I used to subscribe to The Wire many years ago and it definitely played a big part in my discovering weird and wonderful music and noise that I might not have heard about otherwise, but yeh the levels of academic pretension even make Sight & Sound seem like Total Film.
However their free CDs, particularly the tapper series were undoubtedly amongst the best free CDs that I've ever had. Sure there was some gash on there but generally it was 70% worth of interesting/gateway tunes as well.
And as Wes mentioned the Primer section could be truly enlightening.
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