Sooner or later, I suppose, John Fahey was going to cross my path. I'd had his name at the back of my mind for a while now & this morning I saw a copy of A Young Person's Guide To ... also entitled Sea Changes & Coelacanths. Irresistible - especially with the cover art. I get it home, listen to a few tracks & discover it's very much late period Fahey & not what many of the hard-core fans regard as the 'real stuff'. Undeterred, I head for the Mediatheque (where else?) & flip through the racks. Nothing. Odd. Until I notice on the window ledge - home to outsize items - this sumptuous set of his early years recordings. It's as though I was meant to find it.

CD1 is playing now - & there's some fine music. Tracks such as The Transcendental Waterfall are extraordinary even for someone like me who knows little about Blues guitar playing & the subtleties he's working with the tradition. Above all it is the entire context in which Fahey is starting to make this music - as the booklet explains, a time when so little was available & you had to root it out for ourself. Fahey's first hearing of Blind Willie Johnson stands as an epiphanic moment equivalent to Frank Zappa's finding of a Varese record in a dump bin. & the Zappa parallel extends further with Fahey's resolutely home industry methods & single-mindedness.

Made my day.