A quiet wander around the CBD.

First stop Missing Link. I'm about to walk out empty-handed when the guy in the shop puts on something that sounds familiar with its angry guitars...and then when the voice starts there's no mistaking Mark E. Smith. I don't have this. It turns out to be Live at the Witch Trials. It's the only copy, and I feel bad making him stop the CD playing so I can buy it, but $30 seemed like a good buy, given that most stuff's heading up towards $40 these days. He said "oh, no worries, I was actually listening to something else on the headphones anyway..."

Synaesthesia was next, and it's the kind of place you can wander into and drool over random weird music you weren't expecting to see. I didn't buy (but probably should've) that Sweden CD, and spotted a few others I could think about going back and getting - Size, Loop Orchestra, a Nurse With Wound album that I wasn't particularly after just yet. Some bloke from New Zealand had a CD called The Evan Dando of Noise. And so on.

Au Go Go's somewhere I hardly ever go to anymore, but I picked up the Silver Ray album - no listening post here, so I just took a chance and spent the money.

Having taken one chance I figured that was enough for the day (in my new "self-restraint / trying to be good" mode), which meant that I didn't end up buying that new Jim O'Rourke CD, despite seeing it in every shop I went to, staring back at me.

There's this odd little shop over in Southbank called Hipper, that sells, for $10, all sorts of old CD reissues of semi-random stuff, including early 80's (et al) Australian stuff (Models, Sports, Split Enz, Sunnyboys, Triffids, Paul Kelly, etc.) which is good if you're after that kind of stuff. I thought about buying a pile of old Bob Dylan CDs, but guilt got the better of me and in the end all I could find was a Billy Bragg album, Talking with the Taxman about Poetry.