The Guardian had a very hard hitting editorial on the latest US proposal on how best to manage Intellectual Property Rights for drugs required by poor countries to tackle major epidemics. It suggested that there is very little benevolence at all in the move. I suppose I think is slightly beside the point � most things arise from mixed morives but the key question is whether this suggestion would do any good.

I have been doing some more research on Anti-form. This term was coined in an article by one of the founding fathers of Minimalism � Robert Morris born in 1931. He seems to have moved rapidly and quite innovatively through different syles starting as an Abstract Expressionist in San Francisco in the early 1950s. Anti-form is the polar opposite of Minimalism � so much so that it very much exists in the same universe or runs in parallel at the other extreme. Minimalism is all overt structure, antiform not at all � what is overt is the material which makes itself more prominent by being wildly non-standard.

AF is part of a general migration of sculpture away from its traditional means and locale which also includes for example Land Art and where British artists especially those trained at St Martins like Barry Flanagan, Gilbert and George and Richard Long. One of the links between these ideas and musical Minimalism is the idea that Steve Reich likes that the process which creates the work should be clearly evident in the work.

I am not sure I share this aspiration � some of the processes which I embark I might well want to keep secret � because I don�t want people to be diverted from the results by thinking about how those results were achieved. I am more sympathetic to the idea that works aren�t just about some exercise of �taste� in configuring �material� � that the process should be finding some �ideas� and then doing some �artistic configuration� of them seems to me to be unworthy � especially as so many other people have done this before.

Once you see anti-form as a broad cultural movement or thrust you begin to wonder how it might be linked (for example) with the route that Miles took in his electric phase. People who don�t like this music often criticise its apparent formlessness.

In the past I have also wondered a lot about free jazz and abstract expressionism. In fact the links between abstract expressionism, modern jazz and �serious� music are quite tight around 1950. Pollock listens to jazz when he paints, composers wonder if they can bring of the formal freedom of jazz and abstract expressionism into their working methods. I had thought maybe that free jazz pioneers looked at abstract expressionist painting which had become part of official culture by the late 50s and thought that it provided extra reasons for majoring on heroic freedom - the prospect of cultural endorsement and support. You might see the final expansive abstraction of Trane in a similar way that one looks at the expansive abstraction of Monet�s series of late water lilies � or indeed the existential self defining elements as being of a piece with the general aura around Pollock Rothko and Barnet Newman.

But the anti-form artists think about positioning themselves on a more finely divided territory than that. I still don�t have much evidence that musicians at that point were thinking in equivalent terms. The person most likely to have done so is perhaps Philip Glass � because he was working closely with artists like Richard Serra who were at the leading edge of these ideas � of refining ideas about process structure and form. But its really hard to get back to those early Glass works, I think � to consider what they might be independently of what came after them. I have been digging around for some MIDIs � but it seems I am not the only one. When Music in 12 Parts comes up for sale on ebay then its eagerly posted on the various Glass For a. It seems that the Glass recordings that I have are all from his popular phase � and they are massively controversial in their own way � maybe there is a considered artistic positioning behind them � but you get no hint of it when you pull them out of the rack in the shop.

I did manage to find a couple of MIDIs about Babbit piano which sounds familiar, partly because of some of the stuff that has emerged on the Isbin/Cameron axis. I managed to get to a new recording of Shortstories. This is happening all in the portable � I tackled a couple of the mix and balance issues and reconfigured the WAV assembly in the CD burner. The piece is defined by this master � which is used to burn the CDs � I have made one to post to Gilbert.

On the Radio 3 site there are some recordings by Tacita Dean who was a Turner finalist a couple of years ago. Kevin, a friend of Yvonne�s, knows her and so Yvonne has met her a few times and we have various of her works around the house � not in frames. One is just a book of postcards but obviously not anyold card she has found in a shop. The stuff on the Radio 3 website is about her German soundwork which was broadcast last year � we managed to hear all of it. In the segments on the site she records her thoughts as she assembles the work. To me it sounds like she is confronting issues that arise from mainly having an artistic intuition which in my world operates at a more fundamental mental level and then having to pull that up to engage with ideas about form in sound.

Yvonne has gone to East Anglia with Jake to see her mother and sister. I am on a kind of party patrol here � Vita has plans to bring a few friends back from some party tonight and sleep on the floor of the living room.