I suppose this is a bit rich coming from someone who gets most of their music for free, but a gentle reminder that tomorrow seems to be Record Store Day across Britain and the US, at the very least.

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I was reminded of this when this morning’s post brought a copy of one of the exclusives that’ll be available tomorrow. It’s a very heady mix CD put together by the marvellous Wooden Shjips, as a bonus disc to go with their new album, “Dos”, which I raved about here a while back.

Reading the tracklisting is a bit tricky, but it seems the band are as taken with some of the dirgey new psych coming out of the States as we are: Sun Araw’s transporting “Canopy” is included on the mix, as well as stuff by Magic Lantern and Blues Control. There’s one overt nod to the Shjips’ antecedents, in the form of an old Loop track. But later today I’ll hopefully start trying to find out more about Moon Duo, Teenage Panzerkorps, Las Llamarada, The Bad Trips and the last band on the list, whose name I’m afraid I’m still not able to make out.

Maybe we’ll try and get the whole jam played out at Club Uncut when Wooden Shjips play for us in August.

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Other Record Store Day tempters apparently include this Tom Waits seven-inch, and a bunch of stuff from people like Sonic Youth; which reminds me, “The Eternal” is starting to make sense now (“Antenna” especially; amazing song), and I’ll write something about that as soon as possible.

In the meantime, while there’s something undoubtedly a bit sentimental about the idea of a Record Store Day, and while I’m not normally much bothered about how people receive their music, it’s hard to imagine even the most assiduous internet communities being able to reproduce the atmosphere of a really good shop. I’m too attached to the culture of browsing to buy many books online and I suspect, if a sackful of freebies didn’t turn up every morning, I’d have a similar need to actually touch music before I bought it, to examine possibilities.

Major natural events allowing, I might try and get down to Rough Trade East tomorrow. But in the meantime, a quick note that the next blog will be my 500th post on Wild Mercury Sound. Anniversaries are a bit corny, but I might try and work out the most popular posts from those previous 498 – even the one where all the Smashing Pumpkins fans started having a go at me. See you then…