Its realised that I am on something of an escalator. It�s the annual dinner of the organisation that I work for on Tuesday night ( a major undertaking) � there�s a conference at Warwick on Thursday and I have booked a flight to Milan on Saturday. If I am not careful the follow-up actions from one of these things will get obliterated by the preparations for the next one.

Good to see/hear Mark�s foray into the land of fractals. Fractals just sit there as a branch of mathematics but they seem to have been taken up by people with broadly �new age� values in the early to mid 1990s. There could be some back-wash from that first flush of enthusiasm. When I first started to get interested in some of this stuff Eno was using the software Koan and writing about it his year with swollen appendices � a kind of early blog which took book form and was published in 1996.

At a fairly grand level there are similarities between fractal mathematics and music � repetition amid variety � deviation and convergence on points of �attraction�. There is a connection between F-music and the aspiration to rule-govern everything which brought the total serialists together with the Cage of the Music of Changes � possibly even with some Minimalist ideas about process music.

The software � is just there on the web, you make some choices and press the GO button . I would say (but then I would wouldn�t I) that it shows how right the avant-garde were in the 60s and 70s to focus on the art-object and its relation to creative intention back .

The Fractal machine may just sit there on the web and the odd person may create a MIDI file or two from it but nothing more. The software may only exist as a footnote or less than that. Or some net-curator dredging the acheological layers of the web in 2070 may come across a remnant and put on an exhibition which will push the Fractal pioneers back into view.

The current piece uses minor thirds in the ratio of 19 to 16 in a coarsely serial way � once slowly through the series after the manner of Lamont Young�s early pieces. Now it flows into a more Cageian coda which uses material from Roland interface. I used the interface to pick an organ patch on the MU10 and plugged the sax output from the DH500 into the analog input on the device while driving it through the MIDI at the same time. So the sax and the organ could play the same line in perfect time and the output was recorded on the portable. There is a baseline and some voice material.

The piece is a progression towards a kind of harmonic serenity which ends in a much more chaotic and emphatic couple of minutes. I want to get it boxed away before I really get stuck into using F-pieces.

I reread Slightly All the Time before despatching it to the Island hopper I bumped into on Thursday night. It needs amending not least in the light of Ian M�s death.

Drove back to Gfd on Saturday morning because of the weather which meant that I heard some of Jazz FM�s Top 20 . They played All Blues because Kind of Blue is still at no 13. How does it still sound so fresh? Like Begel Gilberto this album has been on the charts since it started just under a year ago. Serendipity � I heard that Daryl Hall was going to be interviewed for an hour at 1.00pm on Jazz FM and I managed to get that down off digital air to CD. DH explained that he was in the same highschool in Philly as the Delfonics and he competed against them in a talent show when they were all teenagers. He also knew their producer Tom Bell before they had their first hit and he picked up some of his studio craft from that source. DH agrees that Philly in the early 70s was like Detroit � everyone there knew something great was on the boil.

I have been thinking about the difference in beat between the original version of What Become of the Broken Hearted and the version filmed for Standing in the Shadows of Motown. I am convinced that the second version does more for the song even though it is more mechanistic - the new beat has taken it to a new depth. There is something of a Chicago shuffle in the original which lightens the song against its message. I wonder whether the evolution of this beat doesn�t in some way represent how Philly redefined rhythm after Detroit. The Philly beat had amazing focus which enabled new complexities of meaning � the classic case might be the O Jays� Backstabber.

I have also been thinking about the Motown backbeats � handclaps, Joe Messina chopping on guitar, the tamborine and the snare. It�s a backbeat with duration and character which anchors the music often framed by James Jamerson�s bass syncopations. I suspect there something very clever in the frequency mix � high top and lower middle maybe.

I tried to find out more about Turing in Gfd but his biography has very little to say.