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.

SUFJAN STEVENS PART TWO

Well, an extraordinary album by a melodic genius? No, not quite. 'The Age Of Adz' is insane. But 'I Walked' and 'Too Much' are outstanding, genuinely innovative pop songs, managing to be emotionally involving while splicing up choppy beats and guiding complex, swooning swells of sound to a conflicted mass. Afterwards we're in at the deep end. The rest is brave, daringly off-kilter, grandiose and sometimes exhausting. His voice can feel constrained under the weight of self-invented, revolving Celtic-prog-soul-gospel hybrids. Crammed production skills frequently overshadow his potentially remarkable songwriting. At opposite ends, 'Futile Devices' is delicacy itself, 'Impossible Soul,' however, chants out an astral-Armageddon hymn on Sesame Street. Warning; Auto-Tune slapstick also occurs. From this gleefully mad, chirpy alienation there emerges a sweet folk coda. Verging on the totally overblown, always wilfully peculiar, it'll take time to savour all this restless vigour, riotous devotion and baffling intensity. The key might be that it's all an elaborate fantasy. I was uncertain initially, about the whole enterprise, but now I'm finding it sort of inspired. No brainwashing took place, just a realisation; he's actually mapping out new territories for himself, and if there are faults, well, so be it, because how many contemporary musical artists, in the context of songform, are taking these kind of risks?

NEIL YOUNG

Two years ago I went to see Neil Young in concert. It was one of the best live shows I've ever experienced. The first set was solo acoustic, haunted, an eerie recollection. The second wild, electric, churning on and on until he'd reached salvation. An unfortunate incident happened. In front of us were a famous model and a couple of rock stars. These posh girls sniffed them out, and got up to dance, badly, in front of our view. I couldn't see anything of Neil, just these two shallow wannabes. Heartbreaking. Then an older fellow beside me piped up. 'Hey, Atomic Mutton. Sit the fuck down.' They did as they were told and magic was resumed.

To his loyal followers, Neil Young rules as a proud warrior. Cutting through the crap, relying on instinct, never compromising to expectation. His last two great records were Sleeps With Angels and Broken Arrow, twinned sprawls of swollen romanticism and gloomy undertow. Since then, you know, there's been a lot of ramble. So will the prince of ambient swamp bring him back, unadorned? Smell the coffee pal, Le Noise is an open freeway, a man travelling, searching for evidence of goodness amongst all the disaster that surrounds him. Holding onto some dignified spirit, a resemblance of a non-forgotten dream. Blues shot down in fx, faith still bleeding, defiant but cursed by memory. Hitchhiker explains Like An Inca, a hurt, tarnished statement from days that were hopefully buried and then came back uninvited. What falls is sepia, catching sudden illuminations blazing, caressing and vanishing into air. Desolation brings fruit, outta the decay, lost in drifting ruin, he returns and returns until he next takes flight. If you haven't figured it out by now, he's made a record that demands constant interrogation and belief.

DEERHUNTER

A snowy television set played German cinema with French subtitles. He switched channels. Alicia Keys sang, she'd been dubbed. Donald Sutherland spoke, he'd been dubbed. Alex lay back and stared at some quiet coloured tiles on the bathroom wall. Water rippled under the charred gold of the bridge. A jogger was circling the hotel, toxic footsteps trailing behind. Rats ate scraps of leftovers, chewing discreetly by the empty restaurant.

Alex had to get up early in the morning, 5 am, for family work. Yet he didn't feel tired, just slightly bored and discontent. There was no mini-bar to raid, no room service to call. He lit a cigarette, put on the Deerhunter CD that a girl back home had given him. It was the same as before. The solitary, ethereal glide of their pretty songs, reaching out from the internal womb to a soaring ecstatic space. He guessed Desire Lines was his favourite; Strokes-like chugging guitars and floating, blurred sighs. Or was it Helicopter, glowing with a luminous if claustrophobic passion. A state of continual longing. And who in the hell had brought along that greasy sax break to the party? Wait. Did he hear someone scratch and knock on the door? No, he'd let his imagination run fast, it was time for slow motion. He brushed his teeth and looked up at the moon for awhile.