Leaf Records - 'Pole vs. Four Tet EP'

This is quite a new acquisition - my work colleague Dan gave it to me for my birthday a few years ago, so I guess it reminds me mainly of him. I met him in about 2003, when he was working at Polar Bear in Headingley, Leeds. He was a regular customer at Beer-Ritz. At the time, I thought I knew a lot about music, but Dan kept bringing in CDs from bands I'd never heard of, and everything he lent me was brilliant. It would be exaggerating slightly to say that I gave him a job to get access to his music collection, but only slightly.

Musically, I love this record - it's a great example of how electronic music can sound organic and human, which is odd given its clearly processed and bass-heavy production. Four Tet (Kieran Hebden) is a dab hand at making sequenced music sound natural and live, and if you've never heard any of his early albums, I'd strongly recommend checking them out. And if you like dub, the extreme minimalism of Pole's first three albums (handily titled 1, 2 and 3) are also a must.

Tracks: Heim (Four Tet Mix). Cload. Cload (Pole Mix). Heim.

Catalogue Number: DOCK20

Purusha and The Lovely Genette - 'Gasoline/Cambigil'

A weird, minimal spooked-out record this one, on a legendary but now defunct small Leeds-based, full of personal half-memories not really related to the music. I suppose this a classic example of 'sampler dub', which was quite popular at the time when everyone had sampler. For a while, Mimaster Morris's prediction that no two records need ever sound the same looked as though it might come true, although as we now know, sampling went the other way.

Soundclash was an almost well-known label at the time for releasing bass-heavy post-indutrial dub, and used to put on club nights using Iration Steppas' dub sound system, and I'm sure this record would have sounded awesome through it.

The Lovely Genette was a bloke called John, who played drums. Purusha was definitely a studio engineer, either double bass-playing Louis who mastered my first EP (at Leeds' Lion Studios), or a guy whose name I forget, who ran a studio in the top of Leeds Town & Country Club (which is now the Carling Academy). I remeber the T&C guy when I sat in on the mixing of a track for Overseer's first EP. He became slightly obsessed by identifying the drum sounds and samples Rob Overseer had used in the track, which culminated in a five minute discussion over whether a certain electronic sound from either the Roland 808 or 909 was called a 'thip' - onamatapeiacally correct, but very boring. I remember thinking that if the engineer couldn't correctly identify and name a thip, the whole session was doomed.

Tracks: Gasoline. Gasoline (Oil Drum). Cambigil. Cambigil (Sun Dub)

Catalogue Number: SOUND 005

Rodgers & Hammerstein - 'South Pacific'

This is one that I inherited from my parents. When they were working at a hospital together in the mid- to late 1960s, there was a staff production of South Pacific, which I guess at the time was still a more-or-less contemporary blockbuster. It's pretty high on the old fashioned cheese, but it's still a great listen. The high point for me is the raucous singalong 'There Is Nothing Like a Dame', partly because I heartily, unreconstructedly believe in the sentiment, but also because I've never met anyone who didn't have a smile put on their face by it.

Two examples: I was driving back from a skiing trip with my friends Ben, Simon and Malcolm. It was long boring drive, given an added twist by Malcolm's gallstones; they meant that we were travelling with a whole roundel of Pecorino cheese, which Malc insisted was a perfectly sensible provision (in case you hadn't guessed, Malc is a chap of a certain age). As we hurtled along, in post-holiday sadness, eating slices of Pecorino on chicory leaves (we're not as metrosexual as that makes us sound), I treated everyone to a run-through of '...Dame', jazz-hands and everything. Well, it cheered me up, anyway.

Example two: I was in the studio as a vocalist during the making of the Overseer album 'Wreckage'. I forget exactly why I'd brought this in - it's just possible that we were trying to find something totally off the wall for a mixtape - and the general response to '...Dame' was 'This is DOPE!'.

The whole album is totally feelgood, with just enough raucousness to balance the slushy string-laden numbers. A stone-cold classic.

Tracklist: South Pacific Overture. Dites-moi. A Cockeyed Optimist. Twin Soliliquies. Some Enchanted Evening. Bloody Mary. My Girl Back Home. There is Nothing Like a Dame. Bali Hai. I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair. A Wonderful Guy. Younger Than Springtime. Happy Talk. Honey Bun. Carefully Taught. This Nearly Was Mine. Finale.

Catalogue number: RCA RB-16065

Brian Eno and Harold Budd - 'Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror'

I have no idea when I bought this. I'd guess it was late 1990s, because there are bits in it that I remember sampling and hiding in the background of tracks, just to fill it out and give it a bit of ambience (pun intended). The piano motif at the start of 'The Chill Air' immediately takes me back to the mini-studio I had set up at my gaff on Meanwood Road in Leeds. I vividly remember having woken up really early, getting into the studio, and laying down layers of samples as the background to a track. I'd used loads of tiny snippets of sound, collaged together behind a drumbeat. I had a terrible lack-of-sleep headache, and what came out of the sampler was reflective of that - disjointed, irritated and disembodied. Not a productive morning.

Conversely, 'Ambient 2' is a beautiful record, really soft and dreamy, but at the same time quite structured. I'd guess that's the combination of Eno's production and Budd's meandering but strong piano lines. It's from a period when ambient actually meant 'evocative', rather than shorthand for slow, repetitive faux-ethnic techno.

I hadn't noticed before, but this really reminds me of 'Genny Hanniver' by Tatsuhiko Asano, which is a relatively recent record. It has the same textures and dreamy feel, calm and cool, but at the same time pulling the listener towards a destination. I don't have 'Genny Hanniver' on vinyl, but it's certainly one of the better electronic downbeat records I've heard in the last 10 years.

Tracks: First Light, Steal Away, The Plateaux of Mirror, Above Chiangmai, An Arc of Doves, Not Yet Remembered, The Chill Air, Among Fields of Crystal, Wind in Lonely Fences, Failing Light.

Catalogue Number: Editions EG EGED18

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - 'Ella and Louis'

I don't really know anything about this record - for me, it's a really cool recording of two people at the top of their game, effortlessly swinging through a few standards. But maybe connoisseurs know this to be a cheesy commercial cash-in - whatever, I love it. There's a sleepy, languid quality to a lot of this. Even when they step it up on 'They Can't Take That Away From Me', you get the impression that they're both still sitting down.

I think I bought this from the now defunct chain 'Our Price' while living in Salisbury in the late 1980s. When I got it home, I was blown away by the warmth and intimacy of the recording. I'd just started getting into to hip hop, and this was the opposite of processed, sequenced music, a record in the truest sense - a recording of a performance. They probably knocked this out in an afternoon. To me, brilliant, warm, and deeply soulful.

It reminds me of sunny autumnal Sunday mornings in a bedsit in Salisbury, a rare moment of quiet between work and play. Which, thinking about it, meant being hungover and freezing.

Tracks: Can't We Be Friends, Isn't This A Lovely Day, Moonlight in Vermont, They Can't Take That Away From Me, Under a Blanket of Blue, Tenderly, A Foggy Day, Stars Fell on Alabama, Cheek to Cheek, The Nearness of You, April in Paris.

Catalogue Number: Verve 825 373-1