First off, a tremendous and very worthwhile London gig to plug next month. A Requiem For Jack Rose takes place at Café Oto in Dalston on February 16, with a neat bill of Rose friends; Hush Arbors, Heather Leigh, Rick Tomlinson, Michael Flower Band and C Joynes. More details about the show here at No-Fi.

In the slightly dazed hurly-burly of the first week back at work, I clean forgot to mention anything about the new Uncut’s free CD, which collects 15 bands notionally influenced by our cover star, Jimi Hendrix.

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.

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).

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.

Some surprise, really, that Wolf People, a new London band just signed to Jagjaguwar, have decided to stick with their name, given the seemingly innumerable number of Wolf-related bands currently around.

First off, check this brand new Portishead track out today. It’s called “Chase The Tear”, it’s being released to support Amnesty International, and it’s right up there with anything on “Third”, if our first listens are anything to go by.

Jack White’s Third Man cottage industry has produced a bit of a mixed bag of releases in 2009, with the highlight thus far (of those I’ve heard, anyhow) being his own solo seven-inch, “Fly Farm Blues”. The whole disdain he seems to have for standard record company practise, the sense that decisions are made on a creative whim, is really admirable. But it can’t hide the fact that singles by, say, a local gospel group, Transit, haven’t been hugely compelling.

Awful news over the weekend: the wonderful guitarist, Jack Rose, died of a heart attack on Saturday. Of all the adventurous new American primitives who’ve emerged in the past decade, it’d be just to call Rose the most talented of them all; a warm, intuitive and truly inspired player who dissolved the lines between traditional and experimental music.

Because, as I have just had pointed out to me, I have foolishly mistakenly read their name as MegaFUN, when the three members of MegaFAUN hove into view, led by a large bearded man with a banjo and a big grin, I somewhat feared they would prove to be relentlessly hearty, the distressing musical equivalent of bouncy castles, red noses, playground japes, a particularly unwelcome wackiness. The kind of jollity, in other words, that makes you want to run screaming from its larkish presence.