Various Artists – Doug Shipton presents Dedicated Swallower Of Fashion – Fat City - FCCD034 - ***

Doug Shipton roots resolutely through second hand shops worldwide, scoring impossible obscurities for the Finders Keepers label, which offloads Hungarian Seventies funk, Turkish Sixties psychedelia, Australian biker movie soundtracks, Czech prog, and Iranian acid-folk onto jaded hipsters.

Diggers like Shipton seem drawn, almost morbidly, to the vainglorious attempts by artists far from the perceived epicentres of pop culture to assimilate then dominant Western styles into local idioms, and here he stitches forty-five snatches of such sounds into a seamless, kaleidoscopic, fifty-six minute trip through time and space, defying taste, mocking geography and shredding the Gergorian calendar.

(16/5/11)