Vessels, who do this whole complicated post-rock, mood-scape type thing, have featured here before. They've put together a whole complicated, post-rock, mood-scape type mix featuring Athens psychedelicists Maserati, whom we love to distraction, as well as Mogwai.

Our only quibble - at 30 minutes long some of the tracks are alarmingly abbreviated. It is, however, available quite free over at the NME's quite good Daily Download site - the only reason, I would imagine, why anyone pays attention to the NME. If indeed they do. Below, let there be drums and cake...

Drifting across our radar this week are Girls, whose enticingly titled 'Vomit' is actually a saddish surge of autunmal, shoegazing noise. You can download it for free over at yertube.

Thereafter twangy discordance from Civil Civic, who sound like Gang of Four covering hi-NRG disco, as described to them by someone who's never actually heard any, in an unstaffed fairground. They are also giving it away for a song over at civilcivic.com.

Sad news today: guitarist Bert Jansch has split for the unforeseeable future. Along with Davey Graham, Jansch - like Nick Drake and John Martyn - was instrumental in re-introducing island folk to its mystic, clouded roots, warping those delicate, finger-plucking patterns into strange and exotic new shapes.

I first encountered him years ago, courtesy of a job lot of vinyl from the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill Gate. That contained The Contemporary British Guitar Sampler (vols 1 and 2), which still gets the odd spin around here. (It also included an excellent Glitter Band album - tribal post-punk's unacknowledged older brother, but try selling that to anyone now - plus Warm Dust's And It Came To Pass, of which I know you're all deeply fond.)

Like Davey, Jansch was active right up to the end. I regularly saw 'em both advertised at the King's Head up in Crouch End and thought, 'can't do it this week; maybe next time'. Zeppelin, epic plunderers that they were, rebuilt Jansch's Black Mountain Side out of breeze blocks on their first album. Johnny Marr got  it. But I love Jansch's stuff with The Pentangle. Especially this, which, oddly, was the theme to a 1969 sitcom about a London flatshare called Take Three Girls, not one episode of which have I ever seen. It still comes loaded with mysterious  yearning.

Has been this record by Foster The People, which sounds like a 21st century Beach Boys, had the Beach Boys been denied access to any sort of beach. Also one  of the very few tunes that manages successfully to incorporate whistling. I have a feeling it may have breached the Top 20 for an entire week in early August. Now that we are into the dying, dog days of summer, the faintly melancholic undertone seems particularly acute.