Various (compiled by Christoph Wagner): Eye & Ear/Auge & Ohr

Like Longplayer and The Rose and the Briar, this isn't so much an album as a book with an accompanying CD. And as a book, it's somewhere between Tom Phillips's We Are The People and Jeremy Marre's Beats of the Heart. In other words a mix of art, curation and criticism, of ethnography, social history and semiotic whimsy — as well as a study in collecting. Sounds lovely, right? Right up my street, anyway: I asked for it for my birthday three years ago.

Music journalist Christoph Wagner has got a bunch of his musician contacts to write short essays (just 500-600 words), each a meditation on a vintage postcard of musicians from across the world. As with the recordings on the CD — whose 24 tracks, taken from 78rpm records, each relate to one of the 39 essays — the postcards come from the first half of the 20th century. That was the heyday of the postcard medium, which was the Twitter of its age.

I came across the book via a mention on Charlotte Greig's website, but there are many Music Arcades favourites among the writers: Robert Wyatt, Jah Wobble, Sylvia Hallett, Clive Bell, Mike Adcock, Terry Riley, plus others like Justin Adams, Pauline Oliveros and Lol Coxhill on busking (it was only recently that I found out that it was him busking that inspired Joni's For Free).

I haven't read the whole book, but it's the best kind of coffee table accessory: one you can dip into and read one or two essays at a time and listen to the tracks that relate to them.

Read more about this book, hear samples from the album and buy both direct