office ambience / maximo park

Over at The Wire website, they've started streaming their 'Office Ambience' chart from the magazine - which I always read faintly depressed, thinking 'haven't heard that, haven't heard that, where am I going to hear that?'. Well, now there's an MP3 stream and it's full to the brim of good stuff, namely...

For starters; some clunky, clicky house with a hint of junior boys and some delicate guitars from the awfully named Githead, Harry Partch's sublime 'Cloud Chamber Music', which everyone should hear, and some of what I can only describe as African acid-rock, by Mingiedi's Konono no. 1 project, which sounds marvellous on a first listen. More needed.

Strønen/Storløkken play glitchy, percussion led modern jazz, LCD Soundsytem do their usual punky dancy thing with the Crass mix of their 'Yeah', and Greg Davis presents some bewitching drone music which makes me feel lopsided. More on him here. Elsewhere, Lydia Lunch does her NY cool thing but I'm a bit tired of Lydia Lunch after all this time. There's more obscure stuff from Dean Roberts, whose restrained and sparse guitar atmospherics bear repeated listening, as do the menacing bass and vocals from Alexei Borisov & Anton Nikkilä, whose very plain, typewriter style website had me briefly inspired to delete all the boxes on mine, a minute ago.

Inching back towards a tune, Soft Pink Truth's tech-house take on Crass's 'Do They Owe Us a Living', treads a fine line between sound art and kitsch. It's the first thing I've heard from their much talked about 'Do You Want New Wave or DoYou Want the Soft Pink Truth?' LP on Tigerbeat. I kind of like it.

I hope The Wire keeps this up - it's a great feature. The link is up at the top, where it says 'The Wire'.

Meanwhile, can I just put a marker down. You like the Futureheads? Mark my words. Maximo Park. Next. Big. Thing. Awesome.