Everyone seemed to be working despite the Bank Holiday � including my boss. I did a presentation and mailed it to him - then a paper on future trends in Further Education for mice-bhj.

Andrew mailed and I found myself listening to his Opus 2Orecordings and also reading Ricardo�s account of one of these pieces. To counteract this I abused Cathy Bell�s account of a VWms musepiece for soprano and violin and downloaded the result to MD for further processing in Leantown esp against the Yamaha box. I wonder if Vasks has the edge on Tuur for my taste even though I introduced myself to the latter and told him how much I liked the piece we had just heard.

Lots of communal snooker watching recently of course � also the thing about Ightham Moat in Kent which looked extravagant to me. I pressed on with Andrew Duncan and decided that he is nostalgic. It�s a great nostalgia though.

April volumes on the Highveld site were very like March and February and indeed November and May O3 � though there is a slight upward trend. December O3 and January were higher � something I put down mainly to World AIDS Day. The volume of �plays� has just hit 18OO.

Serious Music accounts for about 45% of this but it has been up the longest. I am surprised that Fourths, Short Stories and the Dhorn collection amount in total to 2O% � given that much of this is pretty adventurous � and some of it hasn�t been up too long. Plunderfonix is a quarter but I suppose you can�t have everything. Sooner or later the Summer lull will start I expect.

I see a Skin Too Few is opening at the Cinema Village in Manhattan on 7 May. Otherwise the news is pretty bleak , also the weather.

Tuesday morning I jumped into the car and set off through the wind and rain for the funpalace in Belgravia. Listening to Cassandra Wilson�s Belly of the Sun to calm my nerves. I arrived in good time to set up my PC. The meeting was lengthy but the outcome was what we wanted.

I went down to Balham and spent a couple of hours with Prof Chatterton who explained to me how Lotus Notes worked and how it could be used to deal with one of the issues that came up at the morning�s meeting.

We developed the siteplan for the Lullabies concert on the Highveld site and also managed to put up a new section on the Making Music page on the site � now published for all to see. It comes at the bottom of the page after Imagery and deals with Poetry. Starting with Pete Brown it refers to the GLF and the Pinko site which Andrew Duncan runs. There are some sentences about Nick Totton and a scan of his Biologic song which inspired the Careless Love instrumental. We also put up an opening panel about RedBlues.

Peter went off to do a video interview with Charlie Alexander � I will be really interested to see what they come up with. Charlie is a natural in front of the camera and microphone. Some of this material will go into the Lullabies section of the site in due course.

I got the Wire and Art Review at Smiths in Victoria � the latter has a really interesting article comparing the LA and NYC art scenes in the 6Os and 7Os � how LA was much more relaxed to start with. Venice Beach seems to have been the initial epicentre. The thesis of the piece is that the LA style and culture of pop artistic entrepreneurial activity has conquered the world � you now find it in all art centres but it started on VB � esp the development of Warhols close intermixing of art fashion and cool. Leading artists would play basket ball on Sunday mornings at the Santa Monica High School.

One term that started in LA was �finish fetish� � a defining characteristic of Damien Hirst. Where art is alongside high production value commercial endeavour it feels challenged into producing similarly polished surfaces. The Elements of Beauty could be a comment on all of this. Myself I enjoy rough surfaces � esp when recording the flute which has too much finish for its own good.

The Wire has a discussion of the state of song � against the expectation that the arrival of digital voices would fragment it. It includes a list of highpoints and markers � which has 3 Cale produced items � from the Stooges, Horses and Marble Index.

Tim Buckey, David Sylvian, David Bowie , Phil Ochs, Prandit Pran Nath, Yoko Ono and Sly Stone all feature. The feature reminds me that when Totton/Bell/Cameron dealt with Your No Good we were following the Terry Riley precedent.

I now have the MD of material from the Dell downloaded onto the MD in Leantown where it can be harassed by airsynth and Yamaha box etc. Indeed this has already started.

Plot thickens with Andrew for 21 August MM episode.

I see from the Wire that P Niblock has a new CD of drone pieces - I shd buy this as recompense for using his drone in Blink Music Beyond Belief.