The third year of my slow attempt to piece together all the fragments of a history of the genre-defining Bristol indie-pop label Sarah Records is ebbing towards an end, and I'm pretty close. The perfect Sarah collection, of course, would line up every release they ever did, in every format, in catalog-number order with the flyers and newsletters and posters interspersed in their logical positions. I reserve the right to keep going until I've assembled such a thing, I guess, but my actual goal was the somewhat more manageable proposition of tracking down all four hundred ninety songs those releases contained. This allowed me, for example, to buy compilations and reissues and licensed versions where available, and to skip singles if their tracks were all available on album. Arguably, since the liner notes and catalog blurbs were so integral to the Sarah aesthetic, a track-centric approach is fundamentally inadequate, but enough of the songs exist only on their original singles for this not to be a real issue in practice. I made progress according to a schedule any statistician could have sketched ahead of time: quick headway at first, and then the steps forward coming further and further apart, with the money involved generally ascending in inverse proportion. I would have expected me to keep scrupulous track of every step in this long quest, so that I could now produce a coruscating three-dimensional graph of the extent of my Sarah collection and the magnitude of the expenditures plotted against each other and time, but for some reason I didn't do so explicitly, so the fiscal data is now lost, and even the tracks-vs-time graph, which could be reconstructed from my normal record-keeping, would entail more manual data-mining than I currently have the patience for. So all I can easily report is status. The core run of Sarah 1 to Sarah 100 consists of eighty-seven seven-inch singles, three ten-inch, two twelve-inch, three flexis, three fanzines, a board game and a final retrospective. Objectwise, I'm missing nineteen of the seven-inch singles, one of the twelves and two fanzines, but I have CD-singles for most of the missing seven-inches, and almost all the remaining songs otherwise covered. I have the board game, and did try to play it once. As of the beginning of September I had found all but seven of those four hundred ninety songs. Today I have all but two: Another Sunny Day's "Anorak City", from the flexi Sarah 3 or the equally elusive ASD omnibus London Weekend (Sarah 613); and the Field Mice's "Humblebee", the one track on Skywriting (Sarah 601) not included on the two-disc Skinkansen retrospective Where'd You Learn to Kiss That Way?.

Although Sarah music isn't literally homogenous, most of it, especially if you concentrate on the bands for whom they put out more than one release, does fit into a fairly well-defined spectrum of fragile, introspective, romantic pop with occasional experimental leanings. Probably the most dramatic exception was the Harvest Ministers, a folk/roots band more akin to Dexy's Midnight Runners or Jackie Leven than the Field Mice or the Orchids, but since I already liked that kind of music, I didn't have any problem with them. The Sarah band it took me the longest to appreciate, and maybe that's why they still seem kind of out of place to me, was Boyracer, who were only ever a pop band in the coy, term-co-opting sense of the Buzzcocks or the Ramones. If the essence of punk, in its original Clash/Sex Pistols/Adverts/etc. incarnation, was the joy of sheer incompetence (which it usually wasn't, but for historical purposes it's sometimes useful to pretend it was), then Boyracer are one of the purest punk bands of all time. Stewart Anderson's self-deprecating streak, more Morrissey than Jello Biafra, generates some unexpected lyrics, but the music is jubilantly berserk chaos. The night I finally understood Boyracer was the night I saw Steward play a solo show, opening up for the Cannanes. He got on stage by himself, with a tiny pink guitar I assume he got out of a Japanese cereal box, hit the Start button on the backing-track machine, and proceeded to thrash through his entire set extracting an undifferentiated jammed-vacuum-cleaner grind from the guitar and yelping utterly unintelligibly into a microphone in shrill tone I would otherwise only expect to hear while watching a badger-derived Pokémon being crushed in a recycling truck. As music, it was an abject disaster, but as spectacle, and conceptual art, and a DIY fuck-you, it was borderline timeless. This degree of solipsistic obliviousness is very hard to find in music. The Shaggs had it, of course, but with the Shaggs it's next to impossible to tell what they thought they were doing, so the music just comes off as surreal. Boyracer are trying to write rock songs, so when they fail as badly as they do in most of these songs, it's on the order of a stoned forest ranger trying to explain to you the "technology" of Stonehenge, or your youngest daughter delivering your "copy", on a folded quarto of mustard-yellow construction paper, of her latest "novel". In what measure that's charming, and in what measure stupid, you'll have to decide for yourself.

Boyracer would be much less puzzling to me if Stewart didn't also spend a small part of his time quietly backing up Nicola in their hushed side-project Empress. Plainly he does have some idea what he's doing, at least enough to not do it when it isn't appropriate. Empress appear to be opposed to album titles, but this blue one, on Geographic, is their second. The first one sounded like Low. This one sounds like the first one, but that extra degree of separation from Low, combined with the fact that Low 2001 don't sound like Low 1998 so much any more, either, has introduced enough difference for me to stop thinking of Empress as producers of extra Low records. As Low have expanded their palette, in fact, Empress have restricted theirs, and this album pushes towards a meticulously distended minimalism that has more in common, psychologically, with Stina Nordenstam, later Talk Talk and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. "Blackpool North" in particular, with Nicola muttering in a whisper over background static and a single three-note cycle, is chilling and inexplicable. "The Last Lane" starts out like early Low ("Violence", perhaps), but slides off into a sort of clockwork ballet. "Billie's Blue" is an asylum lullaby that makes me never want to go to sleep. No, I've said that wrong: I already never want to go to sleep, and this is music for not going to sleep to.

The 2001 Low release I'm destined to forget about, since there's obviously no point in comparing it to Things We Lost in the Fire, is this short disc of songs recorded at Konkurrent, in Amsterdam, as part of the label's ongoing series in which bands are invited to take a couple days out of their European touring schedule to come in and improvise a little strange music. Low brought along Dirty Three, and the two bands go through these six songs (five originals and a Neil Young cover), as a sextet. Low and Dirty Three shared a split single a while back, which was my first Dirty Three exposure, but I confess that despite buying three Dirty Three albums since, wanting the association with Low to be powerful enough to evoke my support, I still find Dirty Three unappealing. So when these sound like Low songs with some extra background noise and a violin ("I Hear...Goodnight", Young's "Down By the River", the stilled "Invitation Day" and even the country-tinged "When I Called Upon Your Seed"), I like them just fine. But when the precedence is reversed, as on the mournful instrumental "Cody" or the out-of-tune-banjo gospel-blues number "Lordy", I discover that Low's endorsement of Dirty Three is no more effective for me when they're standing in the same room to deliver it.

Low leads inexorably to Ida. Maybe too inexorably, now, in my mind, since Ida's new album, The Braille Night, also seems to keep diffusing into the glow around Things We Lost in the Fire, for me. In this case there's also an explanation that has nothing to do with me, as most of the songs on The Braille Night are leftover recordings from the sessions for Will You Find Me, with a couple later tracks slotted in to get to an album-like running-length. And despite my position that Amnesiac represents Radiohead trying Kid A again and getting it right, and my belief that Emm Gryner's covers album is one of the most beautiful things I've heard this year, I'm only growing more firm in my opposition to shortcut albums. If you don't have the energy to make a real new album, just don't. We'll wait until you're ready. There are plenty of other artists who could use our attention, in the meantime, for records they've poured their souls into from scratch instead of sweeping together from scraps.

After a single and a split EP with Low, Karla Schickele finally takes advantage of the lull in Ida work to make her album debut as a solo artist with New Problems. I am waiting to be convinced, not having been by the other few songs, that she has a coherent idea of what she wants to accomplish by herself, other than simply publishing on a more aggressive schedule than Dan and Elizabeth's new family responsibilities allow. There are twelve songs here that have a chance. Well, eleven after you eliminate the nineteen-second instrumental intro. Nine after you get rid of the single tracks "Not Here" and "Bad Day at Black Rock (Regular Girl)", neither of which I've warmed to. "Reminder" gets buried under its production, so eight. "Play by the Book" has clarinet where it needs Dan and Elizabeth's voices, so seven. "Hip Flask" has their voices, but neglects to provide parts worth their presence, so six. "Fighter Dove" and "Telegram" both sound to me like a decent beginnings of ideas that Karla attempts to resolve with trick production instead of actually finishing writing them. "Knoxville" is noisy to no end. "Got a Feelin'" is an unconvincing costume turn.