Organ grinder

I have been laid low by the lurgi for a couple of days. Observations:

1. There may not ever have been a better sound committed to tape than Wayne Horvitz's Fender Rhodes on Zony Mash's reworking of Zorn's "Tekufah", appearing on the 2-cd set Voices In The Wilderness, a conglomeration of the Downtown hipsterati all providing their own takes on Masada pieces. A mixed bag, of course, and given one's unfamiliarity with most of the performers (readable signposts are medeski, martin & wood and Kramer (no, not that one, the one from Bongwater)) it will take a while to absorb, but if you are as mesmerised by Zorn's Masada compositions as I am there are a lot of revelations and surprises here. But for now, at least, Horvitz's fat, falling-into-distortion keyboard wins the prize. Guaranteed to rid your house of termites.

2. The thing I like about Air, well one of the things anyway, is that you might have listened to "Mike Mills", a seemingly harmless instrumental from their new album, Talkie Walkie, a hundred times, and yet in an unguarded moment the strings that kick in around the half way mark can reach out, open up your chest and tear out you heart, leaving you completely shattered, as if you had never heard them before. Which, obviously, you hadn't.

3. I had never realised how closely the first song on side two of the self-titled ep by Stephen, from 1988 (and, I think, the only record they ever did) - "Thinkin' About You" - charts the course that David Kilgour's solo career was going to take. I don't know how long it would be since I have listened to this. Sometimes it pays to brush off the dust - you might learn something.