Just before Christmas, I heard word of a supergroup of sorts, Rangda, featuring Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny, along with Chris Corsano on drums. Rangda are named after a Balinese goddess, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, which makes sense given some of the esoteric concerns Bishop investigated during his long stretch in the Sun City Girls. Obviously I’ve written about these three a fair bit over the years: Bishop here; Chasny and Six Organs, here, and elsewhere; and Corsano as part of Corsano/Flower Duo here. Judging by the couple of teasers on the Rangda Myspace, the trio seem to be having some fun with pretty heavy jams that edge towards a kind of fierce-soloing rock orthodoxy, after a fashion. “Bull Lore” is awesome – is that Bishop on lead, I think? “Excerpts In Order To Tease” is just that: the first snippet seems to showcase Corsano at his most frantic and octopoid, and briefly suggests – to me at least – a hook-up between Lightning Bolt and Dick Dale. This all reminds me, too, that Sir Richard Bishop is honouring Club Uncut with an appearance on March 1, where I guess he’ll be mining his “Freak Of Araby”/Omar Korshid-style thing as well as, allegedly, some old Sun City Girls tracks. Should be a great night – it’s not often we get to see Bishop in the UK. But anyhow: venue is the Borderline in London, tickets are £9, available at See Tickets. See you there, hopefully. One more thing today. Following the awful news of Jack Rose’s death last month, it seems that “Luck In The Valley” is still coming out as scheduled on Thrill Jockey in February: I’ve just finished a longish piece about it for the next issue of the magazine. In the meantime, however, Ethan Miller has just posted a wonderful boot of Rose playing live, solo, in Virginia last summer, on his great Silver Currant blog. One more glimpse, really, of what a wonderful player we’ve lost.

A vague New Year’s Resolution for 2010 – not a big one, admittedly – is to try and write about more African records in Wild Mercury Sound, after embarrassingly never getting round to blogging on the likes of Tinariwen last year (and on Toumani Diabaté’s “Mande Variations” the year before, come to that). When I say Africa, I might as well mean Mali, judging by those two – and, in fact, by these two records by Tamikrest and Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté. I always find this music quite hard to write about, much as I love it. There’s a certain absence of confidence on my part, which makes it tricky to discuss things in depth. I’m struggling, for instance, to firmly identify the differences between Tamikrest and the fine Touareg rebel bands who have preceded them, like Toumast, Etran Finatawa and Terakaft as well as Tinariwen. Tamikrest are being touted pretty vigorously as “the future of Tamashek music”, though “Adagh” doesn’t sound like any tremendously radical leap forward – which is not a problem, obviously. Perhaps the interplay between those serpentine guitars is fractionally mellower and more westernised than their predecessors – you can just about spot the influence of producer Chris Eckman from the Walkabouts, and his brand of western desert music, tending towards a kind of ambience on, say, “Aratane N’Adagh” or “Toumastin” – but it’s a minuscule distinction. I wonder if, soon, a much more blatant contemporary hybrid of Tamashek/Touareg music and rock will emerge, one that has, for better or worse, a more forceful new commercial edge rather than referring once again to the blues – and to the likes of Dire Straits, who are once again cited as a key influence in the band’s biog. In the meantime, though, this is another mighty, lovely record, at once meditative and propulsive, with a whole lot of those ecstatic Apache whoops whenever the band start motoring into a groove. At home, the first Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté, “In The Heart Of The Moon” has been something of a constant for the past couple of years or so, and this follow-up, “Ali & Toumani”, is every bit as lovely. It’s a mystery, to be honest, why these sessions – recorded over three afternoons in London in 2005 – have sat on the shelf for so long. It’s certainly not because they’re in any way tossed off, or sub-par. Though ostensibly a duets album, it’s Diabaté’s kora which tends to stand out on most of these tracks, with the late bluesman Touré generally tracking discreetly along in the background. It’s hard to think of a current musician with such a compelling virtuosity on any instrument as Diabaté right now, and his playing on “Ali & Toumani” is once again pretty incandescent; so free-flowing and dramatic, but with a sense that the mind-boggling technical skill involved is focused and unostentatious. For all its great intricacy, once again, it never feels as if Diabaté is merely showing off. I’ve compared him to guitarists like John Fahey in the past, and Diabaté’s playing here has a similar effect on me: magnetic, hypnotic, hugely involving, but on a level where I find it difficult to distinguish and comment on individual tracks. Maybe it’s because his music is so immersively beautiful, and consequently relaxing, that I find it so hard to write about, as well as my sketchy critical vocabulary for African music in general. Whatever: wonderful record.

There’s a very interesting feature on Vampire Weekend in last week’s New Yorker, which includes a brilliantly ridiculous encounter while the band are on tour in California. With a documentary crew in tow, Vampire Weekend set about interviewing a bunch of allegedly notable Californian musicians, and fetch up at the operations centre of Blink 182’s Tom De Longe. They are greeted by De Longe, who’s shadowed by his own documentary crew. After the interview, De Longe takes them into a conference room and embarks on a determined sales pitch for “a prepackaged website” for bands. There are interventions from Blink 182 fans in a video chatroom, some earnest discussion about how bands can make money in “an industry that’s dying” and, eventually, some giggling. You don’t learn a great deal about Vampire Weekend from the scene, though perhaps their slightly bemused response when confronted by the pragmatic realities of being in a rock band – however farcically expressed by De Longe – might provide some grist to their detractors. Why would Vampire Weekend worry about their long-term financial security, the case against would probably run, when they’re so lofty and privileged anyhow? A supposed sense of entitlement, notionally contrary to rock etiquette and beyond material earnings is, after all, one of the favourite ways to beat Ezra Koenig and his bandmates. Another, though, is that they’re somehow “inauthentic” and exploitative of world music: Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber is quoted in the piece as calling them “Globetrotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring distant cultures, despite only being passively, naively invested.” There are any numbers of ways to pick this one apart, of course, though Koenig has a good response himself. “For people who think that Vampire Weekend is making music that’s inauthentic to us, the question is ‘What is authentic to us?’ Is it the Rolling Stones – some version of black Southern music? There are probably a lot better reasons why you could say we’re not good.” Very fair points, though Koenig may be being a little disingenuous here. Calling your album “Contra” and dropping in a bunch of Clash references is a typically canny way of playing with expectations and stereotypes: how else should a bunch of rich American boys respond to rebel rock than with an album named after Reagan-backed right-wingers? Vampire Weekend might be neither authentic nor inauthentic, but they’re certainly not averse to playing with those ideas, or with exploiting the tension between them – as they proved as far back as “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”. The more positive way of looking at all this, perhaps, is to see their music as endemic of a healthy global swarming of pop culture (epitomised I suppose by people like MIA, who’s sampled here on “Diplomat’s Son”), where everything is up for grabs. If Vampire Weekend’s debut artfully located common ground between spindly indie rock and Township hi-life, “Contra” is a much more mixed-up, chaotic hybrid. There’s a slight regret, for me at least, that they haven’t stuck to the zinging guitar pop, which they were so skilful at, though I can see how that might be something of a dead end. Instead, there are the Konono No 1 thumb-piano sounds I mentioned in the “Horchata” blog, stately ballads (“Taxi Cab” is especially superb, all discreet ghetto beats, classical piano runs and Koenig discovering a new tone of regret that confirms and expands upon his novelistic sensibilities), plenty of upgraded Paul Simon, and Lord knows what else (“Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, Brazilian baile funk… Sublime’s “40 Oz”, reggaeton, bachata, Bollywood… NYC 1983, dancehall and the Beastie Boys’ second album, “Paul’s Boutique,” glosses the press release, challengingly). If there’s a Vampire Weekend precedent for a lot of this, it may be a technically enhanced version of “M79”, which probably emphasises Rostam Batmanglij’s developing production skills. “California English” could be cluttered and over-compensating, with Koenig’s vocals autotuned to the point of gibberish and the song evolving into a sort of manic chamber piece. But it’s a measure of the confidence with which they juggle influences and compose songs that it works just fine. Evolution, in other ways, is simpler. “Contra” is often much slower and more elegant than its predecessor, or much faster: “Holiday”, for instance, has an air of well-tailored derangement, ostensibly a ska song which begins with the opening lines from “Matty Groves”, or at least the Fairport Convention version. A short album, but one which you can spend a pleasantly epic time looking for clues and references and random ideas, and I’ve barely even started on the lyrics…