HOW STRANGE that in a year so packed with rhythmic punches of one kind or another, the most enduring noise should come from quarters neither funk nor punk, but from a pair of brothers seemingly time-locked into the spirit of '67.

Or maybe not. Mark and Clive, the brothers Ives, are the kind of living-room duo who might have found some favour in the Great Indie Upheaval of '78-'80, when all manner of new designs were sanctioned and sustained, before the idea of "making your own record" outgrew the quite different idea of "making your own music" and that healthy baby was jettisoned along with the stale bathwater. It could well be a fortuitous bad timing that sees the first Woo album now rather than then, at a time when there is literally nothing to compare it with.

Woo's is the quiet, melodic end of the avant-garde, a largely acoustic concoction owing less to "folk" than to a sense of English country music, its manifold bucolic evocations the perfect complement to a spring (of sorts) slowly stumbling into summer. The hapless Felt would doubtless like to sound like this, but the only real comparison is with the liquid systems of a Buckley album, delicate, suggestive drops and ripples sketching out some grand design of atmosphere, especially on a track like 'The English Style of Rowing' where the Lee Underwood guitar tones and multi-tracked breaths of clarinet harbour memories of some Blue Afternoon…

The main reason that the ambient experiments of Eno so often founder is the forced determinations of theory imposed upon the natural flow of things, the necessity he feels to let the mind know what it should ignore; Woo's music, another ambient strain, has such marvellous powers of relaxation precisely because it isn't forced, because it wanders its own way free of both intellectual and commercial restraints and pressures. There's nothing formalised or studied about these thirteen pieces, no need to know, no threads of attitude or style or rhythm to pursue: this music simply exists, and exists simply. And unlike much around these days, it will stand. It's certainly the only '82 LP I play again and again ... Whichever way Woo go is fine by me.