IT: Day One. Ya Mar gets to some pretty extraordinary places for an ordinarily Type-I tune. The Reba is one of my top 5, also including 12/31/95, 8/11/98, and 9/14/00. I'm a sucker for Two Versions of Me; it's really a beautiful song whose sentimental yet quintessentially Phishy nature seems to have been carried forward into 3.0, perhaps peaking with Trey's composition of Time Turns Elastic (the parallels are there.) Waves is just an utterly compelling improvisational statement. 2.0 seemed to be very fertile while also very fragile, necessitating (Demand-ing, if you will) a respect on the part of the "scene" that maybe wasn't fully committed to. I don't want to speculate on the breakup, or depending on whether you're a glass-is-half-full person, second hiatus, but IT really shows what we have to lose if we're not carefully kind. Rock and Roll -> Seven Below -> Scents and Subtle Sounds is an amazing near-hour of music, and particularly titillates me because if pressed to declare two favorite songs from 2.0, I'd likely pick Seven Below and Scents and Subtle Sounds, which are here--obviously combined by a patient(!) segue. The Tower Jam is quite more traditionally psychedelic than the Sound Check, although they're comparable in length, consisting primarily of synth palettes and textural ambience that I certainly would have been bummed to have slept through, had I been present. I'm reminded again of @waxbanks' coinage of the term "mycological languor," which leads me to wax philosophical upon whether 1997 and 2003 are somehow more closely related than I had previously pontificated upon. Thank God for Phish.