Music Arcades: Future Pilot A.K.A. Vs a Galaxy of Sound

Not a lot of people know this — it happened when I was home alone, and I've never told anyone until now — but somewhere near the start of this decade I had a first run at attempting something like Music Arcades. It didn't last quite as long as this one. Two, maybe three days. The intent was partly the same: to nudge myself into listening more closely though the discipline of writing something about one album a day. But I didn't make the public commitment necessary to keep my motivation going.

Vs a Galaxy of Sound (or whatever it's called) was one of those two or three albums. I can't remember how I selected them — probably on whim — but Brain Donor's album was one of the others, and, if there was a third, it was probably Deep Purple In Rock.

I think I wrote on my Psion Series 5, and all that stuff is dead media now. I have the files; I just don't have anything that can open and read them (any help much appreciated). But from what I can remember, I was pleasantly surprised by this double CD then. Not impressed to have listened to it once since then, but you can't have everything.

I remember Mr Pilot A.K.A. having quite a few features written about him back then, but his star seems to have been on the wane since. Maybe I'm just as fickle as the rest of the herd, but the album sounds a bit thin now. It starts well, with a collaboration Two Lone Swordsmen (featuring Andrew Weatherall of Sabres of Paradise) and another with Bill Wells, but the latter piece then gets featured three further times in different remixes — and each time it sounds better than what came before or after, which kind of suggests that the rest isn't up to much.

Interesting to see the list of similar artists on Last.fm, because they're such a diverse bunch. (Last.fm similar artists are frequently crushingly obvious.) This may be because Mr A.K.A.'s music is protean and eclectic — or it may just be that so few people have listened to him on Last.fm that the Law of Averages — which whittles away all the unusual outliers in individual listeners' habits as the number of listeners grows — hasn't taken effect.