Recent Purchases

Gentle Giant - Gentle Giant/Acquiring The Taste (BGO Records)

PFM - Per Un Amico (finally own the disc!)

f**k Buttons - Tarot Sport

Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing

Black Dice - Broken Ear Record

Harry Partch - 17 Lyrics of Li Po

Tied + Tickled Trio - s/t

Hood - Cold House

Xiu Xiu - A Promise

Curved Air,Second Album.

Eloy, Floating.

The Who, Tommy.

 

From my local market,

Deep purple in concert.

Rush, Roll The Bones,

Family, The Best Of, Strange band.

 

Charity shop run.

Iron Maiden, Dance Of Death.

Wishbone Ash, The Collection.

The A.R. & Machines box is very nicely done.  Still working my way through it.  There are remix CDs 

I'm loving that Camembert. It's the bee's knees, and possibly the aardvark's nostrils.  Still need to hear Chicano Batman and have not heard of Sven Libaek.

 

Guldbamsen wrote: Oh and yet another 'what?!?!?!': remixes ?  Like techno?

Well, kinda...

Full skinny on the box contents: you get the five studio albums, the 'Erholung' live album with two additional tracks including a 26-minute odyssey, another CD of a concert from 1976 consisting of two 40-minute trips (this is a real gem) and three CDs assembled by Reichel from AR&M material retrospectively. These are:

“Transformation”:  Made by AR in 1996 as part of his initial exploration of digital technology, and actually a pretty respectable mid-nineties ambient / chillout album. If it had been released at the time it could have sat quite happily on my shelf between FSOL and Little Axe (if you remember them!). He didn't release it then as he’d decided that you can only be one thing at one time (funny story in the book about the flack he'd recently got from fans of his rock singer stuff when he authorised the CD reissue of Grune Reise...).

“14 Pieces for Guitar and Echo Chamber”:  AR found a box of tapes when looking for additional material that turned out to be unaccompanied echo guitar experiments he'd laid down during the AR&M years. I think these have been edited by AR to make more coherent pieces and treatments applied in a few places. A bit to my surprise this is one of the best things in the box, quite mesmeric and compelling stuff.

“Virtual Journey”: a second CD of beat-orientated mixes made by AR for the box set. These are generally more minimal (largely just guitar and rhythm) and on the whole work pretty well, with a few tracks that I can see myself programming up regularly when I'm in the AR&M headspace. 

I guess the trancey and groove-driven nature of quite a lot of the original AR&M material lends itself better to this kind of treatment than most 70s rock/psych/prog. And AR hasn't made a fool of himself with these mixes - we're not talking about a Wishbone Ash Trance Visionary-style fiasco here, thankfully.