Haunt, Brighton, 1st July

“We're a band that takes a while to get going”, explains drummer Peter Prescott during a break. He leaves a pause before finishing the gag. “Like about thirty years.”

The jury' still out on how much he was joking. This Boston-based post-punk band had an all-too-brief heyday, producing one classic full-length album ('Vs' in '82), before splitting and being reconciled with... you guessed it... cult status.

True, they had a better excuse to bow out than most. Guitarist Roger Miller suffered increasingly from Tinnitis, a condition little accommodated by their characteristic blistering volume. (YouTube footage of later gigs show him resorting to rifle-range noise-cancelling headphones.) Pretty soon he had no choice but to go off and do something less noisy instead. Tonight he seems chiefly protected by a thicket of hair which, combined with the gap of time, leaves him almost unrecognisable.

From the days of Lennon and McCartney, classic bands are often powered by the creative frisson of two opposite but complementary creators. Bassist Clint Conley's songs tended to the doomy cool and anthemic thunder of the era, an East Coaster with ears out to England. While Miller's contributions tended more towards shredded noise. They marked the era when sonic assault and musical experimentalism seemed almost comrades in arms, and were part of the direction Fugazi, Sonic Youth and Big Black would take music. (There's Burma tracks which sound almost like Fugazi, years before Fugazi existed.)

Except with Mission of Burma there was in quite a literal sense an extra dimension. If George Martin could be claimed as the fifth Beatle, there is a far more clear-cut case for the fourth Mission member. Martin Swope would tape their live gigs, manipulate the sound and then feed it back even as they continued playing. Tonight, and since their '02 reunion, he's replaced by their only non-original member – Bob Weston. (Who charmingly if eccentrically still insists on using the loops and effects technology from the period.) Prescott has commented “we wanted to play this hammer-down drony noise stuff, but we also wanted another sound in there.”

Their single 'Trem Two'(above) pictured each band member, but superimposed over one another. And a better visual metaphor for the sound couldn't be found. Think not so much of 3D films as they are but as they're marketed. The music is loud and upfront, with plenty of attack to it. But it also has a kind of waterline behind that, beneath which lurk murky sonic depths, only half discernible.

The tape effects are particularly haunting when vocals are fed back while no-one's actually singing. But perhaps they become most evident at the end of the main set. In the traditional manner of the era, guitars were left against amps to create a howlaround. Except this was then taken up and treated. It was less a tape effects solo, more a mini noise symphony.

You may well be waiting to find what ignorant of this time round. Well I'd have to admit to being woefully unfamiliar with their post-reunion recordings. Yet I'm still kind of glad these dominated the set, even if they elbowed out some of my favourite numbers. They didn't mark any appreciable dip in quality. And they mark a band trading in music, not in nostalgia.

If there was a weakness, it was probably the one alluded to in the opening. Slightly chaotic gigs, with long gaps between songs, were commonplace in that era while distinctions between performance and rehearsal were scant. As Conlin comments jokingly “at least you know it's not manufactured”. And they keep to once-common-now-forgotten rules, such as rejecting set lists to make each gig unique and fresh. But then was then, and too much stalling spoils the supper, or however that saying goes. Could we not strike a bit more of a happy medium between professionalism and spontaneity?

But that minor grumble aside... overall, a legend that still lives.

This clip is handy in epitomising their sound by serving up a Miller and then a Conley track...

AKRON/FAMILY

The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 20th July

Once described by a reliable source of gossip as a “folk-influenced experimental rock band”, Akron/Family are perhaps chiefly known for doubling up as Michael Gira's backing band Angels of Light when he's not busy reforming Swans. And in yet another sign of how little I actually know about culty music, despite having written about Swans not once but twice, I don't really know Angels of Light at all. But then that seemed all the more reason to finally check these guys out...

Let's start with the hardest to miss – the bass player. (Who, in our standard police parlance, I now know to be Miles Seaton.) Despite dressing ex-military, bearing the most stern of beard from a very stern set of beards and never breaking into such a thing as a smile, he effectively becomes the master of ceremonies. Possessed of that American outgoingness, he's forever encouraging us to overcome our English reserve and cut loose. He managed to get going a crowd singalong, substantial enough for the band to break off for a bit. The sort of thing bands can end gigs with. Here it happened in the second number. This clearly isn't going to be one of those “meh” gigs, where you're thinking about which bus to get home during the encore. This is going to be a gig you respond to, one way or the other.

It wouldn't be quite right to say they took off where the Meat Puppets left off, in our new 'post-rock' world. But let's go with the neatness of that anyway. There's the same sense of roots, though perhaps more in folk than in country. There's the same breadth of style, from achingly beautiful melodies to double-guitar assaults to full-on noise. (Though I called Seaton the bassist earlier, the band swap instruments with impunity. At one point they collectively join in on the drumming.) Like a weather system, the styles alternately replace and subsume one another – breaks of sunshine opening up into downpours.

But most of all there's the same effortless naturalness to it, the lack of any sense of self-conscious eclecticism – a feeling of just doing it.

It's also reminiscent of the apocalyptic folk of Bonnie Prince Billy, like now we're in the end days music's role is to soundtrack it. You keep thinking this must be the last number, as each track mounts to the point it seems impossible to follow. Yet when the gig finally ends it does it the way it began, with a stripped-back ballad, Seaton singing eyes half-closed.

None of my analogies really fit, to be honest. At the end of the day, they pretty much just sound like Akron/Family. If that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is..

Not sure anything from this gig made it onto YouTube. Instead, here's a full twenty-two minutes of them from Minneapolis, earlier this year...

Coming Soon! Would you believe it? More gig-going adventures...

BODY/HEAD/ BO NINGEN/ JEFFREY LEWIS + PETER STAMPFEL/ UNEVEN ELEVEN/ BLYTH POWER (YET MORE GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BODY/HEAD

Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, 20th June

Part of the Meltdown festival

Body/Head are the main post-Sonic Youth project of Kim Gordon, featuring noise stalwart Bill Nace on guitar and Ikue Mori on drums and electronics. (Ex of fabled no-wave pioneers DNA, in apparantly her first live performance for a quarter century.) Though Mori is apparantly not a permanent member they seem keen to be seen as an ensemble with their logo image (above) fusing Gordon's head with Nace's. It was notable how, unlike Thursten Moore's sold-out Meltdown appearance, the title 'Body/Head' did not automatically equate to ticket sales and Gordon's name was made a more and more prominent subhead as booking time went on.

Perhaps through a combination of longevity and a sustained existence on the periphery of the mainstream, Sonic Youth often felt like one of those barometer bands. Faces which would turn blank at many other names would at least know of them, and be blown away from quizzing you any further by thought of that squall of noise. It became a mark of The Sort of Gigs I Go To that at least one person would show up sporting the celebrated Pettibon cover to 'Goo' on their T-shirt.

But, despite being a longstanding fan, I was one of the few people I knew to think K-Punk's infamous diatribe did have some kind of a point. Suggesting they spearheaded the “conversion of experimental rock into part of the heritage industry” may fit his own description of “deliberately provocative”. And 'curatorial' is probably too strong a term. But there was always something cerebral, even hipsterish about them. They'd attack guitars with screwdrivers, but in a semi-detached way that made them cool to like. Which sometimes seemed to bypass the really cool thing about music – the way it can come straight from the gut. In short, they were lucid without always being frenzied.

And while I wouldn't want to make some “who gets the fans” issue out of Moore and Gordon's recent divorce, I do associate that downside more with... well, with Moore. I never, alas, saw the full band in action. But I saw a solo Gordon gig early in the Noughties, which I much enjoyed. While the year Moore headlined Colour Out of Space... well, it led to another sold-out crowd but let's say it wasn't for me.

I'd mentally compared the earlier Gordon gig to a charcoal sketch; broad, gestural strokes against a pop song's tight pen-and-ink drawing, all neat composed lines. And Body/Head reproduced that rawness. Two guitars (no bass) played dissonantly atop throbbing drums. One tended to build up rumbling sounds, as if measuring out an expanse of canvas for the other to draw over. (Often in screechy high register, Velvet Underground style.) It's neat the way they don't abandon song structures so much as press them into service, even during the vocal sections - which seem on the border between sung and chanted.

Yoko Ono, this year's Meltdown curator, joined in for the encore. And while she may dance like your Granny at a wedding, her much-mocked waily vocals actually work well with the guitar cacophony. I was reminded, in a good way, of the often-skipped second side of 'Live Peace in Toronto'.

Yet despite the unarguable highlights it somehow feels half full. It's hard to pin down what's missing, but it never quite gets going. We had the derangement of the senses, just not in a systematic fashion. It was like one of those camp fires which will roar into flame but fall back into embers the next moment. It had the feel of a rehearsal in both the good and the bad sense – raw and immediate, but also rough-edged and uneven. And, while it may have just been me, I felt the accompanying filmshow (about Manhattanite loft-dwellers and their art projects) distracting and uninvolving. In the end, I tuned out of looking at it.

After a fairly short set the audience applause felt less than hearfelt, encouraging as much as appreciative – as if our way of saying “keep going, you nearly had it.” Keep going they didn't, at least that night. But watch this space...

Keeping to the family theme, support act Mystical Weapons were an impro duo of Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and no less than Sean Lennon. Though this did suffer from the familiar highs-and-lows syndrome of impro music, highs it did have and it certainly made 'Beautiful Boy' feel a damn long time ago...

That encore, complete with added Yoko Ono...

...and more Body/Head from Belgium, complete wiTH stRange CasiNg fOr sOME rEAson i Don'T unDERstaNd... (They sound like a different band without Mori, with abrasive and dirgy guitar lines taking up the rhythm role. To be frank they sound a considerably better one. Maybe the downsides of London just mark an off night.)

BO NINGEN

Clore Ballroom, South Bank Centre, London, 20th June

Part of the Meltdown festival

Perhaps these London boys play best at home, because I found myself enjoying them even more than when they recently played Brighton. And, in another perhaps, perhaps having just seen Kim Gordon directed my thinking. But they did seem like a contemporary psychedelic version of Sonic Youth – with a seemingly limitless ability to conjure strange sounds out of familiar-looking guitars, combined with an unerring ability to press the strangeness into the service of driving rock numbers. (Though they also use more dub effects than I remember from before.)

A free gig on a week night in central London, that must be a recipe for a pick-up audience. If so, they turned that pick-up audience into clamouring fans and had their endless energy fed back to them.

Not a band to miss live.

JEFFREY LEWIS + PETER STAMPFEL

Blind Tiger Club, Brighton, Tues 28th May

Anti-folk artist Jeffrey Lewis is back in town! And he's telling us it's been a decade since he first played here. And indeed, if I'd been together enough to review him in the previous post on the cult gigs as I intended, I'd have had an act for every decade down from four to one. (I do just throw this show together, you know.) I honestly can't remember if I was present at that inaugural occasion, but I have now seen him more times than I can count.

But this is of course as nothing to co-star Peter Stampfel, whose first album with the Holy Modal Rounders came out in 1964. In a phrase I don't get to use very often nowadays, that's before I was born. In yet another demonstration of how little I actually know about cult music, they're not a band I'm familiar with at all. However I do know him through his early involvement with the Fugs, and the Rounders seem pretty much chips cast from the same block. Which was, protest war and petition society by growing your hair, playing weird music and annoying people. But not necessarily in that order.

Though Stampfel has guested on Lewis recordings before, this is the first time they've collaborated. It's a more folky sound than when Lewis plays with the Junkyard, with Stampfel on fiddle, a mandolin joining in and the bass as the only electric instrument. The numbers seem oriented mostly around old Stampfel tracks or what I'd guess to be new numbers they've worked on together. Frequently they head into jug band/ hoedown territory. I recognise precisely one track the whole night long, 'Don't Be Upset'. (On which Stampfel was blatantly winging the fiddle part.) Then again, that's not all that unusual for a Lewis gig, which often take flight in their own chosen direction.

It's a typically eclectic night, with tracks about reality TV stars and Stampfel's (apparently vast) collection of bottle caps. (The last with accompanying slideshow.) When one number mentions orgones Lewis comments “there's only one other song about orgones” - and yes they really do go on to cover Hawkwind's 'Orgone Accumulator'! (Always a way to a middle-aged man's heart.) Stampfel fills in Dik Mik's synthesizer parts with scatting vocals.

Consciously or not, the generation-spanning line-up seems befitting for the folk tradition. And it's kind of mirrored by its audience, who range from us Hawkwind-recognising oldies to the young Occupy/UK Uncut mob. Lewis segues effortlessly from celebrating Pussy Riot's punk spirit (“I'll ask me and you ask you, what would Pussy Riot do?”) to indulging absurdist deadpan humour. When not on stage, he staffs his own stall selling his comics and self-burnt CDs. It's official. If he didn't exist we really would have to make him up.

This clip medley is from their home base in New York City, but just prior to this tour of Europe...

UNEVEN ELEVEN

Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Sat 25^th May

“Uneven Eleven,” it says here, “is a startling new initiative, injecting the ‘ROCK POWER TRIO’ with a new dose of artistic expression, creativity and freedom.” They're comprised of Kawabata Makota, guitarist from psychedelic warlords Acid Mothers Temple, drummer Charles Hayward (chiefly famed for post-punk legends This Heat), and bassist Guy Segers from Univers Zero. (Who, if I'm honest, I had to Wikipedia.)

...which couldn't sound more like a supergroup if it had been bitten by a radioactive spider as a bat flew in the window on the way from planet Krypton. Now supergroups might sound like the last thing you'd expect from our sort of music. They sound not just the preserve but the worst excess of the muso. And yet, despite it all, sometimes they can come together into a virtuous combination. This were not the musical equivalent of three circus acrobats who happened to be tumbling on stage simultaneously, but three guys who you could believe had been playing together their whole lives. (While I believe it was only their second ever performance.)

This was quite definitely one of the most inspirational gigs of recent months, and I would love to sound all smart and sophisticated and analytical. But to be honest I spent the whole thing in a state of stupefied awe. If they reminded me of anything else, and I'm not sure they did, it was the extended workouts Levene and Wobble (aka Metal BoxIn Dub) were recently giving to classic Public Image tracks. Makota's guitar frequently took on some of Levene's textured harmonics.

But that doesn't really capture their breadth. They didn't sound much like Miles Davis, but they reminded me of that spirit. They had the same caveliar disregard for constraint, the same sense of ceaseless invention, throwing up not just new themes but whole new sounds - and discarding them just as quickly. And yet at the same time it remained tuneful throughout and mostly beat-driven, never chin-stroking or pondersome. Music for brain and body!

YouTube seems sadly silent on footage not just from Brighton but the UK tour in general. This is an all-too-brief snippet from Cafe Oto in London... (Guy Segers himself is in the comments asking for more!)

...fortunately there's more from Brussels, aGAin wiTH tHe UNeven capiTaLISatIOns. (This is but one of several parts.)

BLYTH POWER

The Gladstone, Brighton, Fri 14th June

Despite high enjoyment levels I'm not sure I have much to say that is fresh or new about Blyth Power after the last time I saw them. Yet as this gig precipitated a massive Blyth Power listening session on the House of Four Eyes' home stereo system, they should surely at least receive mention in dispatches.

Though if memory serves I only saw them once back in the day, the clip below was like some crappy VHS footage version of a Proustian cake which brought the whole era back to me. When life consisted almost entirely of boisterous gigs to attend, spilt cider, ripped combats, no-Gods-no-masters and not forgetting to sign on alternate Thursdays. Did we dance like that? I suppose we must have...

Coming soon! More gig-going adventures. (We seemed to go through a glut of great gigs, so yes there is more equally out-of-date stuff still to come. Same lucid time, same frenzied channel...)

NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL OF 'A FIELD IN ENGLAND'

The only previous Ben Wheatley film I've seen, almost certainly through my own erring, is 'Kill List'. I was full of good intentions over catching 'Sightseers', yet alas it didn't come to be. But I was keener still to catch this latest release. I've always regarded the English Revolution as one of the more fascinating periods of our history. That our culture so often tries to sideline it only makes it more enticing. And I've always loved the cinema of the old, weird England, which is quite clearly being referenced here. (One review has described this film as “'Witchfinder General' as imagined by Alejandro Jodorowsky.”) Though I call it a cinema, it's possibly more a mood than a style. It's the mixture of the deadpan and hallucinatory, the clods of earth clinging to your feet and the Devil breathing down your back.

And it's heartening to know, in this era of CGI, 3D and all those other expense-inducing acronyms, that you can still shoot a film in black-and-white in less than two weeks, featuring five guys and a field. A film I'm likely to remember long after those tributes to excess that otherwise clogged our summer.

It is most likely merciful that I'm not offering a proper review of this film, for I'd surely get as waylaid as the characters within it. It's one of those films you know you want to see again before you've even finished your first watch. But as a very provisional stab at things – the mushroom circle is the primary metaphor. What we see isn't a causal series of events but an iteration – something which has probably happened before and will almost certainly happen again.

Though in many ways at variance from 'Kill List', it does share it's roots in the horror cinema of the Sixties and Seventies – and in particular the God-shaped hole which they seemed to focus on. (The paradox of such films was that they were aimed at a modern, sophisticated, secular audience, yet seemed pitched to warn that audience that things had almost literally gone to the Devil. They must make for some of the bleakest world-views in mainstream cinema.) 'Kill List' suggested socialisation was the same thing as damnation. 'Field' warns that we can defeat the Devil only by usurping him.

But of course to find fixed readings for such films would be the same error as trying to force on them linear plots. They're journeys not destinations. Their most clueless critique is “if you like it so much, try explaining what it means.” Of course you can like something without understanding it! There may well be no treasure at the bottom of it's pit, there may be “only shadows”, but it can still exist as a potent framing device in your mind. I felt as mesmerised in that mushroom-ringed field as any of the characters.

Something nearer to a proper review lies here.