Retropix’s Home: News Digest for 17th July 2026

Welp I have come back after a long break. I am here and I am not dead, but rather I have a little dilemma.

First off I’d like to say welcome to the new site! I have chosen a new theme which hopefully looks better. Some minimal changes have been made too, but these will probably go unnoticed.

Secondly I must say that while it seems I stopped after my last rating, I in fact did not stop. I have made the full rating for Chillout Crisis but something has stopped me from uploading and it’s time to talk about it.

The way I want to run this blog is so that I have a healthy back catalogue of ratings raring to go – and the way I pick albums is by choosing random. So although I got one of my favourites right after the only intentional decision (Lake Hiraeth) the random feature came back to bite me badly.

I’d hope many people know about James Leyland Kirby, or The Caretaker as he is well known. He does publish works under his own name too but also under the names The Stranger and V/Vm. Just the mere mention of Leyland Kirby probably makes you think I got a long album like the 6 and a half hour beast of Everywhere At The End Of Time, and that in of itself is a true dilemma but if we’re considering that a beast, what I got is a megalith.

Under the V/Vm name in 2006 (rereleased in 2021) Kirby made an album about the death of the 90s rave scene and called it “The Death of Rave”. It is just over 10 hours long itself – but the way I run these ratings means I have a bit extra to cover.

When making this blog I decided it would be good to prefer the “upgraded” version of every album. This means, for example, Mélonade’s self-titled album would not be rated on its own – rather the 2019 remake that includes all the original songs and some remixes will be rated instead.

The Death Of Rave has 2 (or 3) parts. It begins with The Source, 111 tracks for 10h, then we have Additional, another 93 (95 if you include the splits between sections) songs for a further 9h 30m, then finally A Partial Flashback, another 8 songs for 40 minutes.

In total the full album has 214 tracks, and will last 20 whole hours, I could listen to EATEOT 3 times over before this albumset is complete! And I have one rule when it comes to these ratings: I cannot skip ANY of them.

So I have a solution. On the V/Vm wiki there is a tracklist that breaks all 214 tracks down into sections. Starting tomorrow after I upload the Chillout Crisis rate, I will be rating the album one section at a time. Luckily after this we are rating IMAX Superstore by Eternal Supermarket Stock after this behemoth, and that’ll be a nice break from 20 hours of noise. Wish me luck.

Thanks for reading, as ever. I really will need time to do this, it’s not just a 20hr job! Don’t be worried if I’m not here for a while. This dilemma really bugs me daily.