Brian Eno was on Radio 3 Mixing It last night talking about a new album of bell sounds. I caught a bit of it and as I write I am listening to a digital repeat off the BBC website. It�s a great facility when you can be bothered to remember it which I ought to a lot more. Apparently the newer synths are much better at making authentic bell sounds and Eno has got interested in making non-standard physically impossible bells. You can hear some on the programme. He makes a good point about the cultural inheritance of sounds - sounds carry meaning by long cultural association. A more complex foray about social timescales for decision making and how an icon might alter that - the right image might start people thinking more about the collective long term interest. The icon might be on a mountain in the Nevada desert. Some of the bell music sounds a bit like Wednesday Afternoon, the piece Eno did in the mid 80s to exploit the time length of the CD.

Paul Wheeler (who like me was quite hit by Eno�s Year with Swollen Appendices) mailed about the Incredible String Band and a visit from Nick Totton. Yvonne has gone to Covent Garden to hear Don Giovanni.

Last night driving back from Leamington I heard an orchestral piece on Radio 3 written by an academic composer in Belfast to celebrate whose name I can�t remember. I really enjoyed it. I wonder if its somewhere on the Radio 3 website as well?

I have been confusing myself with John Cage � no surprises there then. The more you find out about him the less the different bits fit together. I suppose you could divide his creative life into beginning middle and end. People seem to think that the works at the beginning are most likely to endure although some from the late period might too. The ideas in the middle period seem to have been most influential or perhaps it was just the attitude. When people dismiss the middle they suggest that it was just a matter of trying to be as �far out� as possible � one of the silly fads of the 60s.

When I was on the Radio 3 Website I copied an interview with Michael Craig-Martin � recently at the ICA I nearly bought a taped interview with him but didnt. He is said to be very influential on the British artstars of the 90s. (This week I had managed to see a retrospective of the Chapman Bros at the Saatchi. Subsequently I read a review which made me think I was right not to have much of a reaction to the stuff.) Anyway back to the MCM interview which reveals that he studied with Joseph Albers at Yale. Albers was at the Bauhaus when it was closed. When he went to the USA he was asked to run the Black Mountain College and invited John Cage to teach there. Cage's experiences there helped provoke him from his early to his middle period. And so now Albers emerges as one of the infuences on the person who was the midwife of the Britart explosion. This is what MCM says about being in NYC in the first half of the 60s:

�when I arrived (in the UK) in 1966, and I was just out of, I had just finished a Masters course at Yale, I was very, very attuned to what was going on in New York, in America at that time. It was a very, it was a very critical moment in art, very exciting moment, and when I arrived in Britain I met incredibly interesting people, but almost nobody knew about the things that I was most interested in, and in retrospect I think that I misunderstood one's cultural background and how much a part it plays in one's development, in one's understanding of what it is that art can be.�

Must be the art-world talking.