The Memory Tapes live experience is brilliantly transported from the wonderful Seek Magic album to become a whole new beast altogether – it’s more visceral and inventive rather than a simple attempt to reproduce the sound and songs of the album. More guitar heavy, with some ace live percussion and a perfect melding of the synthetic and the organic – just brilliant.

I’d almost forgotten about this photo.

The first time taking pictures in a venue you haven’t been to in ages can be an umitigated disaster. You have no idea on the lighting setup, you don’t know how well the flash will bounce if it’s dark in there and you just don’t feel settled until you have a feel for a place – for me it can take a couple of shows in the same place to get that confidence. I’ve only just started to work out the complexities of shooting in The Social after my fourth time there (for the record, it’s fun to bounce flash backwards off the window and onto the stage).

The last time I was at the Scala was about nine years ago – shortly after they reopened I think, following the closure for Clockwork Orange-showing shenanigans. I seem to recall smoking three packs of cigarettes in one evening, drinking five times my body weight in Smirnoff Ices and nearly going home with someone of ambigious gender. Such is life.

Anyway, I scoped the venue as soon as I entered, looked for good points to shoot, took my place and waited. Very quickly I realised I’d chosen entirely the wrong position – there was no pit on the ocassion – and just didn’t get the shots I wanted. Coupled with the lighting, which just didn’t fall in the right place. It was one of the few ocassions when the abscence of a press pit means you can’t use flash.

This shot did, however, turn out pretty okay and I’m real happy with it. When those silhouette shots work, they’re a real winner but as this was pretty much the only shot from this entire gig I liked, I’d filed that night under ‘photographic disaster’.

Anyway, my rule of thumb now for new places is to turn up very early and use the support as practise. Takes the guesswork out of the equation.

Sweden: home to many fine exports – IKEA, Julmust, Volvo and, of course, some of the finest, most sincere and beautiful music in the world. Maybe it’s the climate there, the lack of real pretension and the artistic impulse that seems inherant in every Swedish person I’ve ever met, but there’s a level of quality in their music that you just don’t get elsewhere.

So this week I’ve had The Forest and The Trees staying with me in London. Stockholm residents and husband and wife Joel and Linnea Edin were in the UK to play two shows at The Social and The Rest is Noise and introduce the UK to their swimmingly lovely folksy pop sound. They make music with a sublime heart and soul that sounds like it was recorded in a dusky field sometime in late summer. Totally transcendental and it even sounded great while there was a snow storm raging outside.

Their myspace has some good stuff and there are two great videos on Vimeo that you can watch here and here. Hopefully they’ll be back next year with an album to promote and we’ll get to see them play some more.

Kudos to Joel and Linnea (and to fellow live band members, the brothers David and Robin Lindvall) for being the perfect houseguests and making us wish we’d had more time with them to drink wine and talk music.

Another fine band from Portland Oregon, Horse Feathers are headed up by the mellow-voiced Justin Ringle – think My Morning Jacket’s Jim James but more lush – with arrangements by the multi-talented Peter Broderick.

They play very fine Americana and in the song ‘Cascades’ – out on 7″ right now – have released one of the more sublime efforts to hit my record player in recent days. ‘Curs in the Weeds’ – also on their myspace – is a pretty amazing song too. Check them out – they’ve just finished a short tour of the UK but should be back next year.

So to last Friday and Wetdog’s album launch show at The Lexington which came as a result of your humble London Music Photographer being left of the guestlist for another gig a mile down the road. It didn’t matter; Wetdog were a more than adequate alternative. Despite shitty sound, bad wiring and the resulting , the girls threw out pretty decent set. The album’s called Frauhaus and is out now on Angular.

As usual, sub-par lighting in the Lexington meant some strobe and I got some pretty nice motion shots playing around with first curtain and long shutter speeds. Lots of fun.

I recall this as a three men and a dog in the audience kinda gig and seem to remember the power failed half way through. It didn’t visibly faze the band, which is why they’re probably vying (and rather successfully) for the title of the ‘most exciting live band around right now’.

Anway, tiny venue, no light, lots of flash and some great black and white shots. And this one is all lines and angles and cabley squiggles – it’s exactly the shot I was going after, capturing the stickyness of the floor, the mess of cabling and the feel of rock n roll in the tiniest of venues. Perfect.

Just some of the reasons to love Casey Holden Wisenbaker and The Whispertown 2000.

The Rise Above album in 2007 was pretty awesome to begin with (and showed them really moving forward in giant steps as a band) but Bitte Orca was a revelation.

It’s an album that, like the band, is hard to pin down. Just what would you describe them as, musically speaking? Surely the words ‘fractured’, ‘art’, ‘experimental’ and ‘disharmony’ would provide useful metadata were we writing an entry for Wikipedia or Allmusic…and yet that doesn’t capture it at all.

I love the album in the same way I love Bjork’s Debut or Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Someone once said they were like Radiohead in a parallel universe, which is a much better approximation of where I think they’re at.

As a live act, they’re musically perfect – tight as you’d hope and fascinating to watch; the vocal instrumentation that comes from Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle is a most entertaining visual spectacle.

And then there’s the frowning, browsome Longstreth and his awesome cardigan. I considered throwing my camera to the ground, juping on stage and wrestling the cardigan off his back but I think the burly security guy to my right saw the look and my eye and knew exactly what I had in mind. He gave me a hard stare that left me whimpering like a frightened dog. Damn him. I think he wanted the cardigan too.

A band that I rate and yet I think that the reason they’re so compellingly wonderful live is also the reason they’re unable to translate that onto record. Wildbirds and Peacedrums put on some of the most progressive live shows I’ve ever seen, where the audience is both witness and participant in something extrordinary and magical. No record can live up to it: it’s the spectacle that’s the thing (as Guy Debord would say).

As a husband and wife team, there’s this amazing interplay between Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin. Something sexual in the way they establish a tempo, a mood, an attitude in the early part of the show and then crank it up – slow at first – to a steady, rhythmic beat towards the end, climaxing accordingly.

The best shots from this show weren’t during the outstanding (and poorly lit) performance but while observing the duo set up stage beforehand. Always pays to get to the pit early!

I knew the very moment I saw Dan Sartain’s cheekbones betwixt the (web)pages of Pitchfork, some years ago, that it would be very difficult to take a bad photo of this fine-looking chiselled chap. Perfect skin tone – a warm alabastor – and coiffeured to within an inch of his life, he looks every inch the star – equal parts James Dean, Chet Baker and embodying the spirit of rockabilly in his liberal use of pomade.

Helluva contrast too – amongst the hairy straggle of Fleet Foxes, Steve Earle and the throng of beards and guts in the audience – Sartain’s something of a skinny bitch – almost paper thin from the side. Sometimes it was hard to tell the performer from the microphone stand…