“OF COURSE, I could have gone to India to do this, but where’s the mystery in that?” asks Taken By Trees’ Victoria Bergsman, once the cool but hot Swedish voice of The Concretes and Peter Bjorn & John’s Young Folks.

She picked Pakistan for her less-concrete adventures, drawn to the Sufi musicians’ way of playing to enter a trance-like state. Such a state would not come so easily to Bergsman, who had to overcome bureaucracy, cultural differences and the opposition of the Swedish government, who could not guarantee her safe passage.

Nevertheless, barriers were overcome, even the small problem of the electricity going off every third hour, and so the union of magical Sufi sounds and beats and Bergman’s songs of mystery and wonder bore fruit, although not quite so fruitfully as this year’s Scottish-Japanese liaison of The Pastels and Tenniscoats.

Whereas the notion of a woman being in charge of a recording session was initially anathema to the Pakistani players, One Dove’s Dot Allison had no such problems in drawing Peter Doherty, Paul Weller and The Bad Seeds’ Mick Harvey to her Scottish lair for her third solo album. “Dot is like some gifted child locked in the attic of the music industry,” said Doherty, in an apt appraisal of her filmic, distant yet beckoning songs. Doherty plays the young buck, Weller the old roué, Allison the noir siren. Beautiful, but creepy as space.