One of my favourite pieces of music, especially on bright mornings like today, is “A Rainbow In Curved Air” by Terry Riley, a great fluttering organ-led salute to the sun that put a psychedelic spin on the new classical/electronic/minimalist music that came to the fore in the ‘60s. I mention this because this third album from Ben Vida, aka Bird Show, begins with a delirious flurry of two ascending organs and gently pattering drums that sounds perfectly like a lost Riley track from that time. It’s called, with a certain reductive neatness, “Two Organs And Dumbek”, and it’s a lovely record to put on first thing in the morning. Actually it’s the second we played today, after the Kings Of Leon single we call “Sex Owl” here, but – though it’s OK, actually – let’s forget about that for now. Vida appears to be from Chicago and also figures in Town And Country, a pretty decent ensemble who always got closer to rarefied chamber minimalism than most of their post-rock contemporaries. This is his third album as Bird Show and, though I suspect I have at least one of the previous two lurking somewhere at home (under “B”, I imagine), “Bird Show” is the first to make a real impression. Being churlish, I guess the big reason why I like this one so much is the aforementioned pathological similarities between one or two tracks here and Terry Riley; one of those occasions where a homage is justified by virtue of it being so obsessively fastidious. But Vida stretches beyond that, too. Sometimes, as on “Green Vines”, he’ll graft songs onto the gravitational hums, singing in a thin, mildly indie-ish voice (the vocals can be a distraction from the elegant rustles and chimes, on “Wood Flute, Berimbau, Mbira And Voice” for instance). At other times, on “BRDDRMS” or “Percussion And Voice” say, he’ll strip everything back to bare, trancey percussion, redolent of the Eastern dronemusics which fired up the imaginations of Riley and his contemporaries like Lamonte Young, but which also make me think of those earliest Moondog records, where his oddly resonant home-made instruments took precedence. On “Pan Pipe Ensemble And Voice”, Vida even manages to reclaim, yep, pan pipes from the world of new age mulch and make something genuinely disorienting with them. And there are more experiments with vintage synths like, um, “Synthesizer Solo”, which match some of the delicate museum trips taken by Matmos on the excellent “Supreme Balloon”. Terry Riley actually guested on a track from the vinyl version of that album, “Hashish Master”, but it’s the giant, gracefully vibrating title track which sits so neatly alongside “Two Organs And Dumbek”, plenty of the last White Rainbow and Arp albums and so on. Good stuff.

A whole heap of jealousy towards the residents of Los Angeles last weekend, since the Boredoms followed up last year’s 77-drummer extravaganza in New York with 88 Boadrum there on 8/8/08. I’m sure you can guess how many drummers were involved this time round, and as soon as I manage to hunt down an MP3, I’ll try and post some links. New York wasn’t entirely deprived on this auspicious day, either, since 88 Boadrum was enacted there, too, with Gang Gang Dance filling in for the Boredoms as the band at the centre of the melee. Neat timing, then, for a new GGD album to turn up in the office, on the Warp label in the UK, no less. There are definite congruities between the Boredoms and Gang Gang, chiefly a fascination with the ritualistic, transcendent possibilities of music, and, not unrelated, a big thing for drums. But if the Boredoms appear heroically embedded in their own world, Gang Gang have always seemed a little self-conscious on their adventures, not least because – fairly or unfairly – they’ve often been painted as the epitome of Brooklyn’s ineffably hip, art-conscious underground scene. “Saint Dymphna”, their fourth album, finds GGD apparently keener than ever to show themselves as a voracious and eclectic troupe; there is even, in what might cruelly be interpreted as an attempt to parlay favour with some of the blogosphere’s more intimidating cultural theorists, a guest spot from London grime MC, Tinchy Stryder. The thing is, Stryder’s guest spot works, as do most of the other stunts on this ambitious and rather fine album. Ostensibly, a lot of “Saint Dymphna” is a kind of super-produced, precision-tooled, pop and dancefloor-primed rebooting of tribal psych. I’ve been playing it all week, and the constant ebb and flow makes it quite tricky to identify separate tracks. But on the other hand, it is a record that lends itself to a great landslide of references. So amidst all the contrasting beats, from the fervid drum circles to programmed sputters that recall a goth-tinged Timbaland, various bits of “Saint Dymphna” make me think of contemporary New York bands like Outhud, or a friendlier Black Dice. There are elements of Bjork, quite late Can, Yoko Ono, and a fantastic grasp of how variegated global rhythms can mix with ultra-modern western electronica that makes me think of the Sun City Girls on DFA (or, God help me, the sort of fusion that Transglobal Underground always strived for). The outstanding track, though, is called “Vacuum”, and features a prominent melody that seems to closely echo the siren riff from My Bloody Valentine’s “I Only Said”, hazily reconfigured over a backing that’s somewhere between ambient dub and kosmische synthprog. The hyper-creative drift of “Saint Dymphna” as a whole is pretty gripping, but this one’s the keeper.

As someone who has spent a good decade lavishing praise on/making excuses for Julian Cope’s music while so many of his old fans have wandered off in dismay at another Brain Donor CD, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at being one of the very few people who enjoyed his show at Latitude last month. I blogged about this captivating spectacle at length over here, so won’t go into it all again now. But it immediately came to mind when I put on Disc One of Cope’s latest opus, “Black Sheep”. “Come The Revolution” was one of two fully-formed songs that he managed to play at Latitude, just after the farcically extended soundcheck and just before the farcically extended version of “Sleeping Gas” that sent Cope – and, in the opposite direction, most of the audience – over the edge. It’s a cracking song, which also echoes that Latitude performance with the new configuration of Cope’s sound: a thicket of predominantly acoustic guitars, massed Mellotrons and marching drums which is a lot more conspicuously “arranged” than the gonzoid metal he’s mainly been using to disseminate his ideas for the past few years (and a much better rethink than last year’s “You Gotta Problem With Me”). The daftness and rock bombast are still present, of course – Cope has long believed that playing the Holy Fool (or Gnostic Fool, I guess) is the best way to present subversive concepts. But now he seems to have reconciled himself to a sort of fervid psychedelic pop music that many of us thought he’d generally abandoned years ago: “These Things I Know”, for instance, is a heinously catchy jangle that could have sat prettily on “Droolian” or “Skellington” – if it weren’t for the arch, “Everyone believes the Wiki,” line, of course. As those of us who’ve stuck with him over the past few years will expect, “Black Sheep” is a lavishly-packaged artefact with copious notes and lyrics, and the music split across two CDs – it’d probably fit on one, but comes on two to recreate the olde vinyl experience. On the cover, Cope poses with his current band (featuring old hands Doggen and Holy McGrail as well as someone called, with profound mystical import, Big Nige) around Avebury’s stone circle. They look like a cross between Motorhead roadies and, less appealingly, some slightly dubious quasi-military sect (there are a few sinister army caps, and some red and black shields with an Isle Of Mannish three-legged logo on them that make me uncomfortable). Cope, I’m sure, will explain what’s going on in time. What can be ascertained here is that, a) I’m beginning to think that this might be the best set of songs he’s come up with since “20 Mothers” in 1995 (though I’ll make a case for “Rome Wasn’t Burned In A Day” and “Citizen Cain’d” when I’m cornered; and b) that I’m beginning to get a bit tired of his stance on religion. A good part of Cope’s position makes sense to me as an atheist: that much of what we know as organised religion is institutionally sexist and homophobic; that the teachings of a Jesus became “perverted”, as he puts it in the mighty Mellotron doom-drones of “The Shipwreck Of St Paul”, by St Paul (I always liked Stanley Spencer’s gripe that St Paul was the originator of, if I remember this right, “All that get-your-hair-cut nonsense”). But a couple of things bug me. Religious tolerance strikes me as a pragmatic way to live and move forward, while Cope’s stance is epitomised by a quote on the sleeve – “When I wage war with the ones who wage war. Only then I’m at peace with myself” – and a “Bungalow Bill”-like singalong on Disc Two entitled “All The Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Were Suckers)”, which seems shall we say, a tad inflammatory. Then there’s a homily in the CD booklet which justifies why he lets pagan deities off the hook while aiming both barrels at “Jehovah, Allah and the Christian God”, because, as I understand it, we’re Northern Europeans and those are Middle Eastern “Divine Phenomena”. It’s a tidy argument, and one familiar to long-term Cope obsessives, but one which ignores the fact that the idea of an indigenous faith is at best irrelevant, and at worst offensive, to a modern, mobile, multi-cultural community. Cope gets pretty close to suggesting that if you live in Britain and feel the need to worship a God, then you should worship a pagan, Northern European one – surely exactly the kind of dogmatism and intolerance which he purports, as a "Black Sheep" outsider, to despise? Great tunes, problematic ideas I think.