BRIAN ENO

This is what you'd expect, beatific. Another moon landing. Fatalistic background music. Okay, neurotic drum assemblage. Borne unto the brain, a swish of rainy poison. UK garage fluxed, Nerve Vet? Tracks stopping before they start on the get-go. Swig of French wine. Cut-ups of evolution. Guitars mesh, high-end over solar. Too tasteful, not No Pussyfooting, The Drop. Theme music to menace. Juddering sound apocalypse. African village with nettles. The guitar playing is too expensive, rote. Prayer for resolution. Yeah, watch your back, things are not quite what they seem, clean disruption. Monkey in the outer, look at them stars, they are shining, breathing and shuddering with condolence. Church bells toll, wide. It's only a performance. Nylon strings protruding synthetics. How many detectives, how many were there? Cumbersome mist, continual washing. Specs of blood in a transparent basin.

JOSEPHINE FOSTER

For the last few years Josephine Foster has resembled a musical archaeologist, digging in to disjointed renditions of classical German song-art, adapting Emily Dickinson's pure, sensory poetry and now, unearthing Federico Garcia Lorca's unassuming radicalism. Should that sound academic, opener Los Cuatro Muleros dispels such worry. It's a lively prelude, the players taking place, for the tale shalt be told. Anda Jaleo captures the playfully serious tone of flamenco perfectly. There isn't much need for translation, as good spirits reside, Foster radiating an uncontrived eccentricity as she clicks her castanets and stomps her feet in time. By the end, she sings to herself, alone, wavering and murmuring, the party was old-fashioned, but it still echoes in memory, on the close of summer.

ARI UP 1962-2010

Unconventional, energetic and charismatic, disobeying the rules as if it were all second nature-Shoplifting, Typical Girls, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, In The Beginning There Was Rhythm.

AVEY TARE

Late 2003. Animal Collective played at a small cafe. Avey Tare screamed, shouted and cried through a vast spectrum of pedals and electronic distortion. Panda Bear thrashed his drum kit with an astonishing fury. It was an exhilarating, tribal jam, with the bombed force of an ancient Amon Duul record. The audience couldn't get enough. Closing time. Avey was selling merch with a big smile, a natural showman, Panda sat by the side of the stage, inspecting wires, a serene roadie. They were likable, supremely unpretentious. It was an era when me and my friends would be checking out the brutalising noise of Wolf Eyes one night and maybe, Joanna Newsom the next. Animal Collective communicated through both worlds, as there was always plenty of melody underneath their storms of discord.

Early 2009. Animal Collective played at a relatively large venue. A strobe show. Some sort of rave for an audience with tar on their shoes. I felt so far away and disconnected. Everything had changed. Panda Bear's Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion are, of course, miraculous adventures, listening to them makes you happy to be alive. They'll stand up for years to come, pivotal and enormously influential for a little majority. That crew waits for Person Pitch 2 with baited breath and Tomboy probably won't disappoint. Not easily dissuaded, his co-worker has made a very private, spook-house record in the interim that harks back to their earlier, looser foundations. Down There shakes with splatter, suggestive in it's creeping fragmentation, lurching impenetrably to a damp, camouflaged woodland. He drizzles faded obscurity over rhythms clapped out by whiplash, pained harmonies foreboding the worst and dilapidated synth dirt feeding on the remains. Those rascal zombies, they are all hot and bothered from hunger. Forget milestones, this invitation chimes through cement.