Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-05-03 - 11:10 a.m.

Bank holiday weekend looms - and on Tuesday I am going to the University of Hertfordshire for the day. The Oxford meeting went OK if not quite as far as full approval - but I think we are still on track.

There is an excellent article on the spread of HIV and AIDS between South Africa and MOzambique in this months New York Review of Books. It shows exactly how complex the situation is but how dramatic the problems are too. And it clearly shows how important the small local organisations are in mitigating the suffering. Probably worth including this on the Serious Music website a draft of which sits under my foto here.

Only got NYRB because I couldnt find this months Wire which I glanced at earlier in the Week in Smiths. There is a feature on Mick Beck and a pic of him playing bassoon. He and I went out with the same girl once - sequentially. She must have had a taste for jazz playing philosophers destined for the Civil Service. Actually I bumped into her (years after the entanglement) in a supermarket in Edinburgh which was how I got MB's telno. Then he and I had a meeting in my office maybe another 20 years later. He just happened to have his latest CD and I just happened to have a tape of some flute over a Prokofiev pno piece. I though long and hard about the CD and in some ways it shifted my views on art and abstraction.

We had a discussion on his "genre" which seemed to me to be less than utterly abstract - in the sense that it was rooted eg in Archie Shepp and the black free music of the 60s. Derek Bailey's book on improv suggests that there is a style of improv beyond all genre. Anyway sometimes I think the main reason I buy the Wire is to keep with people whose path I once crossed.

I at last managed to get a haircut yesterday before going to Oxford and then went into town to get a new printer cartridge. Inevitably the route went through HMV and I got two Miles CDs for under �10.00 total in their clearout. On the Corner and In A Silent Way.

IASW is one of the last products of the 2nd great 5tet. Listening this time I thought of its relationship to Steve Reich's emerging style. I have remix albums of both the Miles music of this era and SR.

On the Corner is something further out and caused a lot of outrage when it was first issued. I think we hear this music differently now because of the things that have happened since. The rhythmic conception now seems very sophisticated although everyone thought how crude the rock beat was. There is an onbeat but there is also a (tape loop?) cross-beat and the bassline is very very syncopated and varying. I listened to it on the train this morning. Apparently Paul Buckmaster had been talking to Miles at the time this was recorded. I suspect there is a grand structure over the 50 plus minutes of music.

Before setting off for Oxford I managed to throw down a track - a bit of "found" Fruity Loop with altered FX. Then I plugged the Korg into the back of the PC and managed to get a gtr signal that I could record in Wavelab Lite, save and load into Wave demo to access the plug ins. I put a fourth chord phrase in on the guitar, looped it and ran it against the Fruity loop. Then the lead line went over the loops in the PC and I took the output down to a compressor, enhancer and MD. Partly this was an exercise in thinking in terms of scales which are made up of around 10 notes.

James asked if the Taize stuff is the same as he heard when he was a lad. I think the source is the same. One of the wonders of the genre is the various things you can do with the same source.

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