This is not so much a CD with an accompanying booklet as the reverse: a hardbound book, disc mounted in a pocket at the back, running to 62 pages. Both text and CD have a thesis: that there is an enormous amount of interesting and valuable music that we hardly rate as ‘music’ at all, since it does not appear in concert halls, on commercial disc or on radio. Yet it is music motivated by a genuine creative impulse and often fulfils a genuine need.

Bob Downes wrote his repetitive but jolly Football Blues for the amateur band of his adopted home town in Germany, and they obviously enjoy it hugely; likewise, Bandemonium, an ‘open-access band’ founded by Bob Strawson a decade ago, have a high old time with his strong but simple tune. When Peter Godfrey helps out his limited keyboard skills with the use of tape delay and produces a fair-to-middling impression of Conlon Nancarrow, or when James Young does something rather similar and sounds very like Philip Glass, we may admire their ingenuity.

People involved with community music or education, or listeners who’ve always thought they’d like to try composing, may be inspired to go forth and do likewise. That is the disc’s value; otherwise the extracts are too brief (average length 2'30") and often of rather too slight musical interest for continuous or repeated listening.

Mark Russell of BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It programme chooses 10 extracts from CDs sent in by listeners, most using relatively inexpensive computers and synthesizers. Amateur composers indeed – all of them technically adroit and at home with the various dialects of current popular music – but here the distinction between composer and techno-nerd is so narrow, and the excerpts so very short, that only one (Peter Boulding’s Fractal Music) struck me as of any musical value.

In one of the booklet’s essays Andrew Peggie calls for us to celebrate ‘rough music, all the music whose merits resist digital mastering: the buskers, street bands, local cover bands, ladies’ choirs, pub talent contests...’ He means ‘folk music’, of course, and I agree, but of the music here very little (Downes, Strawson, the joyous musicians at a wedding in Zanzibar) is rough enough.