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First off, if you'll indulge me, a little bit about ME. It's sort of germane to the words that follow.

I've never had a tribal attitude towards music. The music I grew up hearing courtesy of my mum and dad was always pretty varied: old rock 'n' roll 7"s, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Van Morrison, Roxy Music, Mike Oldfield, Springsteen, Ray Charles, Motown, JJ Cale, Aretha. It was like formal training for a prospective, future subscriber to 'adult' music magazines.

"You might turn up your nose at this Chuck Berry now, young Abbles, but in twenty years time when you're struggling to complete the Mojo crossword, you'll thank me for introducing you to My Ding-a-Ling."

That is a suspect sentence on so many levels. But I'll take whatever cheap laughs are going, thanks.

Of my own volition I was getting obsessed with the tape deck, the Top 40 and - in particular - Landscape's Einstein A Go Go. I passed through a decidedly MOR, stadium rock phase. My younger brother (the shame!) re-educated me with a bizarre concoction of Madness, Iron Maiden, Ice T and aciiiiiiiiiiid house blaring through the wall, knocking over all of my carefully assembled Citadel Miniatures.

By the time I was 18 I, like millions of others who grew up throughout the 70s and 80s, had no real idea that music fitted into convenient little, restrictive boxes. Music was music. The stickers on the racks at the local record shop just indicated flavours. My appetite was catholic even if the end result was an unholy stew.

So genre delineated music listening has always been anathema to me. I suspect it's anathema to anyone with half an ear linked to a quarter of a brain. But having spent my fair share of time with Northern Soul aficionados; doyens of whatever micro-genre of dance music is currently flavour of the weekend, and obscurity obsessives, I know that many others - and frequently those regarded as tastemakers - deliberately focus their tastes into an aesthetic.

I'm nowhere near cool enough, or unwise enough, to let the form dictate the noises I fall in love with.

If I like it, that's all that matters.

But it's rare to hear that ethos expressed coherently and compulsively on any given musical platform, whether it be a magazine, a festival, a radio show, whatever.

Which is why the first time I heard Ruthin's Soundhog it was an epiphany. I was blithely clicking on links in a concerted fug of pretending-to-work at our ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ office in Wrexham (in 2002). One dull Stereophonics-wannabe filed past another, like empty cardboard boxes on a conveyor belt. Then something cracked me a sharp one across the face, grabbed hold of my good ear, and proceeded to bash my head repeatedly against the speaker with an unholy mangling of TLC and the B-52s.

I quite liked TLC, although I wouldn't have dared to admit that to anyone. But here were the vocally perfect nu soul melodies and harmonies of No Scrubs wrestling with the grit under the B-52s' cracked nail varnish. By god, it sounded good: a tremendously exciting, post-modern reinvention and inversion of genre boundaries and the listener's expectations. That made me want to dance.

I know Soulwax had popularised the bootleg form, that Soundhog hadn't invented what I was hearing, here. But it was his impeccable taste, his courage to juxtapose the unexpected, and his meticulousness production that elevated his work above all others'. That's right: all others.

As 2002 reeled into 2003, it seemed like the whole world and its musically-conversant cat were displacing urban vocals over 'credible' guitar music and looking rather self-satisfied about their ingenuity, even though the genie had long been let out the bottle, quite literally with regards to Christina Aguilera's bootlegged-to-death song of that same cliché, Soundhog was thinking more expansively. His boots absorbed Mogwai and a host of artists others wouldn't have had the taste or knowledge to assimilate.

And his considerable musical brain was thinking about bigger pictures: mixes that took wing on the simple concept of the mash up, but extended the length and the parameters further than anyone had hitherto dared to go.

The Radio Soundhog series of mixes are legendary within that 'scene'. Even the people that Soundhog would entangle himself in interminable forum-based arguments with, because he hated what they were doing with the form and wasn't backwards in saying so, could do nothing other than pay tribute to the meticulous, all-encompassing genius showcased by his mixes.

He became the scene's iconoclast. The likes of Go ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Productions might have got to cosy up to the industry and earn themselves a few cheques, but Soundhog remained thorny and opaque. A man sat alone atop his considerable record collection, speaking his mind as the scene crumbled under the weight of its own self-regard and general lack of standards.
Soundhog got poorer as his mixes got better, and more infrequent.

His reluctance to whore himself around, while laudable, meant that only a select very-few-indeed got to hear and marvel at his skills, and enjoy the music that he so wanted to share with the wider world.

Which brings us to now.

After three years and more headscratching than a nit infestation at a primary school, Soundhog has finally finished Radio Soundhog 7.

It's called 'The Game's Over' because he can't imagine ever doing anything like this again.

I don't doubt him. But I've heard him make such bold and fatalistic proclamations many times over the past seven years.

Suffice to say that RsH7 is a triumph. We're 1,000 words into this and I won't waste any more of your time trying to describe its multitudinous wonders or risk spoiling the surprising and inspired juxtapositions that await you.
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The bluebottle is out.