When we moved here a couple of years ago, the only room to be completely gutted and remade was what is now my music room. No fancy soundproofing or audiophile tricks, just taking the surplus cupboard out and putting down one of those pretend-wood floors, because the real one was beyond help. Then we looked into putting some shelving into the recess next to the chimney breast, for my CDs. We had one guy round who was a bit of an artisan. He was telling me how he could install these sliding shelves, so that I'd be able to have the CDs two-deep and still have them all accessible. I told him I'd done some measurements and I reckoned I could get almost all of them accessible if just had them one-deep. "Yeah, but you're going to be buying more, aren't you?" I glowered, non-commitally. But I didn't argue, I just got him to send me the quote for what he was recommending, and, as I suspected, it was out of this world. And he hadn't even taken account of the fact — as we later discovered — that the walls and chimney breast are neither vertical nor perpendicular, which would have made hanging his clever shelves well nigh impossible. So we got an odd-job man to put up some bog-standard brackets with adjustable shelves. I can get most of the CDs visible on the shelves. True, all those I've bought in the last 9-12 months are in piles on other shelves, with no spare space to put them away. When I did the original organising of CDs onto shelves (one full shelf of Neil Young CDs including the bootlegs, one of jazz, one ambient and 'krautrock', one of classical and avant-garde, one of folk and world, one of Stephin Merritt and all the purchases he's inspired etc etc), there were about 30 that I couldn't fit on. I selected those to be the ones that I would just about never want to play. Mitchell Froom is there; so is the Artful Dodger.
It was no surprise to find this CD there. To be fair, I enjoyed it more today than I did last time I listened. The Boy was pretty scared by a few of the tracks, but if he grew up liking this kind of stuff, I wouldn't mind him playing it in the car, if cars are still legal then. Though I've heard what Richard's nine-year-old son listens to, and it's much more extreme than this; quite obnoxious — while also strangely reassuring that the generation gap has not been completely eroded by families full of Oasis fans, and that some music still has the power to repel me.
Meanwhile buying a 2 CD compilation because I liked one track (Intergalactic) was never going to be a wise move.
MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2
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