Music Arcades: Agitation Free: 2nd

I let slip earlier this year that I was lusting after this album, and it made its way onto my Amazon wishlist too. Lucy's lovely older sister selected it from there and gave me the CD for my birthday. I genuinely couldn't wait to play it; that doesn't happen very often these days.

It all began with Stuart Maconie featuring this album on the Freak Zone in November last year. I don't listen to the Freak Zone as religiously as I did five years ago, but, since Mixing It was cruelly axed from the airwaves, the Zone has become a refuge on radio for many whole genres of music (I know there's Resonance as well — for whatever reason I've never acquired that habit).

Anyway, I thought I knew all the German bands of the early '70s that mattered — especially those that had any connection with Tangerine Dream (TD's Christoph Franke was in Agitation before he switched from drums to sequencers). It was an exciting surprise to discover another one, and with such lovely, fluid and melodic guitar lines, noodling pleasantly along with jazzy percussion. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I like it…

(… That's how I remember it, anyway, but the raw data suggests a slightly different story: Last.fm says I listened to four Agitation Free tracks more than twelve months ago i.e. before the Freak Zone broadcast. This life-streaming business is going to find all sorts of ways to unsettle our autobiographical narratives, so we'd better get used to it!)

I downloaded all the Agitation Free I could get from eMusic, but 2nd isn't available there or on Spotify. It's like the rest of the catalogue is there to promote sales of the 2nd CD. In my case it worked.