Yes fraught is certainly the word. Dealing with utility companies, trying to get the bureaucracy of the little white car together. These things shouldn't be so fraught-making - eg comapred with the things Mark has been wrestling with but somehow its not that simple. Detail is not one of my strengths.

I definitely can't find a digital in or out (apart from the UBS) on the 1024 Live. The line in doesnt seem to link up with any of the digital recording - only the mic in. So there is quite a strong impulse to leve things be - with the exception of making more use of the digital audio side of Cubasis. I found a track that I did in the middle of February and I loaded that into Cubasis and started putting some flute lines in and then cutting and paste-ing the digital audio. I think I mentioned that the SONY condenser mike seems to work OK in the soundcard - there's lots of equalisation, chorus and ambience there so its reasonably easy to get a decent sound. In the past I have busked in MIDI lines using the digital sax and then cut, pasted and copied that but I have never really done it with "real" recorded material. Its the kind of thing where you follow a few lines of investigation and then draw breath to think about what you make of the result.

I normally skip most of the record reviews in the Wire unless I know something about the people reviewed, but this month I am reading most of them in detail. There seems to be quite a bit that is digital audio manipulation of various found sounds. One guy for example collects his material off the radio and especially likes the sounds he gets when the tuner is slightly off the broadcast frequency. Working in this way throws into high relief the question of musical form - is there going to be any - what kind of principles are going to be developed and applied.

On the one hand one might think that there has to be a formal template before the work begins. Or maybe not - I think the celebrated modernist composer Harrison Birtwhistle has said that he starts with a single note - usually an "e" and lets the work unfold from there. Rothko thought that the forms in his paintings - elemental though they were - had a life of their own and often dictated to him during the production of the work. Again you might think that loops are inherently static and that they inhibit any kind of development - but I am not sure thats true either.

I suppose I think that the new functionality thats appearing all the while offers new ways of development and favour novel formal approaches. I keep coming back to Rauschenberg and his acquisition of a skill to "snatch" an image from any bit of print he came across. I have always loved those works - right from when I first saw them in my teens. But when they first grabbed me I certainly couldnt articulate why they seemed so important.

At the Development Centre the Myers Briggs personality assessment technique was deployed - but there was some new material to me about primary secondary and tertiary processes. The suggestion was that sometimes the environment highlights our reliance on those mental processes that are much less developed. One example for me would be to get too "factual" - to over collect evidence rather than relying on evidence to carry me forward - or to over-eat generally over-consume things with an immediate sensory pay-off. These are things that are less practicised in ones life to date. Anyway the theory seemed to think that the only way to rebalance the psyche was to withdraw into the "visionary" zone.

I once had a Muse-style dream - maybe in my late 20s. She took the form of Miss Mitchell and the climax of the dream was like an electric short circuit between her little finger and mine - a kind of arc-ing across.

I have been meaning to write about the band I was in in the 1980s - after Steve closed down his quintet because he was getting ill. It was a big band which played music from Barcelone - music for doing a particular kind of square dance in the street. Sometimes we would play in the square at Covent Garden - not far from where Steve's band had a regular residency. The music would echo well off the sides of the buildings. It was part of the London alternative scene which was led by comedy-cabaret.

Last might we went and saw "About A Boy" which seems to be part of a wave of successful projects taking a left field view of masculinity - Tony Parsons novel Man and Boy is another. The film wears its thesis pretty much on its slieve - the Hugh Grant character believes that contra J Donne everyman is an island. He is a kind of schematic lad-mags individualist who likes cars and e-gadgets. Grant is extremely funny in the role and part of the humour is how he applies a kinds of ruthless means-ends logic to social phenomena which people don't usually articulate their thoughts about in that way eg families. He pretends to have a family so that he can engineer brief liasons with single parent women. Grant is able to bring just enough charm to the character to keep the whole business well within the domain of comedy.

While the "hero" is anti-romantic the development is only partially towards a traditional romantic solution. If anything it seems to advocate a kind of communitarianism outside of traditional domestic structures. Maybe I should read the book - which Yvonne says is different and better.

Something turned up on my face yesterday - not the usual kind of annoying temporary thing. Its on my eyelid and can best be described as a kind of blood blister. Maybe it itches slightly. I suppose the first issue is whether its just going to go away again.