musings of an abbreviated musical career 
This is another of the Oberlin College-written collaborations between Don Marvel and me. Perhaps the least-celebrated of our collaborations, it was only performed by Mr Ability -- it's not among those college songs I revived for Anomaly in my NYC years. Writing about Mr Ability becomes a minor minefield of namedropping, as a number of our members went on to exciting and notable careers.
This piece was written for my final college band, Lumberbride, and performed in my Oberlin senior recital back in 1992. It's an instrumental with a strong 7/8 riff, which starts in Ab minor then ends in C minor. Originally Lumberbride performed it with drums, bass, keyboards and electric violin (with the great Carla Kihlstedt on Zeta 5-string). Here Anomaly does it with our normal instrumentation (guitars, keyboards, bass, drums). The electric guitar assumes the violin's part. Later in the Anomaly story, I started playing more clarinet; we developed and eventually recorded a rearrangement where I start on keyboards and switch to clarinet halfway through, and the spacey middle is guitar and clarinet. In the recap, the guitar takes over the keyboard part and the clarinet assumes what in this recording is guitar. I am not sure this version was as effective, but it was nice way to change it.
So back in the Anomaly days we got into this really good habit where, if we had a gig on a Saturday, we would meet at the rehearsal space first, like 8 or 9 o'clock before an 11PM show. After we instituted this practice, we started playing especially well at shows, as you might imagine. So one Saturday evening in August of '98 we had a gig at the Orange Bear, which was a Russian Art Bar that we played at a lot. (They gave us our first gig and many others... we could usually get gigs there without too much difficulty. It was our fallback place if the CBGBs of the world were rejecting us. A guy named Victor ran the place and he was generally nice to us. There was always wacky colorful art on the wall which I took to be of Russian or Russian-American origin.)