T2 suggests Television may be coming to Meltdown. I told myself that the Jeff Buckley gig at the Junction in Cambridge would be my last real RnR fan opportunity - then I heard Tinsley Ellis in Detroit and February and it was like being back on Eel Pie Island listening to Stan Webb and the Chickenshack. I spose I can indulge myself in going to RFH and pretending its CBGBs.

Last night the television programming was so awful that I got out an artbook about Barnet Newman - an abstract expressionist painter who studied philosophy first. He has a big retro at the Tate Modern later in the year or so I am told. I looked at his there sculptures HereI HereII and HereIII. In tune with a lot of his paintings they are verticals - although I has two verticals II has three and III has one. They were done at different points in time.

I think its difficult not to see these works as early examples of Minimalism - or rather if you want to debate whether they are or not you need to go into some deep areas of theory - eg deal with the intentionality of the interaction with the work both from the point of view of creator and viewer. Certainly someone who was vaguely aware of art history who came across the Here-s alongside say a piece by Sol Lewitt would think there was a link between the pieces. Newman was also prepared to tolerate a lot of rejection and stick to the integrity of his vision - which was true of later Minimalists. Well true up to the point when Minimalism became the official style of memorial - see the Washington Vietnam Memorial, the Boston Holocaust Memorial and much else.

I pulled down Strickland's Origins of Minimalism - he seemed to be rather more concerned with Cage and Rauschenberg than with Newman. Strickland makes much of the link between Rauschenberg's white canvases and the 4min 33 secs.

Last night the next reference point for me was the early Cage Prepared PIano pieces - I invested in the score for some of these the last rime I went to Chappells. I have started to think quite carefully about a single page work - title something like Preparing for Meditation from the early 40s. It is only octaves and the is the odd shorter high fifth. This seemed to me to inhabit the same universe as the Barnet Newman sculptures. I suppose the title predisposes one against a Minimalist interpretation but if you look at the work in its own right then it is very close (for example) to some Arvo Part piano music which I am also thinking carefully about.

There are a couple of other Cage pieces from this time that have got my attention. One has an opening section which is a fourth chord with the root doubling. The piece is about (in my view) a fairly strict punchy approach to the phrasing - I am playing in on gut string guitar - there are some good syncopations. Another piece opens with an exploration of Dmajor seventh chord with added sixth. The score specifies what goes where in the piano. It can hardly be controversial to do these pieces on other instruments and modify their timbres in a way which seems to make artistic sense of whats on the stave. Such a practice must be pretty close to working (say) with a graphic score.

I wrote a Gap Analysis yesterday for the Academy project which I am hoping will keep me in CDs and synths for the next few years. I thought it was quite punchy - but no reaction yet from Birmingham.

Today it is my presentation for Brno that I should try to get on paper. As this will be sequentially translated when it is delivered it cuts by less than a half how much you have to say for a given allocation of time . English is apparently more concise than Czech. This sounds all good news - except that if you only have 1000 - 1500 words to work with you actually have to know pretty precisely what you are trying to get across. I have a 3 page set of bullet points which I sent to a Vice President in Detroit which might be the point of departure. I would actually love to bottle on for quarter of an hour on the British talent for inventing the future - JBS Haldane and Aldous Huxley,

I had a look at what might be the Magic sequencer Mark got for �10. I thought it looked nice - especially the MIDI Mixer. My current version of Cubasis Audio isnt very fullsome in that area. I also got Vienna Soundfont Studio to load onto my old PC - which has an AWE32 card - and bungled my way into mixing a few "new" fonts under MIDI control. Something tells me that accessing these from Cubase will not be easy - but if I can control them from my D-HORN this will be a major leap forward. When I edit through XG on the PC into the Yamaha outboard synth and I have to throw a switch on the box to get back to MIDI control which is fiddly.

I was reading on the train home a review article covering the developments in synths etc between around 1987 and 2000. It was in 1996 staying in a cottage on the Settle - Carlisle railway line near the famous viaduct that I worked my way through the History of House Music. I was really taken by the way the Detroit pioneers of Techno had worked eg Derek May and I decided I would try to follow their example. About two three months later I drunkenly bought a second hand Casio CZ101 which was a piece of luck because it turns out to be a classic techno machine. It emerged in direct response to the Yamaha DX7 which everyone says launched the age of digital synthesis but is impossible to programme. The CZ101 comes slightly outside the period covered by the review - which showed very clearly how novel music technology starts at a premium price which then falls for a long long while until the gear becomes retro fashionable.

As far as I can tell retro sound fashions are just creeping forward to cover the Commodore 64 and early Akai samplers. I think there is something glorious about 8 bit synthesis and the way its granularity impacts on the harmonic series. I think one day this effect will be cherished in the way valve coloration is currently. (Of course HG Wells and EM Forster saw this all with some clarity!). Clearing out by WORD files I came across the article I wrote about the musical density of Pink Moon and never got round to publishing and I mailed a copy to Mark in case he is interested in this stuff - Andrew and Robin have read it. The link with the foregoing is the analytic density eg of HORN and how it belongs to the same universe as Newman and early PP Cage - also how it can extended using drone theory-practice on the pedal and a variety of synths. Maybe disinterring this will get me going on the half written thing on Bryter Later which I started about a year ago sitting by a pool in Crete. Who knows - with more time on my hands........I ought to complete the set I II III.