The Furrowed Brow of Alexander Tucker

When I was younger I had four or five classical guitar lessons and absolutely hated it.

Alexander Tucker is a maker of dark, psychedelic folk music, but on the phone he sounds a lot more like someone in the line with you at a chippie, chatting about Oval and New Zealand noise.

"Lots of counting involved, learning to read music... Other peoples' structures did my head in. But when I started recording by myself I remembered that walking three-fingered fingerplucking and started really enjoying the preciseness and clarity of that way of playing. The way each note resonates against the others." Sitting with his digital 8-track, Tucker strove to find "what it would sound like if Jandek or Charalambides had a big band with lots of players, but still kind of fucked up and wrong."

The results – particularly 'Furrowed Brow' (out this month) and 2005's 'Old Fog', - are a dread folk music, all multi-layered vocals over Tucker's percussive and interweaving acoustic guitar. It sounds like something out of the darkest English nights, all creeping and twanging, cobwebs growing as a 16 Horsepower record plays. While 'Old Fog' was born out of a very unhappy time, 'Furrowed Brow' is "definitely about life when it started getting better again." It was "a bit more planned" than previous records; instead of the document of a year's scattered recording, Tucker went back to the studio in Kent where he had recorded with his old post-hardcore band, feeding his glittering dirges through an old 70s desk.

While friends contribute some piano and (marvellous, free-wheeling) clarinet, Tucker is himself a small orchestra, playing steel-string and classical guitars, vibraphone, Hammond organ, mandolin, and the Indian bul bul tarang. Singing in a light moan – a far cry from the laughing chap on the phone - sound fills the tracks like so much smoke, a psychedelic aspect that isn't lost on Tucker. "I do like druggy music," he says. "Drugs open up that place a lot quicker than sitting down with the instrument straight and improvising." He mentions inspirations like Bardo Pond and The Dead C. "But then again, I wasn't smoking for a while and it didn't seem to change the music very much."

Tucker's albums, like the visual art he's been creating for years, draw from a rich dream-world. It's a landscape of post-apocalyptic gloom, poltergeist faces and spiderwebs. "I dream a lot about these furrowed valleys where the roads are lifted up higher than the houses. Recently it's moved to a marsh area, with sporadic houses but mostly misty marshland. It's nearly always nighttime. Craggy, hilly grasslands. Caves and woods."

"All rock music has the drone element - the bassline that's always rumbling through the whole thing." The way Tucker says this you might think his low skree and bowed mandolin are only one step removed from Razorlight and The Strokes. And yet perhaps he has a point. Despite an affection for noise and the avant-garde, there's something intuitive about the ebb and flow of 'Furrowed Brow'. It's no more difficult to understand than a ghost let loose in your room: listen to what it has to say; see if it pushes you around. "I'm saying things," Tucker says, "without saying it."