Typically, albums inspire artists before they make music...

Someone hears a record. Falls in love with it. Finds it expressing exactly what they've been feeling. And years later you can still hear its echoes in their own work.

But every now and then, an album does something much stranger. It inspires artists retrospectively.

Their music already exists. The genre is already taking shape. And only then does the artist stumble across a forgotten record and realise: this is where I came from!

That is exactly what happened to Vashti Bunyan's "Just Another Diamond Day." It didn't make any impact on release. It spent decades in obscurity. And then, it came to be embraced as the founding record of freak folk...

I hope you'll enjoy that story, and the other records waiting for you in this issue.

Also in this issue: The haunting darkness of Daniel Bjørnasson's concertos • Castanarc's answer to modern Yes • Wes Montgomery's bootleg worth seeking out, and more...

Pawel