Back after weeks of absence. Maybe I'll post the online journal from the trip.

Today's Listening  Last Days of May, Inner System Blues  You'd have to be a bit of an L.A. rock specialist to remember the band named Dream Syndicate or the "Paisley Underground" movement that spawned it. For some reason psych music was big in the late Eighties, but most bands of that type (The Three O'Clock, Rain Parade) were more soft-psych. more Beatles than 13th Floor Elevators. The Dream Syndicate kids, on the other hand, really liked the old noisy Velvet Underground. Their lead guitarist, Karl Precoda, had his own flavor of Lou Reed's noise guitar, where the feedback is the primary and the guitar the secondary sound. After disappearing following DS' second album, Precoda started recording cool instrumental guitar-based psych music. I hear Floyd and Santana and Miles Davis in the 1970s and dub, among other strands,  in the result. And, in an old-Grateful-Dead way, it seems more adventurous than a band like Tortoise does.  Mark's rating: ***½