It was lawn mowing day this morning, and I finally got my tape player working so that I could listen to music during the hour-long task. I dug through my now decades old tape collection, and came up with two favorites: Commercial Suicide by Colin Newman, and The Shivering Man by Bruce Gilbert. Both Newman and Gilbert were members of Wire, one of the most influential bands in the art rock movement. Wire went on hiatus during the early 80's so that the members could persue their own solo interests, including the collaborations of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis as Dome. I find myself drawn more to these interim projects than to the works of the band as a whole. Perhaps it is was simply the timing of my introduction to the band, but I prefer to think that the disparate styles of the members was somehow lost in the whole, and that those qualities I love in these albums are watered down or missing from the Wire albums that came after. Commercial Suicide is OOP (out of print), but can still be found lurking about the backwaters of E-Bay; The Shivering Man has been re-released.