The ariel photography software Mark put in his entry is amazing. For dogwalking put in GU2 4LA - the green on the left hand side. Yvonne and I were up there this afternoon. Not much visibility.

Lunctime all four of us went to a pub in Clandon for a meal for Vita's birthday. Fine.

Lots of musical bits and pieces. I should have mentioned the Channel 4 Gospel competition finals from yesterday - mostly outstanding - including the two winners. Tonight there was a SouthBank Show on REM - not a band I know well. The programme did a good job of explaining how they came to be. It was good seeing the clip of B52s and Patti Smith at the beginning. I thought some good points were made about REM's Appalachian roots.

In the Observer today D Harry gets wistful about CBGBs and gigging with PS, the Ramones and Television. (Patti said on glimpsing Tom V at CBGBs - boy I just gotta have some of that Egon Schiele vibe - indeed who can blame her)

Lots of odd bits of musical stuff today - some remastering of a cassette recoding of a Debussy piece from a set of piano music for four hands. He produced it in 1913 - the same year as Syrinx and Jeux. It is a reworking of Chanson de Bilitis from about fifteen years earlier. Someone produced a flute and piano arrangement of the four handed material - and I performed most of the pieces with Peter Burge. Then I did some Amiga and flute versions which is whats on the cassette. I came across the second piece which is about a tomb with no name on it. Quite a bit of whole tone stuff - and one of those hard to work out long melodic phrases like the one which starts L Apres Midi. There are some nice timbres on the recording. I took it from tape into Wavelab with a view to using it as an ingredient. I have worked on five of the six pieces in this collection and they each have some pretty unusual features. They are really the end of Debussy's lyrical phase (along with Syrinx) before he moves into drier territory eg with the 12 Studies.

Then I came across a very early Midi arrangement of a piece by Jobim called the Red Blouse which comes from the same period as Wave. Its a clever piece - the first two chords are G maj 9 and F# 7 sharp 9. It has an A, B and C section and skips along very prettily. There's some flute improv on this recording that I think is OK - actually the piece is great to blow on. So I cleaned that up and put it onto Minidisc.

I was also ferreting about in the MIDI archives downstairs and came across a file of "We ve Only Just Begun" by the Carpenters which I think I downloaded. I don't do much with web sourced MIDI files although I am building up a collection of bought floppy discs from the remainder bookshop on Victoria St. I must have a weakness for MOR songs at the moment. I just fell on love with it - and started nuancing the timbres - removed some rather clunky drums and pushed the odd corny gesture into the background. Its quite like a 60s post Bacharach song - lots of secondary sevenths - a pretty expressive melody with some quite large steps. It modulates nicely in the middle eight. Well thats a bit of an exageration - it steps down a minor third to start the middle eight and then halfway through it steps up a major third.

The turnaround back to the A section is clever - from B major it uses the D sharp to effortlessly shift the harmony to C minor without any kind of jolt in the melody. C minor is the II chord for the main key of the piece - Bb major / G minor. So the key cycle is Bb major G major B major Bb major . Normally middle eights take a step into a sharper key and then progress back. This one takes a sharp step and then takes another one - not many examples of this come to mind. I suppose the Carpenters must have written it - clearly there's more to them than meets the eye. Well there's her voice and her strange life as well.

Played around with fragments of the guitar version of Alfie looping on two virtual turntables in Traktor. Thought this might be an over-easy option.

Maybe I 'll settle on something tomorrow morning before I go to Birmingham. In fact it turned out to be a truely MOR version of the Carpenters. Looks like I will be staying over night in Birmingham. The "Confessional" stuff looks really interesting.