This is a Recording

For my money this is a heavily front-loaded record: had I bought it on vinyl, disc two would be near-pristine, and disc one would be in need of a clean by now. Owning it on cassette, as I did at first, was irksome, as there was a lot of rewinding involved. I suspect my current CD copy has been with me since '98 or '99. It's not a disc that's picked up all that much mileage as my Frank Black fixation was already beginning to wind down by then. I hadn't enjoyed The Cult of Ray or Frank Black and the Catholics . Even so, I still kept buying his records into the middle of the next decade, with Dog in the Sand and Devil's Workshop being the ones from those years that stuck with me. Much as I loved Pixies once upon a time, their post-reformation material hasn't drawn me back in. Back to Teenager... : it gets off to a flying start, with songs one, two and three all over within five and a half thrilling minutes. 'Thalassocracy', in particular, still gets ...

In the early stages of my Japanese music phase in 2006, I solicited music recommendations via a Q&A website I frequent. Among the bands and artists suggested were Nisennenmondai. At that time very little of their music seemed to be available to buy, but, searching anew on YouTube a few years later I found a powerfully impressive clip of the band performing their track ' Ikkkyokume ': the slow clang of the opening chords piqued my curiosity, then, when Sayaka Himeno's metronomic drums kicked in, I was hooked. Destination Tokyo was then their latest and most readily-obtainable CD. It comprises four long instrumental numbers, plus a brief interlude. The opening two tracks are fast & jittery, with discordant guitar and pulsing bass over astonishingly quickfire drums: impressive, albeit akin to a caffeine overdose expressed in sound. Marginally less intense is the absorbingly repetetive 'Mirrorball' - my favourite track on the disc, while the title-track brings...

Had I not been so short of funds in 2015, I'd have bought Perpetual Motion People as soon as it came out. I was already a fan of Furman's previous album Day of the Dog , and liked what I'd heard of the new one. I ended up acquiring it a few years later, having perhaps left it a little too long, my enthusiasms having drifted off to one side in the meantime. Still, it is a very good record, and a good-looking one on clear blue vinyl. It feels like a continuation of Day of the Dog , with the same '50s rock'n'roll ingredients, garnished with Tim Sandusky's contributions on saxophone: Sandusky produced both records too. A gifted lyricist, Furman delivers her well-turned words with a fervent sincerity. Among the songs, I'm fondest of are 'Lousy Connection', 'Haunted Head', 'Ordinary Life' and 'Body Was Made'. 'Pot Holes' is fun, too. Furman writes a good sleeve-note, and Perpetual Motion People comes with a veritable e...

George Enescu's opus 26, comprising his two Sonate pentru Violoncel şi Pian (sonatas for cello and piano) were issued for publication together but written years apart, the first dating back to 1898, when he was still a teenager; and the second from 1935. The earlier work "shows obvious influence" the CD booklet notes tell me "from both Massenet and Fauré, as well as Saint-Saëns and - especially - Brahms." It's happened several times that I've read of such-and-such a composer being influenced by Brahms, which typically leads me to wonder why it is I enjoy the music of such-and-such while deriving no such pleasure from Brahms'. The first sonata, with those conventional Romantic ingredients, is a piece I find a good deal easier to apprehend & appreciate than the slipperier second. I end up feeling as if I'm too inexpert a listener to grasp many of the niceties of Enescu's mature style. Having said that, some parts of the later sonata do hit...

I'd been intrigued by the reviews I'd read of Aphex Twin's music, but don't think I'd heard as much as a note of it before I bought my first CD of his (the Donkey Rhubarb EP). This more than exceeded my indistinct expectations and indeed knocked my socks off, so I was eager to hear more. Next up, purchased in mid '97 or so when I was still in Italy, was Selected Ambient Works Volume II .  Described by its creator as "like standing in a power station on acid," it is certainly hair-raising and potentially disorienting, although, when not in quite the right frame of mind for it, it's also not without its longueurs. Unlike my other Aphex Twin discs this one is still in reasonably good condition, as the right frame of mind only came along relatively infrequently, and then less often again as the decades wore on. When I play it nowadays, I'll tend to skip past quite a few of the tracks and stick to my old favourites. With all the tracks but one bein...

I knew I wanted get a copy of Sign "O" The Times when I heard 'It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night' played in full on the radio. Up to then, I'd been in two minds: the title track had left me a bit cold (as it still does now), but 'U Got the Look' and 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' seemed to hold more promise. Most likely I didn't buy the cassette until the year after its release. By 1990, though, I had two copies - I think I must have lent out the first one, given it up as lost, and obtained a second - only for the original to be returned. When one of the students visiting my flat-mate from Košice asked if I might dub him a copy of the tape, it was my pleasure to just give him the spare one. The only Prince CDs I ever bought were an unsatisfactory pressing of Purple Rain , and his Greatest Hits , but, soon after getting my first record player, I found a lightly-used vinyl copy of this album, which has since been joined by a few other of his class...

Broadcast: the name of this band was, for me, actively off-putting. If it conjured up any kind of associations, they were anodyne ones. While I'd read about them any number of times, it was only after the release of their collaborative album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age in 2009 that I began to investigate their work, and to realise what I'd been missing out on. Not much more than a year after that came the desperately sad news that their singer Trish Keenan had died. Having first obtained their music by way of file-sharing, there did't seem any great hurry to buy their albums on physical media, but, at length, I did the right thing and acquired the three studio albums on CD, beginning with 2000's The Noise Made by People . It often happens that I'm attracted to music with a cooler emotional temperature, and Broadcast's sound strikes me as particularly chilly, and also - figuratively - sharp-edged, metallic and bright - ...