Not so much music today - cooking and dog-walking instead. Jake and I had a look round Wisley - the next village downriver from Pyrford. Yet another small Norman church by the river with a few secular buildings clustered round. We looked for a large bowl barrow on the Common - supposedly 140 ft in diameter but we couldnt find it. This barrow is about halfway between the Wey and the Mole at the point where they come close together. Just upstream on the Mole from here is the Surrey church which has most Saxon features.

Another interesting playing opportunity has come up. Sister Paula is doing a maze walk and mailed to ask whether I would like to add some musical moments. Tempting to write a piece specially -"Music for Maze Walking". Having framed the idea I feel obliged to see it through.

I have been reviewing some of the recordings in the can from the past few weeks. At the moment I like several of the versions of Alfie. I came across one that is built of intersecting loops from the original guitar parts that I had quite forgotten about. I can remember dismissing it because I thiught it was too easy to do - but coming back to it as a file pulled out the database it inspires me to want to do more .

Maybe I reacted well to it "cold" because of some link up with the reading I am doing about Alban Berg. I listened to Berg's Opus 3 String Quartet this evening - Adorno calls it free atonal (first performed 1911) but it sounds chromatic to me. But not chromatic like the early piano pieces I have somewhere. They are oppressive and claustrophobic - the music doesnt breathe - characteristics I associate with Schoenberg. The Opus 3 sounds rather like Debussy to me although maybe more emotional. It must be 10 years ago that I started to binge on Berg - driving too and from work listening to the tapes from the Barbican Weekend. This was a finite process but the opportunity to get Adorno's angle is very attractive to me. A couple of years ago I read a really good book about Adorno's philosophy of music by an academic from Exeter. Adorno is one of the so-called Frankfurt School who married Freud to Marx.

Harbermas is the latest greatest in that tradition and I have wanted to know more for some while about non-coercive communication theory. Adorno mentions that Berg once met Freud - they were staying at the same hotel in the Dolomites and Berg had a cold - apparently he tended to hypochondria (except when it really mattered) and so he asked Freud to look at something quite minor such as cold and was unimpressed by the consultation.

I watched Ray Mears on BBC2 in Australia and Arizona. There's an advert of a 4WD streaming across the desert on the tube as part of a campaign to get people to go to there on holiday which had begun to get my interest up. Mears went into all the hazards that best people who go off road in the outback. It was the kind of thing that I thought might beset us driving around North Eastern South Africa last year - up to your axles in mud miles from anywhere but I was being too fretful in the event.

I fell in love with Arizona in about the first three minutes I was there. Mears went on a long trek across Southern Arizona near the Mexican border. I really envied him the skill to encounter that landscape in that way - although there are plenty of wild places in this country too like the Assynt for example.

I am writing this listening to an interview with David Thomas from Pere Ubu on Radio 3 on Mixing It - a band I know more by reputation although I am a longterm fan of Mixing It. He is explaining how he has given up using microphones and now uses speakers to act as mikes because they have interesting frequency responses - interesting stuff!! People tell him he sounds like Captain B but he can't hear it.

I have started to wonder whether you can record directly off Radio broadcasting on the net.The idea of digital radio is inspiring - just being able to capture in digital form anything floating past!