Volcanic Tongue by Various Artists
Twenty tracks to paint a writer's profile
Volcanic Tongue is a strong twenty track compilation of underground gems ranging from Industrial and Punk to Ambient and Folk, recorded between 1968 and 2013, and includes artists like The Bachs, ESP Kinetic, Simon Finn, Orphan Fairytale and Circuit Des Yeux. Compiled by David Keenan, it's a companion piece to his new book of the same name* which collects the best of his music writing since 1988 (when he published his first fanzine). Of the book Keenan states:
Volcanic Tongue is a book about my own personal adventure in modern music and spans the whole of my adult existence, starting from my first musical epiphany when I saw The Pastels live in Glasgow at the age of seventeen in 1988 and was inspired to become a writer, and running up to 2015, when I left The Wire to become a full- time novelist.
Superb artwork from Julian House adorns both album and book.
* Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the mail-order music shop he ran from Glasgow between 2005 and 2015