Go figure. Phish plays a solid show last night with songs many fans, in many eras, longed for - NICU, Carini, 2001, Mike's & Weekapaug, Funky Bitch, Fluffhead, Loving Cup. But many fans, particularly a number of the lot of you here within our (multiple and overlapping, but ultimately notable if not distinct) bubble of Phish veteranism, complain that it lacked anything notable, and didn't justify Miner-level praise (all due respect to his vocabulary and skillful phrasing).

Sure, I'm a fan of the weirdness, too. I'm honored to have been at the 2/20/93 Roxy, for example, among others. (Not that last night was that. The Roxy was miles, and locked smiles, beyond last night.) And I've of course made sure to hear everything from the early embarrassing-in-retrospect bar shows to the later embarrassing-in-most-ways Coventry shows. But I've aggressively cut back on what I listen, particularly, post-breakup, to perhaps only a show or two each tour that I didn't actually attend, because the jadedness was ruining it for me. And it may be ruining it for you.

By the "breakup", I'd stopped going for the music. I was going to see friends, and to experience the aura - and those, too, were of course changing. The music's now back for me, and not just because it's gotten better, but because I'm not mired in it.When I head to AC next week, it won't just be exciting because of the imminent Halloween show, or the 120-seat Phamily Poker Classic at the Tropicana. It'll be because friggin' PHISH is playing. And they play great shows. Like Providence, last night.

The reliable stuff, the solid stuff, the strings of good songs with no flubs or meanders or distractions or oddities, the straight-ahead "this is our stuff" Phish? That's the show last night, getting 2 of 5 stars because it came too soon after Uttica, and verged too little from the compositions.

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Mike just loves doing weird little projects that fall below the radar. First there was the "Joey Arkenstat" album Bane (and if you don't own that, you really should. It's a weird 50 minute continuous track that ventures into interesting places), then there was the "Birth of the Universe" track, and now there's a new one on Live Phish: Moss Remixes.

A 24 minute selection of (mostly) instrumentals that build off of aspects of songs onMoss, this is pretty interesting. It's melodic, dark at times, pretty at others and is a perfect little spin for a quiet morning. Not only that, but it's absolutely free! I can't promise everyone will love it, but if you're a fan of Mike, what's the downside?

http://www.livephish.com/music/0,586/Mike-Gordon-mp3-flac-download-Moss--The-Remixes.html

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For this album we wanted to something new and somebody closer to our age. There's always this feeling with each album that, what have we done before and what's a direction that we haven't gone in? The album before Hoist [Rift] was really conceptual. It was kind of a concept album, and the whole thing was strung together. We wanted to just go swing to a whole different direction, and [Hoist producer] Paul Fox is somebody who... I think the biggest thing that appealed to us was that his records sounded so good.