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I used to stop by the iTunes Music Store every Tuesday to skim through their long list of the new songs that had gone up that week, but I've been erratic about it lately.

But Apple is having another countdown—this time they're counting down to 500 million songs sold via the iTMS. Every hundred thousandth song sold (for the next 1.4 million songs or so) comes with an iPod mini and a 50-song gift card; the person who buys the 500 millionth song gets ten iPods, a gold 10,000-song gift card, 10 extra 50-song gift cards, and a trip to see a Coldplay concert. I'm afraid I got a little obsessive last time they did this, at their first 100 million mark; I spent way too much time one weekend tracking how long it took for n songs to be sold and trying to time my purchases (of a bunch of songs at once, to improve my odds) to hit the hundred thousand marks. I didn't buy anything I didn't actually want—that was during one of my periods of buying a bunch of music from the iTMS—but I didn't win, either, though I think I came pretty close a couple times. Anyway, I plan to be saner about it this time around.

Still, it prompted me to go look at the iTMS for the first time in a month or so. And since I had missed a few weeks, I did a search for a couple of the things I always search for there but never find. "London Danny," by Fairport Convention, for example, but they still don't have that. And then on a whim I searched for the Sufi Choir.

The Sufi Choir (scroll down) was started in 1969 by some California Sufis; Sufis being Muslim mystics. These particular Sufis were followers of Murshid ("Teacher") Samuel Lewis, and the sorts of people you would expect to find in San Francisco in 1969 practicing Sufism: yes, hippies.

My parents owned two LPs recorded by the choir. They were the kind of albums that instead of having an A side and a B side, had a "Sun side" and a "Star side" (indicated by icons on the LP label). Some of the music didn't do anything for me, but some of it is inextricably woven through my childhood. I took the albums to college with me, played bits of them a couple of times for friends; the universal response was "Wow, that's really 1970s, isn't it?" Okay, whatever, obviously not to everyone's taste. But I still like the music, and some of the lyrics. And I can still dig the messages of universal peace, love, and understanding, even if I don't actually agree with all the particulars of the religious/spiritual stuff.

But I only have the albums on old scratchy LP, and I haven't yet invested the time and/or money it would take to transfer my old LPs and tapes (the ones not available on CD) to MP3. There was a best-of Sufi Choir CD for a while, but last I looked (a couple years back) it was out of print and not available anywhere. There's also a New Sufi Choir CD (some version of the group has re-formed), but that wasn't really what I was looking for, though I'm curious about what it sounds like.

But now I gather the CD has been reissued, or another one put forth. And wonder of wonders, you can now purchase The Best of the Sufi Choir, or any individual song from it, from the iTunes Music Store. If I remember, I'll let you know which ones I like best when I get a chance to listen to 'em again.

But that's not all. After I added that album to my shopping cart, I went back to perusing this week's new-music list, and almost immediately came across an Emerald Web album.

Emerald Web was a New Age duo, Bob Stohl and Kat Epple, who played flute and synthesizer in the SF Bay Area in the '80s. I'm not sure how I first encountered them; New Age Renaissance Faire, maybe? At any rate, they used to give regular laser-show concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park. I would drive half a dozen friends up in my father's green Toyota pickup, the back of which had a couple-inch-thick foam pad and a camper shell, and we would lie back in the planetarium's comfortable chairs for an hour or two watching the lights and listening to the music and (in my case, anyway) occasionally dozing off, and then we'd drive home down 101 at one in the morning. I think I may have also heard them once or twice during trips home from college, not sure. Sadly, Bob Stohl died in 1990. Kat Epple has apparently continued performing and recording, though. She's done soundtracks for various TV shows, and apparently she's won eight Emmy Awards for "her work in video." Anyway, back in high school I bought three or four of their albums on cassette; I still have those, but as with the Sufi Choir I haven't transferred them to electronic format.

But it turns out that the iTMS now has two of their albums on CD, and you can buy another (a two-album combination of Nocturne and Lights of the Ivory Plains, the latter of which I have on tape) from Amazon or directly from Kat Epple's website.

Cool. I suspect y'all have no interest in any of this stuff, but I like it and/or am nostalgic for it, and I'm really pleased to see it available again.

It also reminds me that I have a bunch of music on cassette and LP that will almost certainly never be reissued on CD (but that's what I would've said about the Sufi Choir and Emerald Web, so who knows). Maybe I oughtta just get a professional to transfer this stuff to CD for me; it's been something like three years that I've been planning to do it myself but not doing it.