I’ve listened several times these past few weeks to Erik Friedlander’s new CD, <I>Block Ice & Propane</I> (on the Skipstone Records label), a haunting, sprawling, majestic piece of Americana. The album is subtitled “Taking Trips to America: Compositions and Improvisations for Solo Cello,” and that sums it up. The cellist’s father is the master photographer, Lee Friedlander. When Erik was growing up, Lee would spend summers driving a 1966 Chevy pickup truck around the country, taking pictures, and he’d take the family along: he and his wife in the front, often blasting the radio, Erik and his sister in the thin shelled-box camper up above, watching the clouds and the road markers flash by. <I>Block Ice & Propane</I>—named after the old techniques for keeping food chilled and gas stoves lit—is a remembrance of those summers, an elegy for innocent adventure, a musical road trip in its own right.

The amount of flux in the world of music and the businesses of marketing and selling creativity continues to be absolutely amazing. In nearly 25 years of writing about music I’m seeing things I almost don't believe.

When I was eight, I had a series of accidents that kept me indoors for most of a winter. My parents, thinking I needed diversion, gave me a lab-grade microscope, which completely captivated me. I quickly learned to cut, mount, and stain specimen slides. One day, however, the med student father of one of my friends dropped a bombshell on me&mdash;he brought home a box of commercially prepared slides from the university's book store. For the next year, the only comic books I read were the ones at my friends' houses, my allowance went to buying slides, which, if I recall, cost 25&ndash;75&#162; each.

Over at <I>The Audiophiliac</I>, Steve Guttenberg's CNET blog, there's a superb piece on Daptone Records, Brooklyn's own old-school analog record label. I heard Daptone artists the Budos Band on <I>Soundcheck</I> a few weeks ago and <I>loved</I> the classic '60s sound on their record.