Jake and I explored various localities yesterday afternoon - a road up the chalk east from here. We stopped at a place where there was a good view west - we could see the Hogs Back from the side - and odd shape with a slight kink - and another hill behind and beyond which I couldnt make out. To the north St Annes Hill at Chertsey stood out of the landscape -its quite close to the Thames near where the River Wey enters the Thames. Also not far from Chertsey Abbey which was founded in the 7th century.

We went down to an 18C park from there - designed by Capability Brown and trotted round. Then further down the chalk dip slope - on a road which crosses the chalk ridge and then down into the valley along a low ridge which makes the river Wey swing round it to the North. On the north bank we stopped at Old Woking and looked at Church St - very much an oasis in suburbia. The bass of the chuch tower has horizontal layered orange tiles - something I have seen in a church in the East Midlands which incorporates Roman buidling material.

It would be good to have one of those old houses besides the river (except when it floods). Then on to Pyrford - on which is on the north bank on a terrace maybe 90 feet above the flood plain - a small Norman church in a commanding position looking south - obviously another old north-south route probably to Ockham. On the floodplane here is Newham Priory - quite substantial ruins of the nave of the chuch visible from the road but on private land. Lots of old river engineering on the floodplane.

Pyrford has its very own standing stone north from the church where the road divides. Byron's daughter married into the local family - she has given her name (Ada) to a computer language on account of her friendship with Charles Babbage and her mastery of his ideas. There's a play about her by Tom Stoppard which makes rather a lot of chaos theory.

It seems more and more obvious that the Wey was an avenue for settlement right from the earliest times. There are bronze age barrows on two of the low terraces overlooking the river - one just near the intersection of the A3 and M25 at Wisley. Where the Wey swings towards the Mole (the next river east - although they breach the chalk 10 miles apart they get within a mile of each other downstream) there is an Iron Age Hill Fort which I have yet to visit. I have a vague idea that B Eno used to live nearby in a celebratd early modern house.

I discovered that the Wey navigation was put in just after the Civil war and was one of the first major canal undertakings in the UK. A stronger resolve than ever to walk the towpath downstream.

I worked on a piece - part of a longer loop I busked out of Traktor with a fragment of Hissing of Summer Lawns mixed with some techo - I pre-echoed the main track with a crushed anticipation. I put some guitar across that into the PC and then took it down to the desk. Then I put the line from Alfie across that with the D Horn. Because the line loops and jumps so much the result was quite like a certain style of minor based hard bop writing from the early 60s. I like the moment where the words go "even no believers can believe in" - in the original that is a peak of harmonic pressure at the end of the bridge. In this piece the effect is the opposite because the fall in the line is close to the new root tonality although there is a still a yearning element in the line because there is a suspended second over the minor. In a way this is the destination of the piece. Then I went out and cut my own lawn.

The line went on with D Horn into a fairly conventional brass patch off the CZ101 - I am not sure about this sonority. I remixed the guitar - flute -brass versions of Alfie to go with this.

Also wrote to James - a few words of explanation to go with the CDs. And made a CD of Fifths - I now need to write the performance instructions.

Dropped in on Andertons to look at USB audio interfaces. They are still not cheap - the one they recommend is �250. But it would mean I could take a signal from the coaxial SPDIF on the Tascam into the PC and then out from the PC to minidisc on SPDIF optical. The Minidisc could then physically transfer into the Tascam again so a lot of processing could happen in the digital domain avoiding A-D converters. This would be "cleaner" but it remains to be seen what this means in terms of feel and character.

Vita has been exploring her Digitec bass processor with Sam who lives next door who is 10 and has just started learning the guitar.