Introduction service

BBC Music Introducing celebrated its tenth birthday on 4th October, and has been rightly commended for its promotion of new music, both nationally and locally. The truth, though, is that BBC 6 Music also does that job extremely well. Not having a digital radio in either the car or the kitchen, I listen all too rarely, but last night's poker session presented an ideal opportunity to tune in.

Iggy Pop - these days sounding increasingly like the drawling, deep-voiced cowboy narrator of The Big Lebowski - introduced me to the ferocious punk of 'Aging Jerk' by Drug Church (whose name led him into a long ramble about The Stooges being offered smack on a flight in the early '70s, which must have had his producer at the Beeb having kittens). Meanwhile, an airing of Massive Attack's superb 'Inertia Creeps' made me wonder why I never persevered with Mezzanine. Time to give it another try, methinks.

Iggy's successor in the studio, Tom Ravenscroft, played Surfbort's brilliantly named 'Hippie Vomit Inhaler', a very trashy Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon on vocal duties. Better still was a mix put together by Mogwai that featured (most notably) 'Buried Guns' by Out Lines, a very promising new project from Kathryn Joseph and The Twilight Sad's James Graham, and In Aeternam Vale's 'Dust Under Brightness', electro-minimalism from 1983 that sounds like Factory Floor.

All in all, very welcome exposure to things that would otherwise have never appeared on my radar.