20 years ago now, before tech got fully evil, I was in a record store in San Francisco, and someone pushed a CD into my hand: "my partner recorded this".

When they drop you into the timeline, they don't tell you the toilet seats are half a centimetre lower and Arrival wasn't ABBA's first dark album.

Philip Glass again. My friend Michael always took a dim view of him - and I get it. There's a brash cheapness to Glass that even a skilled violinist like Gidon Kremer can't entirely disguise. But if you asked me what was the music of the great American city before the Fall, I'd say maybe because of its brash cheapness: Glass's Violin Concerto 1. You just have to listen to it to know the fascists will hate it.

Can you hear them talking about us? "Our lips are sealed" turned up in my iTunes. I had completely forgotten about this song despite its immediate familiarity.

Fancy re-adjusting your musical aesthetic? Here's Mabrouk el hanna from Cheba Maria 15 years ago. It's always time for Raï.

I have no idea how or why Loa Do Mar by Eta Carinae is in my iTunes library, or how it got there. But there it is - and you should listen to it.

Embrace always sounded like a Celtic band to me. Who knew they were from West Yorkshire? Anyway, I have a soft spot for "Ashes".

We can argue about Philip Glass. When I was a kid I stayed up late to listen to Einstein on the Beach performed on Radio 3. It blew me away. Here's Knee 5. Imagine you're an awkward kid who likes music, maths, science and Star Trek - and reserve judgement.

When is it never time for Raï? Check the backstory. Among modern Raï singers, Cheba Maria has a beautiful voice. Maybe you know "Omri". If not, give it a listen.

When I was a kid, I remember standing on a pebble beach on the south coast with my dad as the Isle of Wight hovercraft glided in to, uh, land. I got pebble-dashed. I loved hovercrafts - I was so excited when my parents sprung for the much-more-expensive-than-the-ferry hovercraft across the Channel to France. I wasn't much older when I discovered ekranoplans - screen-gliders (ground effect vehicles). Something better than hovercrafts, and proper mysterious behind the Iron Curtain.

I had just started in secondary school when our biology teacher told us about birds flying in ground effect. That wasn't in my bird-watching book! So I watched the coots and the gulls more closely...

Life was, life was hard at that time - but the coots ran across the water, screen-gliding: close but free. I came to hear music in that way: how close were my wingtips to the water?