SubVersion Stop 215: Buying one record reviewed in The Wire each month...

...is something I started earlier this year after renewing my subscription to The Wire, now jointly with my mate Martyn. (The magazines in fact go to him.)

Anyway, the idea is a simple one. I read through all the reviews — no small task, as they usually run to 20+ pages of small print — noting down records I think I might be interested in. Then I go online and find extracts/clips from these records to listen to, whittling the list down to two or three or six. Eventually I decide upon one record and then go and buy it.

The points of doing this are several:
1) It gives me the impetus read every word of a magazine I've paid for. #moneysworth
2) It gives me the impetus to seek out and (potentially) be excited by new music which I might not otherwise do. #naturallylazy
3) It gives me a small topic of conversation with my mate. #thingstosay
4) It enables me to make a list of them all. #statto

I actually started doing this with the April 2013 issue (#350), but I've subsequently gone back and looked at the three earlier issues to see if I'd inadvertently bought anything reviewed in those as well (which I had); and I've skimmed the new issue (#358) too and seen that I've already bought something from that. So I can now make an entire list for 2013. Hurrah! And if I add three more records (reviewed in 2013 issues) which I've also bought, I can make a proper Wire "Chart". So here it is:

SubVersion 2013 15

#347 James Blackshaw & Ludomyr Melnyk - The Watchers (Important)
#348 various - Wandelweiser und so weiter (Another Timbre)
#349 John Edwards & Okkyung Lee - White Cable, Black Wires (Fataka)
#350 Pat Thomas - Al-Khwarizmi Variations (Fataka)
#351 Mainliner - Revelation Space (Riot Season)
#352 Lee Patterson & Vanessa Rossetto - Temperament as Waveform (Another Timbre)
#353 Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (Warp)
#354 Nohome - Nohome (Trost)
#355 Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program - Back on the Planet (Brainfeeder)
#356 Tom Johnson / Samuel Vriezen - The Chord Catalogue / Within Fourths / Within Fifths (Edition Wandelweiser)
#357 SOS - Looking for the Next One (Cuneiform)
#358 NRSB-11 - Commodified (WeMe)

+#355 DJ Sprinkles - Queerifications & Ruins (Mule Musiq)
+#356 Robert Haigh - Darkling Streams (Primary Numbers)
+#356 Omar Souleyman - Wenu Wenu (Ribbon Music)

Compiled by Jonathan Tait, subvertcentral.blogspot.co.uk