Silver Wheel of Prayer

With so much outward-bound free action these days, it's oddly comforting to hear someone's - well, Roy Montgomery's - version of the journey to the heart of the inner cosmos. A sister record to Montgomery's Drunken Fish CD The Allegory of Hearing, Silver Wheel Of Prayer has seven complementary instrumental tracks, played mostly on Tiesco six-string and recorded mostly on four-track. A couple of tracks are dominated by a new Farfisa organ, which provides a gliding drone and waver on which to hang titles like "for the disoriented" and "for the mortified." The longest track here is "for a small blue orb," a simple strum that builds into a hypnotic pattern over 16 minutes. "The album," says Roy, "is dedicated to Geoff Davies and Annie Leadbetter and their son Jess, who, without seeming to worry about what they were in for, welcomed me into their house and their lives at 12 Buckingham Ave, Liverpool in 1982. The longest track on this recording was first sketched out in their front