One of the joys of my ‘day’ job is having the opportunity to expose people subliminally to music they might not otherwise hear. An academic library isn’t a place where you’d expect people to be playing music anyway, but the department I work in (Audiovisual) is sealed-off from the main stacks and full of records and films, meaning noise is par for the course.

Anyway, over the last 18 months I’ve been working here we’ve played everything from post-punk to techno to bebop to Qawwali to hiphop to tango at the students and academics who pass through, with varying responses from complete ambivalence/ignorance (”you play music in here? I didn’t realise…”) to distaste (”what’s this shit?”) to bemusement (”…*?*…”). Occasionally, of course, someone reacts well to whatever we’re playing - I’ve made a couple of people CD80 ‘best ofs’ for Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno, a colleague lost his shit for Dave Douglas’ Freak In. But the record that’s inspired by far the most positive reaction is Drive By by The Necks. 50-year-old women, 20-something dance kids, PhD students, professors of film - the variety of people who’ve been intrigued and beguiled enough to ask “what’s this?” and then grill me for information has been unusually varied.

I think the thing with The Necks is that one actually needs to hear the music to be bewitched; simply reading someone else’s reaction to it isn’t enough. Postrock? Ambient? Jazz? 60-minute songs? It doesn’t sound too appealing or make much sense until you actually hear the sound of those drums, that bass, the piano, the layers and twists and hypnotic repetition that lures you like sirens calling to a sailor. As much positive feedback as I’ve got from this, and as much as I enjoyed writing it, it’s pretty redundant if it doesn’t inspire people to hear the record, and, as radio isn’t amenable to 60-minute instrumentals and P2Pers seem keener on amassing huge stocks of individual 3-minute pop songs than downloading whole albums (which, although only one track, is what Drive By is), hearing the record at all isn’t easy.

So I guess what I’m doing is imploring people to download, or, even better, buy (you can get it pretty easily from Amazon UK or Amazon US) the damn thing and hear it for yourself, because unless you fancy a trip to Exeter University’s AV department you’re not going to be able to hear it without making an effort. And, trust me, it’s more than worth it.