This is one film that's stuck with me since I first saw it a month or so back. Principally, it's a spin on low-rent 70s Italian horror movies; a film that both celebrates and mimics the tropes of murky gialli from filmmakers like Dario Argento. It's also a fascinating exercise in sound design. The best film, sonically speaking, since David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I'm thinking here, in particular, of Fincher's tremendous sound editing when Daniel Craig is being stalked round Stellan Skarsgaard's house. It's perhaps no surprise the film, and its British director Peter Strickland, are so pre-occupied with sound. In the early stages of his career, Strickland was a member of the Sonic Catering Band, a trio from Reading who made experimental music derived from the preparing and cooking of a meal. I suspect Strickland’s formative explorations into the sonic potential of celery have paid off handsomely for Berberian Sound System, a film in which watermelons, radishes and cabbages are routinely abused, and the inquiry, “Is there any fresh marrow?”, carries sinister connotations. The man smashing the legumes is tweedy Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a sound engineer from Dorking hired to create the effects for an Italian horror film. It is 1976, and the film in question – The Equestrian Vortex – is a violent, supernatural giallo, for which we only ever see the opening credits: hysterical, red-tinted images of churches, medieval woodcuts, animal skeletons, women screaming. We watch Gilderoy – and his brooding producer Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) – watching the film, the only clue to its grisly contents gleaned from scene synopses read aloud in English for Gilderoy’s benefit: “Teresa and Monica venture into the poultry tunnel underneath the Academy, unaware of the witches’ putrid corpses.” Following up his debut Katalin Varga, Strickland plays much of the first half of this film for laughs, as Gilderoy smashes fruit and boils pans full of oil to emulate torture, death and mutilation. Actresses are brought in to scream – and, memorably, one actor provides strange, gutteral utterances for a “dangerously aroused Goblin”. Jones is brilliant as a kind of Donald Pleasence figure, very much out of his comfort zone in all this phantasmagoria, unable to speak Italian and frustrated by the studio’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy, retreating into his room to read letters from his mother regarding the chaffinch nest in his garden shed. But the mood darkens, boosted by a creepy analogue score by Broadcast (due for release, I think, early next year, to coincide with the film's DVD release). As the violence becomes more specific and horrendous, Strickland floats the idea that Gilderoy is somehow complicit in whatever horrors are unfolding on screen. In a very Lynchian touch, a flashing neon red sign above the studio door reading “SILENZIO” suggests this might be an entry point to Hell itself. Berberian Sound Studio opens in the UK this Friday [August 31].

On www.allah-las.com, the Los Angeles band of the same name have posted a bunch of unusually excellent mixtapes. The latest, “Reverberation #25”, is pretty typical, taking in the likes of Jim Sullivan and Tim Hardin as well as the group’s backwards-facing contemporaries: White Fence, Sonny & The Sunsets and another bunch out of what always seems to be an unbelievably small and cliquey LA indie scene, The Beachwood Sparks. There’s a reasonable chance that the Allah-Las might have played a pivotal if discreet role in that scene, since it seems that the band were formed while they were all working at the excellent branch of Amoeba in Hollywood, presumably dealing rare records to their peers. As you’d perhaps imagine, then, the Allah-Las’ do not make notably gleaming and 2012-ready music. Even by the standards of other notionally retro bands, their self-titled debut album is uncannily and magnificently dated, down to every fuzzy chime of the guitars. Beautifully produced by someone I’ve never heard of, described in the notes as “cult new wave R&B wunderkind Nick Waterhouse”, “Allah-Las” seems located right at the point in the mid-‘60s when American garage bands started processing and responding to the British invasion. Obviously, there’s a lot of “Nuggets” love here (“Busman’s Holiday” mixes the Stones with what first seems like a little Dylan, though it’s possibly more likely to be influenced by Mouse & The Traps), but the Allah-Las are more elegant than raucous, a suaver proposition than fellow travellers like The People’s Temple (I wrote about their fine “Sons Of Stone” here). Sometimes, on lovely instrumentals like “Sacred Sands”, the ghostly, lonely surfer draw of The Ventures is stronger than that of The Animals. At other times, you’re lead to suspect that they believe the Stones peaked with “Stupid Girl” (exhibit A: “Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind)”) and that The Byrds were never quite as good as The Beefeaters. Oddly, the most advanced musical echo occurs on “Vis-à-Vis”, when after the jangling intro (cf “She Don’t Care About Time”) they hurtle forward in time to the mid-‘80s, and the kind of, well, Byrds-rich indie promulgated by The June Brides or, for a couple of singles, Primal Scream. It is hard, evidently, to write about the Allah-Las without acknowledging a certain ridiculousness: check the video for “Tell Me” for further proof… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiJYecS0vU0 Truth is, though, I’ve enjoyed “Allah-Las” these past few days more than any record in a while: not just for the diligence and love with which they approach this music, but also the quality of the songs underneath the vintage packaging (On “Ela Naveda”, they sound like ‘60s prep boys tentatively becoming bohemian through close study of half a dozen Bossa Nova sides). All very engaging, though it seems as if the band might be evolving towards the late ‘60s next, given that they’re currently in the studio with another noted moderniser, Jonathan Wilson. Promising… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

To be honest, I’ve not previously had much time for the music of Dan Deacon; for what struck me, perhaps erroneously, as an odd but not quite combustible mix of process, theory, audience participation, electronica and a certain imperishable indie tweeness. Persistent exposure to “America” in my house has, however, provoked a bit of a rethink. “America” still has a writhing, fidgety aesthetic but, more than at least I’ve noticed in the past, there’s a dynamic coherence, too, a melodic force and clarity that emerges out of the glitchstorms as something approaching grandeur. The start might be akin to a 2012 upgrade of Kid 606, but soon enough “True Thrush” spins out, an impressively nagging surge of a song that’s part nursery rhyme and part psychedelic carnival stampede, a juggling of the tropes that have proved so appealing on Animal Collective records, but don’t (to my mind, anyhow) coalesce in quite such a satisfying way on “Centipede Hz”. It’s on Track 4, though, that the greatest strengths of “America” start to emerge, with Deacon’s more formal compositional skills being knitted into an uncommonly exciting soundtrack for his majestic, confusing homeland. “Prettyboy” unveils a sort of vibrating, orchestrated sound that eventually accelerates into the pounding “Crash Jam”, acting as a prelude for the suite which takes up the second half of this increasingly striking record. The first part “USA 1: Is A Monster” alone manages to incorporate symphonic heft, braindance glitch, tribal drumming, choirs and an overall vaulting ambition and nerve which ensures that the results are spectacular rather than an over-reaching mess. It’s the sort of music that, when you’re listening on the move, noticeably increases the length and confidence of your stride and, less viscerally, prompts a scree of potential reference points. Deacon, then, can just about plausibly be recast as a millennial Aaron Copland, albeit one who’s listened to a fair bit of Squarepusher records like “Go Plastic” as well, maybe, as conceptual electronic pranksters like Dat Politics. There are passages towards the end of “USA II: The Great American Desert” which begin like gamelan and proceed, perhaps inevitably, into straight-up Glass systems when that track folds into “USA III: Rail”. Mention of Glass reminds me, too, of Deacon’s similarities with Sufjan Stevens: another notionally indie figure with a passion for incorporating electronica, modern classical composition and an expansive evocation of the USA into his music. While “Rail”’s systems ebb and flow is a neat parallel to passages from “Illinois”, however, many of Deacon’s attempts to build digital noise into his constructs are much more successful than Stevens’ attempts to do something like that on “The Age Of Adz” (maybe closer, now I think of it, to the underrated “BQE” project). What else? A weird echo of Donna Summer’s “State Of Independence” on “USA IV: Manifest”, and a lot that makes me think of a long-forgotten classical/techno hybrid I came across and liked very much in the ‘90s: Todd Levin’s “Deluxe” (I should check out what happened to him, I guess). Finally, plenty of it reminds me of one of the best things I’ve seen and heard this summer, the Olympics Opening Ceremony: specifically the way Underworld and Danny Boyle grasped that electronic music could invoke nobility and epic feats much more effectively than the Coldplay-style anthemic rock that you’d imagine would have been most directors’ default choice as soundtrack. There are endless massed drums, then, elegantly-wrought bombast, and a load of music that could have fitted pretty neatly onto the last album by those unlikely soundtrackers of the athletes’ parade, Fuck Buttons. I should say that The Guardian have a stream of “America” here, and a lot of commenters that seem more preoccupied with Deacon’s facial hair than the excellence of his work. Maybe I’m missing something… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey