Can’t remember which of my friends described Saint Etienne thus, but I can understand their trepidation. Saint Etienne fans are usually the sort of people who like Camera Obscura as well, and probably take maypole-dancing lessons before listening to some C86 and drinking weak tea. Which is a shame, because Saint Etienne are amazing. Jen disagrees heartily.

Why post now? Well, they’ve got another singles collection coming out on 29th September called London Conversations which is a bit rich since it’s their fourth, and they’ve only released one record since the last one, or none if you live in America. Yeah yeah, I’m not counting free 7″s given away with magazines. Get back to your maypole, dickhead. I can geek it out with the best of them when it comes to Saint Etienne.

So I thought I’d post some tracks that haven’t made it onto this collection, from the rather mournful end of their spectrum. First up it’s “Carnt Sleep” from their first record Foxbase Alpha, a sparse, elegantly cold turkey number that invents trip-hop three years early, but don’t hold that against it.

Saint Etienne - Carnt Sleep

Then we’ve got two from their masterpiece So Tough, which is a stunning collage of different London musical styles and snatched bits of dialogue from radio plays and street scenes. There’s sunshiney pop, acid-soaked psychedelia, 60’s pastiche, piano ballads, flowered up rave, longish-form techno, skanking dub (honestly not rubbish) and demented cut-up speed-freak filth like “Conchita Martinez”. Here’s the clattering, spidery, doom-laden “Calico” and the totally heartbroken ”No Rainbows For Me”.

Saint Etienne - Calico

Saint Etienne - No Rainbows For Me

That album has dated pretty well, which cannot be said for their next effort Tiger Bay. It’s still fantastic in my opinion, but the clubby tracks do conjure images of cheesecloth, waistcoats, big glasses of red wine, and appalling makeup. Still, there are songs on it that still sound totally fresh, like “I Buy American Records”, which sounds like something a housewife would hum while getting ready to meet her lunchtime lover, and “Marble Lions”, which has a wonderful salt-aired swell coursing underneath its twinkling prettiness.

Saint Etienne - I Buy American Records

Saint Etienne - Marble Lions

And so finally to Sound Of Water, which I actually own on both CD and LP, both incidentally bought in America where I’m heading for a month starting next week, so no blogging for a while after this from me. The album always reminds me of being 15 and on holiday in California, with it tinnily playing out of the speakers in a rented SUV as Cali’s epic agriculture span past.

Saint Etienne - Don’t Back Down

Amid the queasy effects and lurching static-submerged beats on Flying Lotus’s new album Los Angeles, emerges a beautifully pure voice in the form of Dolly (she takes her real name Ahu on all her other releases, and when she’s out and about DJ-ing). Singing out from the boom-bap shuffle of “Roberta Flack”, she calls to mind the bruised souls of trip-hop chanteuses Martina Topley-Bird and Beth Gibbons.

She was born and raised in Istanbul, and visited Seattle for the Red Bull Music Academy, ending up staying for a number of months. She’s spending the summer in London, before heading back to Turkey. Play It As It Lays dropped her a line.

“I was always singing, it is like breathing for me”, she says. When I ask her what she does to keep her singing voice in good condition, she bats the question away: “I do believe that everyone has their very own special voice, and it doesn’t have to be ‘perfect’. Macy Gray has a very different voice, but that is what makes her Macy Gray. Voices are like signatures, like characters, they don’t have to be perfect. Their flaws make them what they are”.

Along with modern artists like Roisin Murphy and Erykah Badu, she cites Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan as influences. This is reflected on the track “Turn Your Lights On”, which is on the latest Brownswood Bubblers compilation. “I love gospel, jazz and soul - I want to sing more jazzy stuff in the future”, she says.

And when can we expect some solo releases? She cryptically quotes Victor Hugo: “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.

Angels - Don’t Leave (feat. Ahu)

Flying Lotus - Roberta Flack (feat. Dolly) (Buy)

Watussi are my new favourite band. They’re made up of Eric Broucek, in-house engineer at DFA’s studio, and Morgan Wiley, who plays keyboards for Hercules And Love Affair and is jaunting around the globe with them right now. As you might expect from their backgrounds, they make new-school New York disco/funk of the most refined and affecting kind. Their first release just came out on Eric’s Stickydisc Recordings (who also put out Babytalk’s fantastic “Keep On Move” and “Chance” earlier in the year).

One side features “Purple Moon”, a sassy, forthright tune with a nodding bassline cutting through a nocturnal world of vintage effects out to get ya. The other has “If All We Had Was Love”, a sweeter affair with cute funky synths and bass tussling with ribbiting noises, after which brass fanfares enter and the breakdown of the year comes into effect, before locking everything back into fabulous alignment. It’s the most essential 12″ to come out in months, so we just had to quiz Eric on the Watussi method.

- Where, when and why did you start Watussi?

my good friend morgan wiley and i started watussi one day in january 2008 in morgan’s studio in greenpoint, brooklyn.
we had worked on various projects before and had known each other a long time so musically it was very easy to communicate and come up with something we thought was special enough to share with people.

- What equipment do you use? Do you prefer vintage or brand-new hardware?

yeah, we certainly prefer older equipment to the newer stuff.  we use computers to edit and record, but not for sound generation or anything else.  we have quite a collection of older  synthesizers and keyboards between the two of us and we find them so much more inspiring to work with.  the sounds of the first 12″ all came from old analog gear and cheap digital stuff.  final mixes were done on the console at dfa’s studio in manhattan.  some of the keyboards and things we used -  simmons electronic drums, yamaha cs60 (an analog monster), casio ck-1 sampling keyboard, hohner clav, and a korg poly ensemble.

- There’s that bit of live trumpet on “If All We Had Was Love” - are you going to move towards using more live instrumentation?

live horns sound bad-ass, period.  to us, live instruments can make something feel much more finished and fully realized.  there are certain genres of dance music that work great with only samples and synths, but we’re not interested in being genre-specific with our tunes.  we’ll definitely continue to mix “real” and “artificial” because it’s the most fun for us.

- Despite the nostalgic nods at classic disco, Chicago house and italo, there’s still a contemporary feel to your tracks. Do you think it’s important to make something that isn’t just a pastiche of older styles?

yeah, i hope that we manage to transcend our influences a bit by combining ideas that shouldn’t normally go together.

- After the post-punk focus of the last few years, it’s now the turn of disco, italo and Balearic. Why do you think these genres are having such a renaissance at the moment?

not sure really other than that it was bound to happen as there is so much to explore in these genres.  sonically they’re so exciting… and they make you move.

- What sorts of things will Stickydisc be putting out over the next few months?

there will be a follow up watussi 12″ and releases by other yet to be named projects. exciting stuff!

Watussi - Purple Moon

This is just a 128 mp3 - go and get the vinyl here, here or here. And pick up the 128 mp3 of “If All We Had Was Love” over at 20jazzfunkgreats here.

Let me also excuse my long absence from these pages. Here’s a bumper load of tracks to make up for it.

First up is The Lord Dog Bird, who is one of the guitarists out of Wilderness. He’s shacked up somewhere with a four-track and a wonderfully echoey acoustic to create his self-titled record which is out on Tuesday on Jagjaguwar. This track has its rough stomp smoothed over by some stirringly played chords and arpeggios, alongside a raggedly soulful vocal performance, to create a song that flies straight to your chest.

The Lord Dog Bird - The Gift Of Song In The Lion’s Den

Here’s one from Wilderness themselves, whose record Vessel States I picked up for a pound in Music and Video Exchange, and I can only say whoever left it there has ears of cloth.

Wilderness - Beautiful Alarms

The Lord Dog Bird reminded me of “Wake Up” by The Walkmen from the first album Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone, which shares its blustery, grimy, salt-air decay, as well as its key and rhythm. It’s a very fine song, all nasty, vindictive smoothness. The album is full of unique sounds, from the drunken muffled piano to the distant holler of the guitars.

The Walkmen - Wake Up

The band are best remembered for the demented propulsion of “The Rat” of course, which I thrashed around to just last night in fact, but my favourite of their rhythmic modes is their uncertain, sashaying waltz-time. It’s such a poignant, genuine mood, full of tentative romance and wistfulness. Check it out on “The Blizzard Of ‘96″ from their first record and on the lovely “Red Moon” from their new one, You And I.

The Walkmen - The Blizzard Of ‘96

The Walkmen - Red Moon

You And I can be bought for just $5 (£2.56 when I got it t’other day), with all the proceeds going a cancer charity. It’s a 3-week deal going on at Amie Street. After that I suppose it’ll be available in all the usual ways.