Various: Wire Tapper #6

Now The Wire can probably make the best case of any magazine for providing covermount CDs — because hardly anyone has heard the music they write about.

They're a bit sporadic and uneven, though. A couple of days ago, the latest issue dropped through the letterbox: no CD. But Issue #200 came with this double package of over 150 minutes of various flavours and degrees of Out There.

It's not a themed collection like Whispers from the Forests… was. Neither is it a comprehensive cross-section of all you might find in the magazine: only one track you could call jazz (Trio Hurricane + 1); no reggae or dub. And no "freak folk" — unless you count John Fahey under that heading, as a few Last.fm users do — but that maybe reflects how far that sub-genre has come since the turn of the century.

Each of the two CDs starts with artists that are as close to the mainstream as The Wire gets: The Fall, Faust and aforementioned Fahey. Then they head off from the middle of the road into the ditch.

But it's hard absorbing two and a half hours of disparate and unfamiliar music. I listened through three times while working, just to see if anything would jump out at me. Little did, except maybe the hip hop tracks — and those not in a good way (heh!). On the final run through I warmed to the David Grubbs song, and track by Glass Cage. The latter is listed as an 'exclusive' from a forthcoming release, but as far as I can tell from searching, that release never came, and neither did anything else from the ensemble.

MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2
Wikipedia entry for this album
Rate Your Music entry for this album
Listen to a bit of disc 1 at Last.fm, disc 2