Finally managed to get hold of a copy of this. Pretty, isn’t it? The “album reviews” tag with which this post is lumbered doesn’t come close to doing it justice. I swear that when my copy first arrived, I spent an hour just stroking it. And then another hour wiping off my dirty fingerprints. Only then did I began thumbing gingerly through the contents of this new edition of the Rune Grammofon retrospective book, with new interviews and artwork by Kim Hiorthoy. It took me another day before I remembered about the 2 CDs that were secreted within the folds of the jacket.

24 tracks of exclusive musical content from the great Rune Grammofon, spanning the ever-increasing width of their roster, would have been (almost) worth the entry fee alone. The two discs lurch from RG’s gentler side (heart-piercing balladry from Susanna, beguiling click and glitch from Skyphone, stately Bill Evans shuffle from In The Country) to the devastating skronk of the kind with which the label is prone to erupt (the riff and rumble of Scorch Trio, sixteen minutes of Supersilent, the bizarre Canterbury prog-jazz of Jono El Grande). Amongst all of this, the three minutes of solo Deathprod (arguably Rune Grammofon’s most influential act over the entirety of its existence) “A Dream For Ted Greene” still manage to stand out: a quiet and dense wintry drone from which emerges some haunting scraps of guitar melody.

In an extremely frank interview conducted by Kim Hiorthoy, the label’s founder/owner/manager/everything (I’m sure he’d press the CDs himself, if he could) Rune Kristofferson says that he feels the label has reached some kind of crossroads; its attitude towards its releases as beautiful physical objects perhaps being somehow anachronistic to a generation brought up on a diet of mp3s. However, there will always be a space on my shelves for impeccably designed and thoroughly undownloadable artefacts such as this.

Money Will Ruin Everything 2 is available now from Rune Grammofon and Boomkat.