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Tunng might be the icing on the cake. They might be the layer of marzipan beneath the icing. There might be, probably are, more layers to this cake than you could ever imagine.

A little over a year ago I was driving the mule and not quite by chance I heard Vetiver for the first time. I’m a curmudgeon in many things and new music is no exception. A natural instinct towards scepticism means modern life is indeed probably rubbish, and modern music exceptionally so. All the same…I gave Vetiver a second go. And then a third. Sooner or later, Why’s A Building Get So Tall was right there on the brain, along with all those other quirky-haunting Vetiver moments.

All well and good. Later I overhead something at a BBQ, and my friend told me that was Sufjan Stevens. It didn’t sound all that painful either. Later still, he was at a BBQ of mine and heard the Vetiver and said that sounds like Davendra. And it was. The dolphin Wildman. Who’s an occasional part of Vetiver. Vetiver were playing with M Ward. M Ward – gets under your skin. He can make you cry, if you’re sitting with the kitchen door open sipping whisky at gone midnight on a Summer’s day when the carpet’s moving under you. So can Micah P Hinson, I soon discovered. The Innocence Mission also seemed to have mastered this trick.

So far, so American. North American. The only other time this kind of thing had happened to me was a dozen years ago, when I went to the South American continent and a whole world of music opened up like a serrated Hirst cow, belly, entrails, colour, all the stuff you just want to consume, and lo it is beautiful too. That made a kind of sense to me. Here was music from a continent that didn’t feature, occult, awaiting revelation. But this other stuff, this new stuff, where were its roots? How had it sprung up on me like a leaping hare? The only thing that made perfect sense was when Davendra sung a cover of Caetano, and the two worlds collided.

Then… other strange developments. Someone played me King Creosote, told me I should listen, he was another touched by genius. I resumed my sceptical disposition, because after all, this was British music, from a collective in Perth, how’s that going to tweak the strings? It’s bound to be too…parochial. The curmudgeon disposition failed again. The twisted lyrics found their target – I’ll Fly By The Seat of My Pants – words jogging along beside me as I rode the midnight bus from Stanstead, fleeing Bari for a homecoming of a blank white sofa and an unhinged employer . My friend tried to get KC for his film, but in the end found Barbarossa, and I sat on a beach in the sun and thought, if the worse comes to the worse, this man will sing it better than it could be said. And all the aeroplanes can’t take away... And all the cars and trains cannot take these things away…. muted whistling

Somewhere along the line a whole host of others knocked on the door and demanded attention: Anti Folk; Jeffrey Lewis; Adam Green, Filthy Pedro, Ray LaMontagne; Adem; Findlay Brown and more, and more. The roots stretch back to Bert Jansch; Benji Kirkpatrick; Bob Dylan; Caetano; Silvio Rodriguez; Eliot Smith and Patti Smith who pops up on a Suffolk stage to remind me; and more and more.

This is the cake, which over a year of flux, has been given to me to partake of, to sing along to. On Saturday night with my co-explorer, in Finchley, I heard half a dozen bands, all of them tainted with this same eminent, earthy, folky, musical, listenability, (to these ears). Rounding it off were Tunng. I’d heard a bit of Tunng. I wasn’t convinced. My scepticism was fighting its corner. Electronic riffs; hard to pin down the lyrics; too clever for its own good?

Tunng are the icing on the cake. For now, until the next time. Songs of murder and betrayal, songs of jackdaws and jays, adders crawling through English fields of Eden. Sung with a maverick glee by every part of the collective, all of them there to show off their tricks. A thunder box simmers. Rattles and whistles and maracas and stray voices shimmy or thud across the scape; landscape, soundscape, all at once.

It’s hard not to be jealous of musicians. They can do things wordsmiths can only achieve in their dreams. Maybe it’s why my inclination is to wrestle with them for proof. Not give in too easily. It has been a blessing in strange times that these songs have come to me, to keep me company; have said things to me and for me, better than I could say them myself.