Ann Sexton - "You've Been Gone Too Long". Funny how sometimes it's not the centre of the song that keeps your attention. Here's Ann singing in a coffeecream voice, just the right amount of nicotine burr, but me I'm looking somewhere else. She's in the spotlight, the others are falling in love, but I'm just staring dumbly at the electric guitar. Listening to the golden over-and-over; the persistent hope; the shaking free. I feel like a dope, standing there. This is soul music! A dusky voice, bedroom eyes, noNOnos and yesYESyeses of horns! So why do I keep being drawn away, like a man chasing through a wood for his sweetheart? I dunno, I dunno. All I know with certainty is that the song's got to fade out. Because it can't end. (Thanks, Milo.)

[Buy the Ann Sexton Anthology]

Felix Lajkó es Bandaja - "Untitled". Felix Lajkó aka Lajkó Felix is a part-gypsy violinist who was born in the former Yugoslavia but has since established himself as one of the biggest forces in contemporary Hungarian folk music. One of my favourite pieces of instrumental music is his "Etno Camp", in which Lajkó seems to fiddle Rome to the ground, his band wearing their shoes out as they dance behind. But tonight I don't have the tenacity for that fourteen minute epic, that glorious and furious thing. Instead tonight I turn to the final track on Játszanak - two minutes long, more mood than song, a piece that falls away like a scene you might see from inside a bus. You drive by and then it's out of sight; it's gone.

An old woman sings in Hungarian, each phrase a tentative hop. Piano, fiddle and other stringy things set the yellow glass blowing. And it's like she's calling down a storm, inviting it quietly so that we can laugh when it doesn't arrive. Ha ha ha? (This was actually and truly recorded in a forest.)

(Let me know if you'd like to hear "Etno Camp".)

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You really oughta grab the Pineapples song at Green Pea-ness so you can italo-disco till the sun come up.

If anyone missed the message about the Said the Gramophone chalet at All Tomorrow's Parties...