These days, voicemail messages are digital, and probably live in cloud servers at sea. But when I was a child, many homes had a device called an answerphone, rigged up to the telephone line. This machine was a cassette recorder that would play an outgoing message to anyone who happened to phone up when the occupants weren't around. After the outgoing greeting had deployed, the machine would record the caller's incoming message (usually on a second cassette). You would get home and hit play to hear who had been in touch while you were out.

This album is a compilation of outgoing messages I recorded on my childhood answerphone. When I was growing up, I often wanted to use the house phone when my mum or sister were already on it, so I went and installed a second phone line in my bedroom. This meant that I could "go wild" in terms of what unsuspecting callers might hear when they dialled my number.

A traditional outgoing answerphone message would be along the lines of: "Hi there, we can't make it to the phone at the moment, so please leave your message after the tone." However, I've always urinated in the face of tradition, what with my outré and avant garde take on popular electronic music, and anyone listening to this queasily irritating collection will be unsurprised to note the precocious childhood me was very much the progenitor of the genre-free creator of "long tail" art I am today.

These 32 tracks run the dizzyingly eclectic gamut from "rave" cover versions, to dour sussurations and daft accents, via a compelling story of an avocado stone misclassified as an eggplant. There's a tiresome "running joke" involving a Shamen acapella. The zany studio-as-instrument trickery of Kenny Everett was a substantial influence on young me, and you can hear it in the piled-on sound effects and silly voices. You might ascertain that I was one of those children who would tape songs from the Top 40 rundown on the radio, hitting pause as each tune came to an end, and occasionally interspersing them with my own announcements and noises. This compilation sometimes comes across as a nightmarish parallel universe version of one of those beloved cassettes, a spiral slice of childhood time.

Please forgive the tape hiss, and bear in mind the entire "album" was recorded on the built-in condenser microphone of a 1980s cassette answerphone. I've processed the audio quite a bit but it's still pretty gnarly. But most of all, please forgive the utterly ridiculous nature of the recorded content itself.

"The sort of thing that rightfully should've been rediscovered in forgotten farmland under a demolished carpark in the 2080s, but here it is, troublingly comprehensible to modern listeners." - alltheworldsmusicever.com

"Answerphone insanity from Max Tundra." - DJ Food

"Magnificent absurdisms from Max Tundra - there's even a sneaky bit of Damien All-bran in there!" - Sunken Foal

"Ridiculous. In a great way. Definitely upped the hilarity of my Friday afternoon." - Matthew Brooks

"Classic Ben." - DJ Platinum Ray

"32 tracks? I'm not made of ears." - Martin Carr