Walt, you seem to like this a little (lot?) better than I did. I bought this almost immediately after its release, as I do any Rowe lately, even though I tend to be wary of music that gives sidebar instructions. Regardless of whether Schmickler & Co intended it, that kind of thing comes off like a silly gimmick. Even still, I shuffled and no two adjacent tracks seemed to benefit from that button. I didn't care much for the music here anyway, as the whole of it seemed painfully skeletal without giving me anything to latch onto.

Regarding the shuffle thing, I can recommend John Schott's Shuffle Play: Elegies for the Recording Angel, which IMO really benefits from having its playlist fucked with over and over again. The tunes are beefy, quite experimental even for Schott, and do what music is supposed to do in such a context: stand on its own piece by piece.

"what music is supposed to do in such a context: stand on its own piece by piece."

you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but the phrasing of this sentence is oddly dogmatic, and was fairly obviously not the intention on RR.

that should read piece(s) by piece(s). I do know what you mean.

I'm with Al on preferring 'shuffle' to re-order complete-sounding pieces. I don't find RR's shuffle play particularly effective, the instantaneous blippy nature of the track changes don't do much for me, though it doesn't bother me much either. (I'll note that played from mp3 those changes are essentially instantaneous, and sound better than the slight delay from cd players.) Nor do I hear how RR's shuffle is more appropriate or effective than many other randomly chosen albums on shuffle.

I'd actually rather hear a shuffle play of my own cut-up mp3 rips of many Ersts, in which I blasphemously split long pieces into components, though ones in which I choose what sound to me appropriate start/stop points. (I do this mostly to facilitate my shuffle-everything listening mode, which I approach chiefly as short-form listening.) Shuffles of dach and Cosmos (9 tracks each), for instance, sound quite good to me in this fashion.

Not all cd players have a delay between tracks when shuffling.

Hm, perhaps you mean some have subjectively "negligible" delay? Unless a cd player preloads data into memory, the head mechanism must move from track to track, and I've never heard a player where that didn't take at least 0.25-0.5 seconds. Hard disks are much faster, plus most software players to preload data from the next track, so there's no appreciable inter-track delay at all.

my Tascam CD-RW4U burner/player has essentially no delay on shuffle mode, I assume it uses some sort of memory storage setup.