Among the many tales about Ariel Pink, there’s one, possibly apocryphal, about a live show where he came onstage and did nothing but intone the word “Xanax” for the duration of the gig. It’s slightly worrying, then, when he emerges out of the leftover Halloween dry ice at this Club Uncut show to solemnly pronounce “Carrots”, then disappears again.

Over the summer, I got pretty hooked on a playlist/mixtape thing, "Wah Wah Cowboys", that turned up on a blog called The Old Straight Track. A triumph of early ‘70s crate-digging, "Wah Wah Cowboys" located a high place where country and country-rock found a groove, and packed a fair few revelations into 45 minutes.

The Rolling Stones on our minds a lot this week, with the Keith Richards book finally out (please have a look at Allan’s immense review in the new Uncut), and a pile of page proofs from our forthcoming Rolling Stones Ultimate Music Guide for me to read.

Spent a sizeable part of yesterday afternoon grappling again with “The Age Of Adz”, with little progress. It made me think, beyond the Sufjan Stevens album, there have been a good few albums this year, eagerly anticipated by me, that I’ve ended up delicately avoiding talking about here. Big personal disappointments, in other words: The Hold Steady’s “Heaven Is Whenever” and the Black Mountain album, whose title I’ve momentarily forgotten, spring to mind.

A couple of days ago, I asked here whether anyone had seen the Michael Rother & Friends/Hallogallo 2010 show yet. Olmanal was one person who responded. The show in Ghent was great, he said, but noted, “‘Deluxe (Immer Wieder)’ with Steve Shelley pounding away on the drums, may not be exactly how you remember it.”

Spent more time yesterday than I possibly should have piecing together a playlist out of my Neu!, Harmonia and Michael Rother albums, in preparation for tomorrow’s London show by Hallogallo 2010. Anyone seen them yet? I’d be interested to hear your reports if you have.

How to find a way through the arcane catalogue of the Sun City Girls? Last time I tried to count, there seemed to be around 60-odd releases, mostly rare as hen’s teeth, compounding the mythology of the band as among the most challenging and elusive of the past 20 or 30 years. Now, some three years after the death of Charles Gocher, there’s one last unexpected SCG album, and with characteristically perverse logic, expert word is that it may be their most accessible.

A fairly inhospitable place to be on a Sunday night: just on the edge of the City, near Old Street roundabout, in the cellar of what used to be an almost permanently empty Chinese restaurant. This is the venue for, I think, only the second London show by Emeralds, a night subtitled “A Brave New World In Sound”.

Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects.

Plenty new here, though that might not be the right word for the Dylan mono versions which turned up here on a USB stick last week.