The Listening Club - 8th May 2016

Greetings folks and may the eighth be with you. Or something.

Well then, I do wonder sometimes that my hellos here always seem to be followed by some sort of weather report (*does jazz bass fingers*), but hello-o sunshine! Last week was a gloomy kings day, frost and hailstorms, this week: break out the electric fan and fetch the iced coffee. Keeps you on your toes anyway, whilst you wait for the new Radiohead album to arrive. Or not, as the case may be, as it seems to have arrived prematurely as I type.

Last week @nessiest was in the chair, and smoothed out the week's end with Edward Sharp & The Magnetic Zeroes new album "PersonA", which met with approval all round I think. Many thanks to Ness for the pick and for flipping the frisbee a whole five feet across to @JimMcCauley, who was sitting on our sofa at the time. He's not now, but sent this in, by way of introduction...

"Tempting though it is to subject you all to my current obsession tonight, at two hours and twenty minutes the whole of Hamilton would be pushing things just a little bit, and as a lyrically and musically dense sung-through hip-hopera (I've genuinely seen it described as that, which raised a smile) it defies editing down to best-of selection; very few of the songs make much sense out of context. 

Instead, then, here's an older obsession of mine. Staying in a very cool and groovy little Amsterdam guest house back in 2000, I needed some music to go with a box of psilocybe mexicana, so I found a record store on the Leidsestraat and picked up a couple of CDs: Underworld's 'Everything, Everything', and this album, the two of them providing an excellent soundtrack for a few hours of realisation of the interconnectedness of everything, and observing the grain of the wooden floor rearranging itself into lines of intricate runic glyphs.

I'd heard bits of it before at work, usually accompanied by 'What the hell is this?' comments; the sort of reaction that immediately makes me mentally file something  as worth checking out in full, and it was definitely worth it in this case. It's an artist who's a very big deal in plenty of non-English-speaking countries, but more of a cult thing around these parts. Possibly a bit Guardianista, and definitely one from the world music section. I'm not sorry. Enjoy!"

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is....


See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)