Today is my son James' 18th birthday. This morning at 1.00am I went and picked him and 4 mates up from a party in Gomshall - a village on the Tillingbourne river which drains the valley between the Upper and Lower Greensand Ridges between Guildford and Dorking. They seemed to have had a good time at someone else's 18th birthday party - and tonight there is yet another party fortunately not in this house. Today one of his Godparents and her husband and their son are coming over and we will go out for a pub lunch somewhere. When James was quite young he went off on an American tour with these three taking in Ann Arbor, Niagra Falls, Chicago and New York - he was the first of us to cross the Atlantic. This was an academic tour not a musical one by the way. Maybe this helped fuel his interest in international history. But there was plenty of encouragement elsewhere - Yvonne met this Godparent, Penny, when they studied history at Exeter. Another of his godparents, my sister Andrea, was a professional archivist and is still working on local history now she has retired. I didnt do history even at O-Level but when I was an undergraduate Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions historised the philosophy of science and that quite caught my imagination.

I was interested in the discussion yesterday in the diaries about the loneliness of long distance artistic endeavour. I agree that there is an essential inner-directedness about it that puts a gap between the creator and the rest of the world. Once when I was in St Ives I picked up a book published locally in which a number of artists talked about their studio. I was into mindmaps at this time and I mapped out all the benefits and processes the various artists described and tried to introduce these into my own life. Oneof these is to have the work around you in your daily life so you always rubbing up against it.

I do this most overtly with my drawings - something which is just a hobby. There a lots in my office and lots on the walls of the house and they always catch my eye and make me think either of the place - they were done in locations like Cannes, Tokyo, Crete, LA or the Scilly Isles or the illusionistic techniques that have gone into the images.

I have a very slow process for reproducing CDs - in real time - and that is one way I keep coming back to the musical creations. I also handmake the labels and covers. My production philosophy is based on the Toyota Production System of low inventories. This is an enhanced mass production philosphy which faciltates product variation. The visual side is the one where this variation is evident to the greatest degree. I have started to work with images of the Pieta for the cover - the CD is called Highveld Easter Plundafonix. Highveld because that is the part of South Africa where the (very high) profit margins go. I was hoping to plunder the Sam Taylor Wood image of the Pieta which is in her current exhibition in London. I have always wanted the CD as a physical entity to carry some values.

So stealing an image from the Young British Artist who is married to the gallery-owner who has made most money out of the media hype. This image stealing struck me as a self-referentially YBA thing to do - it makes the CD object more than itself and adds to its currency but also relates to themes in the music. There is the added dimension that any legal action would run up against the resonances between what this project is about - helping people with HIV and AIDS and Sam's own medical troubles.

But I am not sure I can actually get this to work in technical terms. I have also started playing with a image of the Michaelangelo - in black and white and then multiply photocopied which makes it ghostlier. With the typography I have used this emerges as quite High Church - especially with the white plastic of the CD holder and the white label on the CD. I am not sure I want to go quite that far.

I got some of these ideas from a computer security consultant who lives in Guildford and who was working on a project which caused me a great deal of grief. I turned up to a Barndance Gig having only met him in the office - and there he was on Yamaha DX7. We spent ages talking about composition after that - which he had studied at Birmingham. He has some incredibly radical ideas - quite like YBA in that they are very "post" a whole lot of other stuff. He has a life-project called the Dyp Experience which includes a group of friends. I think it has been under way for 15 years or me and runs into hundreds of hours of recorded music. Part of the ethos of this project is that no one else hears the music although this is not an absolute rule - I have a copy of one of the tapes.

This influenced me in the creation of Baroksambience which is a 60 minute work dedicated to the memory of Mary Cameron and Nick Drake. This also exists on tape and there are only two copies, one of which my sister currently has. It is the only post-minimal post-conceptual composition ever to be entered to the DTI Annual Craft Competition where it didnt win anything. The judge - my boss at the time - came from two parents who were classic watercolourists and so the text art dimension didnt really work with him.

I used the final movement from this piece to close the first Highveld CD - Serious Music for the Highveld. I still very much like the way that it does that. But I have been thinking about looking at the rest of Baroksambience again.