A less frantic day. - and that Mark Lamarr prog on Pet Sounds - heavenly!!!!

On the way to the supermarket I delivered a copy of Plundafonix to Nikki Artti in Farncombe. Nikki followed Matt who sings Psalm 22 on Serious Music as curate here and now has moved on to Farncombe, one stop on the railway south of Guildford. Nikki�s husband Giles is a GP and he was the link person with the Highveld before me and he helped organise the first Cleveland recital. (I bumped into Cleveland in Tesco�s and we talked about the site and his next Highveld recital on 9 November.) The CD is a belated gift for Nikki and Giles to celebrate the birth of their second son Dominic in April.

First thing, I had a chance to listen to Mark�s revised mixes of Fifths - they sound even more modern (good) for reasons I haven't yet unearthed. I thought I was going to start Traktoring away but instead I was drawn into a remix of Billy Jean - there is something deeply disturbing about the line of that song. I certainly wouldnt think of doing it without a leadsheet. The idea in my mind is that I will redistribute the narrative tension in the piece - using the written line but postponing the point when the tension gathers towards a climax �people always tell me�����

When I walked the dog on the hill this morning I listened to Bryter Later - if you like in the light of some of the things AK has put in Seagull. One immediate thought was how there was a need to a similar bit of work to the Andrew's Seagull analysis on the opening, closing and middle instrumental pieces on Bryter Later. I always had it in mind to have a crack at this but having seen Seagull I wonder whether I am the right person for the job. At the moment these pieces keep their secrets. The opening maybe the easiest to read, while the middle piece seems to me to be a fulcrum. It also seems clear that the first four songs with Hazey Janes framing the two inner songs, City Clock and One of These Things are a separate semantic entity from the three songs which John Cale was involved in. The opening Hazey Jane song has an amazing construction - indeed song construction is one of things about that initial set of four - whereas the second set are less intricate for the most part in those terms.

One particular theme from Seagull that was on my mind was the way we are tempted now to think about works such as Seagull or especially Poor Boy in a postmodern framework. In both instances I am interested in the question of what justifies this move - and at the moment I am better able to see how it works with Poor Boy.

Irony comes off Poor Boy in waves. Poor Boy is the title of a blues by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Nick quotes the hums of Pooh Bear, there�s an amazing piano solo by the leading South African jazz musician of the day which is overtly bluesy, plus some blues derived progressions towards the end of the song, but also some Brazilian style chordplay and ambiguity in the harmonic narrative. Thinking about these different "modes" in Poor Boy makes you realise that Nick, given the sophistication of some of the other stuff on the album, is a willing party to all of this. The terminus of the song - the possible marriage - is also a means of closure which is straight out of a familiar tradition of another kind - say the Shakespeare comedies. Its meaning is on several levels - partly formal, partly comedic and partly existential. In its existential mode is ricochets off the final moment in Hazey Jane I where Jane�s authenticity is called into question and also off the existential dilemmas of One of These Things.

Poor Boy is also framed between two much more overtly "authentic" songs - Fly with its dialogue of repentance and Northern Sky with its existential stripping away to the terror of raw emotion. The second block all have a significant from John Cale fresh from producing the Marble Index for Nico.

So I would say that now, we can see the clues in Poor Boy, in a way which was hard to achieve when it was first released. Its easy now to apply the kind of analysis that was just emerging from �advanced� aesthetics two or three years before the song was written. I am thinking especially of Richard Wollheim�s book Art and Its Objects which justifies the idea that the meaning of a work may lay not just in itself but in its relation to a tradition of interpretation or creation. This truth hits Wollheim as he wrestles in the mid 60s with Warhol's and Rauschenberg�s paintings - a process which some say led him to invent the term Minimalism. Warhol especially provokes philosophers in this direction - see for example Arthur C Danto.

So I would say that we now read eg Poor Boy through a tradition of interpretation which involves looking at certain surface characteristics which may appear as superficial formal devices, often rather forced, and working on these features those as clues to a deeper meaning - I suppose this is a bit like dream analysis. The fear that we have committed a murder which grossly shapes the surface of the dream may be explained by something less lurid but more complex linking the dream, the recent past and a longer history.

People will always ask whether that was what was really going on in the studio in someone�s mind when the track was put down - and of course we seldom have much evidence on that point. But when you look, say, at the enormously tight and well-organised creative structures Nick put in place on Pink Moon then the possibility remains open, realistic.

You might also ask whether its a bit starry-eyed to suggest that Nick�s songs/recordings are really contributions to a dialogue that embraces the leading edge of analysis and gesture in the New York art world. Well that would take a while to deal with - one might point to the fact that when J Lennon left the Beatles his first performance with Yoko, who was from the centre of the NYC artworld, was with the most post-Webern alto player on the New York scene - collectively with some of Nick�s erstwhile students, in the location where he was meant to go lectures. Or where ones these fellow student was going on to drag the English Dept into the newspapers a few years hence over an apparent crisis in the validity of postmodern interpretation.

If you go into this area of analysis project with Bryter Later and to be honest I don�t see how you can avoid it when you start to look seriously at song structure and instrumentation then I think you will end up in this kind of territory, or maybe seeing Nick as a post-Plathian writer.

One of my many uncompleted essays on Bryter Later starts with a comparison between that recording and Begel Gilberto�s CD Tanto Tempo. A lot of this is to do with the glorious and deceptive lightness of the music, some might be to do with some kind of �post bossa nova� aesthetic and I�ll always remember that delightful moment in A skin Too Few where they use part of a Hazey Jane as a slowed down loop - it sounds just like an episode created in the same way on BG�s piece.

So if we get ourselves into this territory - and some may well want to avoid that at all costs - then you have see the instrumental syntactical pieces as crammed with codes which are waiting to be deconstructed. The chippy little tunes, the calypso chord progressions, the drones, the eliptical solos - are waiting to be recontextualised as part of a much deadlier game.

The Quick Shuffle seems to share some element of the spirit lingering here.

Apparently Vita has been invited to join a band as bassplayer at her school - the one John Renbourn went to.