The Best of John Foxx drives from the minimalist metal beat of his earliest solo incarnation, through the rich verdancy of The Garden, and shimmers in the glow of the Golden Section. Transcending periods of silence and invisibility, always underground, and finally bursting out into the Shifting City in which so much of his work is set. John Foxx is not a musician any more than he is an artist, or a writer, or a film-maker. He is all of these, merging fine art with synthesizers, electronic music with industrialised psychedelia, mixing metallic clicks, squelches and drones with rich strings, drifting voices, creating melodies as fragile as spider silk and bass notes so deep they'd rip the wings off a military aircraft. Glimmer is every shiny, tender one of theses things. As impossible to define as its creator. But Glimmer reflects the thematic, rather than chronological nature of John Foxx's artistry, and is far more than the sum of its parts. Like the John Foxx discography, time is simply not linear. Ideas, sounds, characters and impressions drift in and out of the songs like smoke, bearing little regard for the parameters of sequence, and in such a way that their ordering on the track list exemplifies my favourite kind of irrelevance. 'Now' and 'Then' become lovers, waltzing hand in hand like Petrucio and Katherine through celluloid and steel. Hiroshima, mon amour. Look at the ideas, not the release dates. From Dislocation to Dislocated, embracing newly-shimmering tracks from his solo albums and presenting a tantalising glimpse of translucent sunlight glancing off the splintered fragments of collaboration, Glimmer has it all. Lavishly and clinicially adorned with rare archive photography from different periods, embellished with previously unseen artwork. Expect to have no favourite one here, for it is never going to be easy to isolate a single moment that encapsulates what John Foxx is all about. One of the two places you'll get closest to that 'golden section', that divine moment of meaning, lies in the neo-romantic, post-apocalyptic hybrid of machine and organism that is otherwise listed as track 16. Nowhere among the twisted wreckage of the John Foxx/Louis Gordon fusion is there a better repurposing of an Ultravox compound than the pair's regeneration of My Sex. The patterns of rhythm, sound, angst and poetry in the original are captured with breath-taking eloquence, but now, thanks to the alchemy of Dallas Simpson, the aural graffiti of Gordon's spraycan ejaculate daubs and chirrups away at the slabs of concrete sound constructed by Foxx with more clarity and directionless grace than before. To demonstrate Glimmer's grasp of the retrofuture concept further, there are elements in the title track, written in 1980, that would be perfectly at home in the later Cathedral Oceans material. Some of the threads woven into Carcrash Flashback V2 (From Trash) have their roots in Metamatic and its dub-tronic ancestors. Its no coincidence that the extended version of Plaza (mastered from damaged tapes and now available for the first time) heralds the 21st century explosive remix that closes the album, Dubterror's Burning Car. This is the other blistering, iconic moment of oneness on Glimmer - a work of art that encompasses everything and all that will forever be John Foxx.