Today I saw a reissue of a Whitney Houston LP that costs eighty-five quid, new. I can’t imagine who it’s aimed at. The intersection between Whitney Houston fan / soft enough to spend eighty-five quid on an album / sufficient disposable income to do same must be pretty small.

Everyone knows all the pressing plants are completely backed up, churning out overpriced, dished, awful-sounding reissues, and that interesting new labels have given up trying to press their interesting music, because it’s extortionate and takes for ever. The seven-inch single is on, if not beyond, its last breath for sure: barely anyone bothers with those now, not least because you’ve got to put them out at a tenner to break even. Vinyl as a vehicle for music distribution died some time ago. Now it’s just for “heritage”, or “heirloom”, or whatever your word is for poser fetishism. Honestly, people are welcome to it.

Bollocks to new stuff. It’s all rubbish anyway. Us middle-aged dads need our represses, because we didn’t know Medicine existed in 1991, but it turns out they were actually essential, and we’ve paid for Prime so it’ll be here tomorrow. And I know you could stream it on the Alexa, but it won’t sound the same, and anyway, it’s not about listening to it, it’s about the warmth and the sleeve art and the feel of slipping a vinyl onto the turntable and dropping the needle, and new things are rubbish, and you can’t beat the ’90s, or maybe the ’80s, depending on when you were seventeen. You had proper bands then, making proper music, and I’ll never forget that time me and my Uni mates went to Knebworth. It’s not like that rubbish they have now, that these Vernon Kays and Scott Millses shout over the end of. And where’s Popmaster? I can’t work this stupid bloody Alexa. It keeps asking me if it can update or upgrade or something, and now it’s got rugby coming out of it, with some silly woman screeching over it. Women’s rugby, for crying out loud. And they’re probably all lesbians. How do I turn it off? Put Popmaster on! And ask me one about Britpop.

Ouroborindra came out on CD-R in 2004, and I didn’t buy it, because I was still a vinyl snob at that point. But, as a Ghost Box fan, I eventually caved and bought the digital download a while ago; the CD-R being next to impossible to find. I’m not sure I ever made it through to the end.

Either the old completist or the middle-aged reissue dad got the better of me, and when Ghost Box reissued it, I got one. It’s got lovely Julian House artwork of course, complete with quote from The Stone Tape.

Eric Zann is, I think, Jon Brooks. But rather than serving up his signature tuneful analogue noodles, he’s doing spooky sound collage and scary drones. There’s even a didgeridoo or something: it’s not the easiest going. It’s certainly not ambient: it demands your attention. It’s not generally soundtracky either, except perhaps near the end when The Hammer House of Piano introduces what sounds like an instrument of torture, underpinned by a satanic ritual and a monosynth.

And please, don’t have nightmares.

I don’t have a bloody clue what this is. But it’s Alone Together #4, and I’m pretty sure I have others from that series. No song titles. “Originally made for a performance at The Wine Cellar which I couldn’t attend”. An artist who isn’t bothered enough to go to their own gigs doesn’t inspire confidence, though I always have a soft spot for anyone with contempt for their audience.

Four songs. No titles. Shortest 50 seconds. Longest 1:50.

The first one is just a noise, kind of like a power tool, though I think it might be a guitar.

The second one sounds like someone putting their thumb on the tip of a guitar lead, through some pedals, accompanied by what sounds like someone else trying to make a broken cable work. Through some pedals.

The third one is more complex noise. At its heart it sounds like more bad connections, but there’s some vocal noise and detuned guitar. I must have played the other side at the wrong speed.

The fourth one is identifiably music. Noise on a guitar, some kind-of singing, and quite a lot of noise.

Pretty heavy going.

An old Box Bedroom Rebels thing I saw cheap and snaffled. Has the usual insert richness, and, like others in the series (I think there are three) a CD with a seriously long track on it. I have ripped it, but I’m not sure whether we’ll have time for it tonight. Let’s see:

$ aur info /storage/flac/eps/marc_manning.ambience_1/bonus_disc/01.marc_manning.october.flac
 Filename : 01.marc_manning.october.flac
     Type : FLAC
  Bitrate : 16-bit/44100Hz
     Time : 1:10:01
   Artist : Marc Manning
    Album : Ambience 1
    Title : October
    Genre : Ambient
 Track no : 1
     Year : 2009

Yeah. No, then.

I’m not sure if I played the sides in the right order, but the first song I heard was gorgeously smooth and plaintive. Folky, almost. The second introduced a tension with noise and dirt. On the other side the first was short shimmering pastoral loveliness, and the second a longer vocal piece, backed with controlled feedback. I’ll do the CD at some point, I promise.

In which Brian Records (bought through Norman Records, coincidence fans) bypass aforementioned vinyl pressing impossibilities by lathe-cutting on clear polycarbonate. Sounds decent too, but might not on your shitty bluetooth bollocks. In fact, it might not even play on that, because the auto-return arm will auto-return immediately.

As the title and format suggest, five very short cello pieces. Does any instrument sound better than a cello? And we get the full range here: teeth-rattling lows and not-quite-screechy harmonics, and everything in between. I think the pieces are musical palindromes, but I’m too stupid to tell for sure.

The music is super, but more than that I love that this exists. That someone went to the trouble of writing music that’s the same backwards and forwards, then came up with palindromic titles, and that someone else decided to lathe cut it, and sell it. There’s hope for record collecting, but you’ve got to look for it.