This Grammy award-winning album features Ry Cooder on bottleneck guitar and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt playing an instrument of his own design, called the Mohan Vina. About midway through the cut, while these two master musicians are swapping their improvised riffs back and forth, Cooder's percussion playing son, Joachim, let's loose with a punctuated series of canon shot beats. The Sunfire and MBLs blasted the plaster right off the apartment walls. Meanwhile, the delicate string glissando's of Cooder and Bhatt never got shell-shocked amidst the percussive explosions, nor ever lost their upper treble glean and dizzying shimmer. The Sunfire handles both ends of the spectrum with equal aplomb.
Nothing is shortchanged.
This cut also rocked like it never had before. With the Sunfire taking part in the action, it was joyous musical making, pure and simple. Contributing to the bravura performance is this tubed preamp's solid state quietness, a great tribute to its wunderkind designer, Bob Carver. There is no hissing of maddened electrons rampaging back and forth inside their tiny glass cages. This black background contributes to the astonishing wealth of musical detail that emerges from the Sunfire.