Just over a decade ago, an anonymous-looking Jiffy Bag arrived in my pigeonhole at work. This was pretty much par for the course in 2002.
Without wishing to sound Jiffy Bag-ist, they do have a habit of being hard to distinguish from each other and looking rather anonymous.
But what this Jiffy Bag contained made it one of the most remarkable pieces of packaging to have ever crossed my fumbling fingertips.
Inside was a CD-R. Robert Mitchum's brimstone face and polarised knuckles from Night Of The Hunter stared up at me from the homemade sleeve. The band's name was Soft Hearted Scientists. I remember thinking it an unwieldy name - but being very glad indeed that neither the name nor the sleeve suggested Lostprophets-wannabe. That was a rare blessing back in 2002, trust me.
So, the CD went into the cumbersome multi-CD platter in the office hi-fi and a humdrum Wrexham afternoon was transformed into something magical. I've had moments like that maybe six or seven times over the last two decades. The lo-fi, four track hissy tape masterpieces contained therein resonated so truly within me.
I heard a yearning for wonder and escape; a profound love of Wales' wildest spaces, the natural world and the folklore we fleshbags have written since time immemorial to try and explain the mysteries of that world. I heard jaw harps, arpeggios, whispered vocals and fading, broken synthesisers. I heard an echo of the music that I'd probably most want to make if I'd had the skills and the courage to follow my pipe dreams.
I heard psychedelia and folk interweaved with such natural grace it blew my preconceptions to shimmering tatters, many years before 'folkdelica' became a de facto genre.
It was the Beta Band playing Pentangle and that was just about perfect for me.
I made my friend Will Riding listen to the whole album in my tiny kitchen on Whipcord Lane. We drank lots of wine, smoked a bit, didn't notice the clock dance through the hours as we started the CD again and again. Both of us were smitten. Will had no vested interest in Welsh music. But he loved this as much as I did - and that's important when you're used to hanging your arse out of a window only to have people point and laugh at it.
On 18 February Soft-Hearted Scientists release Whatever Happened To The Soft Hearted Scientists, a double vinyl retrospective on Fruits De Mer Records. It contains some of the most singular and wonderful music made by Welsh minds over the last decade. I know this because I love it without reservation. I also know it because many others don't and didn't.
I played Soft-Hearted Scientists more than any other artist from 2002 until 2010. They generated more polarised correspondence to my show than anyone else, ever. When an unconvincingly dreadlocked, Metaller Lite, who thinks you should be playing him yodel "baby, see my funk worm" over a 93rd hand Red Hot Chilli Peppers' riff writes in, in green ink, demanding I play his band instead of "that foke (sic) rubbish from So Farty Scientists" (I did laugh at that, to be fair), I knew my instincts were bang on. I was kneeling in front of the right idols.
So, my track of the day today is Rockford's Return. The original of this was on that CD that dropped into my pigeonhole back in the day. It's a hypnotic mantra for those on the verge of cynical meltdown, bruised by the ludicrous, painful realities of a thoroughly unromantic world. It has a cuckoo clock on it and was inspired by the theme music to James Garner's brilliantly hangdog 70's TV detective.
Really, truly, honestly who could want more?
