Being fortunate enough to visit London with work on a reasonably regular basis, most weeks I manage to find time to visit a record shop or two after work. Over the last few weeks in particular I have picked up a wide variety of CD's which do not fit neatly into a single musical category, other than the fact that I like them. Perhaps instead of trying to come up with a meaningful title for this post I should have justed called it "Me rock".
Probably my favourite out of the latest batch is John Cale - Paris 1919. I had heard the odd track on last.fm so was not buying blind, but this is a truly brilliant album. My only dilemna now is that having bought what seems to be widely regarded as his best solo work, anything else I buy may be a disappointment. I did notice that he's performing this at the Festival Hall next month but it seems like tickets sold out pretty quickly - I'm just hoping it's the sort of thing that might appear as a BBC4 documentary later in the year.
Other great finds have been a couple of CD's from Van Der Graaf Generator. I now have four in total having recently added H to He Who Am The Only One and Still Life to the collection. Whilst these are both great albums, I do find I need to be in the right sort of mood to listen to Peter Hammill's 'shoutier' material ... I could however listen to his ballards every day, regardless of mood.
Having now finished reading Julian Cope's excellent Japrocksampler book, I did try and track down some Japrock CD's but this did unfortunately not bear any fruit. I was however a bit more successful with Krautrocksampler and managed to find a copy of Harmonia - Deluxe. For anyone who doesn't know, Harmonia are Michael Rother (Neu), Hans Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (Cluster). This is a perfect album in every respect and has been played daily since I found it.
And finally, for this blog entry anyway, a couple of CD's by John Foxx, on his Metamatic label: A New Kind of Man and Impossible, both featuring Louis Gordon. As I think I've mentioned before, John Foxx is one of those artists that I didn't give adequate attention to at the time. I particularly like Impossible which sounds simultaneously modern and retro. Looking through the Metamatic discrography on Discogs it seems that there are plenty more releases to track down. I also need to get hold of the 3 albums that he did with the pre-Midge Ure Ultravox!
As with all my CD's, I generally don't keep them in physical format, and now having upgraded to a massive 160Gb iPod even less so. Those that I'm selling on can be found on my web site.
Records and CDs for sale
You have such excellent taste! I thought the same when I heard Paris 1919 as my first John Cale experience, and it probably is his best but I liked Fear nearly as much. I've recently started exploring Hammill and VDGG as well. I actually love Hammill's shouty stuff. It's when the music becomes a kind of prog twee that it puts me off (like "Out of My Book" from The Least We Could Do Is Wave To Each Other). Pawn Hearts is also great if it isn't one of the four you already have.
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking time to comment on my blog. Thanks also for suggesting "Fear" as my next John Cale CD - I'll have to keep my eyes open for that one.
ReplyDeletePawn Hearts is one of my 4 VDGG CD's (the others being H to He ..., Godbluff and Still Life). I don't dislkike the shouty stuff, I just have to be in the right mood.
On the CD player today have been the first 3 Ultravox albums (Ultravox, Ha Ha Ha, Systems of Romance) relased in the late 1970's in the John Foxx era, and also a couplf of early Fall CD's (Dragnet and Grotesque) which I've not heard for years.