Pace too frantic.

I have brought some little speakers into the office - and limiting the music played on them to Morton Feldman's long calm 1980s pieces played at an almost subliminal level - which I think is how he wanted them heard.

I overslept this morning wich went down like a lead balloon. Yesterday I got a copy of Computer Music- too much software on the coverdisc - too much for one to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Not only is there a revised demo copy of Fruity Loops but a complete version of Making Waves and a demo of something called CrusherX-Live.

I was attracted by Making Waves which is a bit like the old Amiga tracker-type sequencer that I used to rely on - MED written by an altruistic Finnish genius. There is a bar/beat structure and you can quite simply place WAVs within that. But you can also generate what used to be called subroutines. So the unit thats placed in the first level of time organisation (bar/beat) can itself be an organisation of WAVs in time. So for example a beat loop could be made of individual WAVs of snare kick hihat etc set out in a time grid

OR it could be made of pitched events in time - say a base riff - as specified say for a single note WAV eg from a synth OR it could be harmonically organised in time - so that a single note organ WAV could be built into a chord sequence or lick.

I suppose this feels a bit like a cross between Cubase and Fruity Loops - but it is pretty intuitive and potentially very powerful. There is time-stretching but thats the part I couldnt crack.

I have a very strong affection for MED - indeed I am thinking of getting another old Amiga because I think the soundchip is so powerful even though it only 8 bit. I recently remixed a version of the John Lennon song - I'll Be Back - that I had done with an Amiga backing track. Maybe now is not the time for a trawl through my Amiga nostalgia - I'll just say that the first piece I wrote on it ended up as a setting of Ash Wednesday which nearly went on Plundafonix - but I bottled out at the end of the day of inflicting my vocals on the world. I do some fills on that track using my 1970s Japanese SG copy - the guitar I use least - I just dont like Gibson layout volume and tone controls.

Back to the coverdisc - the other interesting software is Crusher-X live which appears to be a very powerful and severe effects/synth - but it looks as if you can load a WAV into it and then really do some very odd things to it. It took a while for me to realise that the sound coing out of the speakers was actually the loop that I had put in !

Feldman's Crippled Symmetries playing as I write - music that's at least as good as its title!

I listened to ESP (again) on the way to work - what can I say? It feels to me like the goal - post acid-jazz ESP style improvised music. One of the elements inthe music is the relationship between where Tony Williams is in the beat (ahead) and where Ron Carter is (behind or maybe four square - he is classically trained). This is partly what gives Eighty One its extraordinary feel - Carter is syncopating but pretty accurately and Williams is playing rock eights but pushing them further into the beat than is normally the case. At the moment I feel maybe the Fifth Bagatelle derivation will be an expicit ESP influenced piece.

I also listened again to a 70s funk compilation I got a couple of months ago. Had to compare it with the Norman Whitfiled produced Temptations tracks - Poppa Was A Rolling Stone etc. When they called one of the albums Masterpiece they werent boasting.

I have an idea about hexachords and Pythagorean intervals. Build two hexachord - start with two pitches separated by a factor which is the square root of two - this is the classic irational number. Within each hexachord build the pitches in intervals of a fourth using the ratio four over three. Its the kind of scale that would actually ne do-able on a synth controlled by Yamha's XG interface.