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So fatigued I'm barely literate after completing my seventh splendid weekend at SappyFest. SappyFest is the treasure of Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada and my favourite music festival in the world. Founded by the likes of Julie Doiron, it is small and weird, specializing in brave, sincere and noisy rackets; 2015 marked its improbable 10th anniversary.

Seven times now, I have penned Sappy's Sappy Times: a daily journal, printed on real paper, distributed across the festival site. Every night I'd get home at 1 or 2 a.m. and, with the help of this year's new Junior Correspondents, collect my thoughts on all the marvels I heard. The Times were penned between the hours of midnight and 6:47 a.m. My three nights added up into about 13 hours of sleep. The greatest performances I saw were by PUP, Frog Eyes, Nap Eyes, Partner, Nancy Pants, ANAMAI, Mozart's Sister, Julie Doiron, Human Music, Michael Feuerstack and Les Hay Babies. Other major highlights included Shotgun Jimmie's Guided By Voices Sing-Along and a late-night DJ set by DJ Coconuts (a man in a gorilla suit who plays and plays and replays a vinyl copy of Harry Nilsson's "Lime in the Coconut".

As in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, for archival purposes, and for the interest of Said the Gramophone readers, I offer the digitized Sappy Times right here:

If you've never been to Sappy, I'll say it again: it's special and small and remarkable. If you enjoy the kind of music I do, and the songs we do, you owe it to yourself to book a trip to the Canadian maritime provinces. See some swans, some beautiful songs, then drive to the coast and swim in the sea.

Thank you again to Lucas Hicks, as well as Matt Tunnacliffe and the SappyFest board, for making this one of the gladdest traditions of my year.

Stephen Tsoti Kasumali - "Banakatekwe". I know you have considered it: dismantling your life into its simplest parts, small pieces, discarding everything and emerging into a freer today. Sometimes I consider it as I am staring at a plot of grass. This lawn, this green lawn, just leaves. This song, just singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar. But more often I consider the simplification of my life when I am reflecting on its present complexity. This life, this busy life, full of so many moving parts. I look at all these pieces and wonder how many other lives could be constituted from this stuff. Is the stuff of my life enough stuff for three lives, five, fifteen? Would my one complicated life be able to be reconstituted as fifteen simple lives? Plainer, happier lives, like singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar? Not poor lives, ramshackle lives, like a row of shoeboxes - just lives like green lawns. It is too easy to fetishize the sound of faraway, to diminish the complexity of another person's experience purely because it is alien to you. And this is especially true when Westerners look at Africa. I do not believe that Stephen Tsoti Kasumali and the other musicians on "Banakatekwe" have simple lives; their lives are probably as complicated as mine. But "Banakatekwe" is a dream of something easier, freer, made of fewer parts. I wonder if they wonder this too, listening to the recording: Could I make my whole life like this?

[buy (out of print)]

(Photo by Robert Knudsen. It's of Richard Nixon's final lunch before announcing that he was resigning as president of the USA.)

Evening Hymns - "Sweet Surrender". Somewhere in the multiverse, there is an alternate Earth where Sarah McLachlan listened to different tapes, signed to a different record label, stayed east in Halifax instead of migrating westward to B.C. This universe's "Sweet Surrender" is not necessarily superior to our universe's "Sweet Surrender" - McLachlan's 1998 hit is one of my favourite mainstream cancon ballads. But instead of boasting a clean, polished sound; instead of trim drums and neat electric guitars, where the only mystery is the singer's cool + reverberating voice; instead of all that, in this Eric's Trip-inspired "Surrender", there'd be fuzz and chug, voices like burnt sugar. There'd be something closer to what Evening Hymns have done - recasting Thursday midnight as Saturday hangover, mystic longing as grounded wishing. But the same hope and the same defeat: Sarah McLachlan knows and Evening Hymns know that this song is about the hope as well as defeat. Sometimes hope and defeat are call and answer; sometimes they're just singing at the same time. Sometimes hope and defeat are the same syllables in the same voice at the same time, impossible.

[This "Sweet Surrender" is taken from Quick Before It Melts' DOMINIONATED (Deux), a free compilation "of classic Canadian songs covered by contemporary Canadian artists". / more from Evening Hymns]

New Dog - "23". Anar Badalov sing a song of half-serious confession: the things he's done, the things he's done. But mostly it's the guitars that do the admitting, the baring of souls. Splashy electric guitar, dependable electric bass, a mingling of notes that add up to autobiography. Imagine the confessional pyrotechnician, making memoir out of his fireworks display. Imagine the hedgemaze-maker whose hedgemaze says it all. His topiary says, "This is who I was, this isn't where I'm going." "23"'s guitars inhabit this song from the very beginning, giddy to say what they have to say. That first solo, 28 seconds in - part-evident, part-hidden, a laughing panorama. But Badalov doesn't get caught up in their flightiness. He remains convincing, steady, a monk slowly tracing page after illuminated page. [buy]

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Elsewhere:

• My novel, Us Conductors, is out this week in the UK. Buy it from Bloomsbury. In recent days I've spoken about the book with BBC Radio 4's Open Book and my fine friends at The Skinny. I'll be working with the Skinny for one of the amazing events I'm doing as part of a visit to Edinburgh and St Andrews in August.
• But first I'm going to our nation's capital! To Ottawa for an incredible event on Tuesday night, as part of Music & Beyond: I'll be reading from Us Conductors between performances by Thorwald Jorgensen, truly one of the world's greatest theremin-players.
• Then to Saskatchewan: readings in Moose Jaw, later this week, as part of the Festival of Words.
• Finally, have a look-see at this week's column for the Globe & Mail, where I wrote about songs by NEEDLES//PINS (via Jeff) and Tune-yards compatriot Naytronix, plus some thoughts on Mdou Moctar's extraordinary Touareg remake of Purple Rain, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai.

Wolf Alice - "Freazy". One of my favourite movements is the hopeful reach. You on a kitchen chair, tippy-toes, straining to grasp the vase. You on all fours, under the bed, dreaming of that distant box of picture frames. You and an apple tree, you and Thanksgiving's bowl of yams, you and your lover as their train leaves the station. The hopeful reach is nicer than the hopeless reach, nicer than the blind fumble. I am not sure it is satisfying but it is nice. It is nice to watch: see the boy and his hopeful reaching, see the girl and her hopeful reaching, see the Aegean nation reaching for that which it cannot quite grasp. [buy]

(photo source lost)

The Winter Passing - "Fruits of Gloom". Sometimes I get a perverse pleasure out of listening to a song at the inopportune time. As you might infer from the performer's name, "Fruits of Gloom" is better suited to the North American months of November, December, January or February. It is a melancholy rock'n'roll of desolate pavement, bare trees, harsh winds. It is alone in a vast city, emo roaring in headphones. It is Pixies and Jimmy Eat World; it is the 90s, revived, and all of us are lonely 20-year-olds. So I listen to it in late June, in my thirties, in sunshine, and it becomes a source of such strength. Like being able to see the top and bottom of a waterfall from a single vantage point. Like touching the bottom of a lake. There are so many miles of minutes from winter to summer, from sorrow to joy, but in a way each slope is the same; travelling in either direction, you can feel the wind in your hair. [bandcamp / thanks hamza]

Saad Lamjarred - "LM3ALLEM". Travelling in Morocco last week, I reflected on its pop music. A song like this, Lamjarred's juddering summer smash - what did it have to do with the terrasses of Taroudant or the alleys of Essaouira? What could it tell me about Tinghir's river valley? About the people sitting with me at tea? The answer, I think: it couldn't tell me much. In 2015, most commercial pop feels as if it is the product of a vast, musico-industrial machine. For the recording, mixing and mastering of "LM3ALLEM", I imagine a series of conveyor belts, turbines and control panels. I imagine plutonium rods. And a factory in Los Angeles or Nashville looks more or less like a factory in Shenzhen or Rabat. With a handful of major exceptions, what we mean when we say "radio pop" is "stuff that sounds like American radio pop". There's an erasure of the local (and, to some degree, a hybridization of what's American). "LM3ALLEM" is distinctly Moroccan in that it's sung in Arabic, with flourishes from traditional Middle Eastern music and dabke. But that's not actually very distinct: Arabic is an official language in 24 countries and among 200 million people.

I'm not sure that there's a point to my reflections here. I don't wish to fetishize some mythical past when Moroccan radio was full of "real", local Moroccan music. Nor do I wish to dismiss "LM3ALLEM" - as much as it's milled for mass consumption, it's still a rambunctious slab of 2010s dance-pop. But I suppose I'm reflecting on the way that non-commercial art has become a better site for the transmission of regional aesthetics. Gone are the days of Bob Marley or Amália Rodrigues, whose regional sounds became currency in the international mainstream. Now this exchange seems to happen only far away from radio or TV, via small labels, boutique festivals, and - if we're lucky - blogs.