Broselmaschine - Broselmaschine (1971)

Krautrock's wealth of musical curios has been extensively excavated over the past 15 years but Broselmaschine strangely remains in the shadows.

Perhaps the album just doesn't fit in the freak rock image with which the era is best associated.

Rather than the wild strangeness of Amon Duul II's Phallus Dei, the Faust Tapes, Can's Tago Mago or Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, Broselmaschine contains an idyllic pastoral haze that cocoons you in its blissful shimmer.

Considering its continuing obscurity, it's curious that Broselmaschine drew more influences from England than their contemporaries.

The early Canterbury scene can be detected but Pentangle are the obvious frame of reference, as reflected by a line-up including two virtuoso guitarists (Peter Bursch and Willi Kismer) and a female singer (Jenni Schucker).

Schucker also plays flute and her dreamy vocal style - halfway between a semi-comatose Jacqui McShee and Grace Slick - gives this album much of its charm.

The other key factor is the interplay between Bursch and Kismer, the former usually on acoustic guitar while the latter plays electric.

The way Kismet's wah-wah guitar intertwines with Bursch and Schucker's flute on the intro to The Old Man's Song is just magical.

That hoary old folk standard Lassie even sounds refreshed in their hands, with Kismer's solo adding a heady hippy vibe.

Sitar and tablas give Schmetterling an Eastern flavour that fortunately never slumps into raga drone, instead skipping about impishly, introducing a funky bassline eight minutes in and even finishing off with a mellotron flourish.

There isn't a weak moment to be found on the whole album, which sustains its entrancing mood effortlessly through six songs and 34 minutes.

The gatefold sleeve's drawings of castle with butterflies, bats, sprites and mushrooms completes the groovy period ambiance.

Schucker disappeared off to who knows where after Broselmaschine's release and never graced a recording studio again.

The band recorded a second album without her as Peter Bursch and Broselmaschine in 1974 with the help of a couple of Guru Guru members, but not even the presence of Conny Plank in the producer's chair could replicate the magic of their debut.

Remainder bin treasure

Remainder bin vinyl was a source of treasure for any youngster on a limited budget.

Record companies would find themselves with a vast warehouse stuffed with unsold records and ship them out at a fraction of the cost.

An old promotional trick back in the 1970s used to be to send out vast quantities of an album and then declare it had 'shipped gold/platinium' in the hope of getting some momentum going.

It could fail spectacularly - Casablancas Records was so notorious for it that the company was given an unofficial slogan: 'Shipped gold, returned platinum'.

Once they'd given up on selling them at full price, record companies would then send out with a slightly mutilate sleeve to stop record shops from craftily flogging them at full price.

This could involve chopping a corner off or cutting out a thin slice from the sleeve. Which beats using them as landfill for road building in China, I suppose - the fate that befell the unwanted CD copies of Robbie Williams' Rudebox album.

Back in the 1980s, Manchester had a record shop originally called Yanks, then subsequently Power Cuts, that was stuffed with hundreds of these bargain records.

It was a large, bare cellar shop that would occassionally open up an extra, even bigger, room stuffed with vast amounts of vinyl, little of which cost as much as a fiver.

The staff were as curmudgeonly as you'd expect of any decent record shop and you famously had to hand in your bag at the counter before proceeding any further.

The annual sale was also legendary, with people queuing from 6am to snap up albums from prices that started from 29p.

You'd join a vast queue, convinced that there would be nothing left by the time you got in there before finally leaving with a vast bag of random goodies. Half of which would turn out to be rubbish, of course...

Nowadays new vinyl is printed in strictly limited quantities and prices seem to start at £9.99 and rise rapidly from there, so Yanks/Power Cuts increasingly takes on a Shangri-La like quality in my mind.

Link Wray - Link Wray (1971)

This was a surprise find on a market stall in Utrecht in Holland in among a box of Euro prog and 1980s synth pop.

I'd first read about this in an interview with Richard Hawley when he was promoting his Lowedges album in 2003 - Hawley obviously related to the idea of the guitarist finally making his way to the microphone a long way into his career.

Wray was already 41 when this came out in 1971, and hadn't had a hit single since Jack The Ripper in 1963.

He'd gone back to live on the farm in Maryland and 'Link Wray' is very much a family affair. His brothers Vernon and Doug both appear, and Link is proudly pictured with his mother on the back cover, where she also gets thanked for 'hot coffee and good chilli'.

Link has obviously travelled a long way since 1958, when his guitar sound on Rumble was considered such a threat to public decency that it became the only instrumental ever widely banned by radio stations.

Moving back to the farm proved inspirational, with all the tracks recorded in a ramshackle barn pictured inside the cover and emblazoned with the badly painted logo 'Wray's 3 Track Shack'.

The backwoodsman vibe popularised by The Band lies heavy in the air, with a lack of production clarity more than compensated for by a smoked country atmosphere that just wafts off the vinyl.

But then laying it down in the barn still works for Neil Young, and it also paid off handsomely on Neko Case's Middle Cyclone last year.

Link Wray had sung on occasional tracks before, but it's still fascinating to hear his voice (reminiscent of Keith Richards) over a whole album - especially when you know he'd lost a lung to TB while in the army back in the 1950s.

Having waited so long to put his voice to the fore, Link gives the impression that it's very much from the heart.

He keeps the guitar low key, preferring to let Heath Robinson percussion instruments and the piano playing of Billy Hodges and Bobby Howard dominate on La De Da, Fallin' Rain and Ice People.

The country and the church are central to the lyrics, and Link sounds like he means every word of Take Me Home Jesus, God Out West and Fire And Brimestone.

Even when he checks out the girl dancing in the local bar on Juke Box Mama, he goes on to warn her 'you're going to lose your man'.

Not that Wray ever sounds too holy, signing off the album with a cover of Willie Dixon's Tail Dragger that hints that his heart and head are probably pulling in different directions.

Polydor was sufficient impressed with the Three Track Shack tapes to give Wray a deal and package the album with a cut-out cover featuring him in an Indian headband, which acknowledged his Shawnee heritage with a little counterculture cool thrown in to boot.

A year later, Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to pick up his Oscar for The Godfather and the plight of the Red Indians because the cause du jour.

Unfortunately Link seems to have been a little ahead of the game because despite Polydor's efforts to promote the album it sold poorly.

Still, anyone who enjoys the murky grooves of Exile On Main Street (which also came out the following year) should find much to enjoy on Link Wray.

It's equally slow to reveal its laid-back pleasures but well worth the effort.

The Flaming Lips - Dark Side Of The Moon (2010)

Where better to start than Record Store Day, with its host of limited-edition goodies designed to woo us all back to those independent record shops that are steadily going the way of all things.

Singles by Electric Eels, Slow Club, Neu! and the Stones all escaped me but considering the queue of around 500 people waiting outside Piccadilly Records just before opening time, I was still delighted to bag a copy of The Flaming Lips' Dark Side Of The Moon.

Gatefold sleeve, clear vinyl, colour inner sleeve - this is the stuff of vinyl nerd dreams. There's even a CD copy chucked in so I can enjoy it in the car.

Easy All-Stars got there first with Dub Side Of The Moon in 1993, with the songs taking to a rocksteady reggae/dub style surprisingly well. You first listened to it expecting a novelty record but the transformation was done with such obvious love and the lyrics rather suited a 1970s consciousness reggae-type vibe.

The sonic approach is very different here but the love of Pink Floyd's original LP is clearly shared.

It starts out with Henry Rollins muttering the lines 'I've mad for fucking years, absolutely years' and it takes on an ominous air. But then Dark Side... was always supposed to about mental illness, so a more dissonant take on the songs isn't so much of a stretch after all.

Rollins supplies the dialogue snippits, Peaches does an admirable job of Great Gig In The Sky and everything gets pleasingly scuffed up and bashed about.

The bass-heavy groove approach that dominated the Lips slightly disappointing Embryonic LP remains the main focus but the sprawling experimental songs of last year are replaced with 41 minutes of tight material that still manages to crams in plenty of sonic exploration.

Dark Side... is a child of the vinyl age and it shows in its pleasing brevity. When it finishes, you want to play it again - how good does that feel in the bloated CD age?

I'll bet it felt pretty good for the Flaming Lips, who seem to have been struggling with their songwriting a little since 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.

The curious thing about Yoshimi... being that it was effectively a four-track EP about a Japanese girl saving the world tacked onto the start of a chill-out album that would sit nicely next Air's Moon Safari. Stick it on from track five next time the vicar pops round and see if you get so much as a murmur of complaint...

Anyway, no man of the cloth would be impressed with the Lips' take on Dark Side Of The Moon and it's all the more fun for it.

Wayne Coyne and co obviously got into this so they could have some fun in the studio with a few pals. As well as Rollins and Peaches, Stardeath And White Dwarves are actually given equal billing on the album cover.

You'd be forgiven for having never heard of them - and its one band rather than two in case you're confused - but the lead singer is one Dennis Coyne, nephew of Wayne, so nepotism is at work here.

Dennis actually takes lead vocals on Breathe and Brain Damage, sounding like a younger, clearer-voiced version of his uncle.

The highlight is probably Us And Them, done with great delicacy and featuring some lovely soulful Fender Rhodes playing.

It underlines what great musicians the Flaming Lips have become, which it is pretty surprising considering that Coyne admits they got as far as their fourth album (1990's In A Priest Driven Ambulance) with no real conviction that they could cut it in the studio.

Imagine any band getting that many chances nowadays...