More about a line of development � from Schoenberg in LA on through:

Some One Or Other: Your last album was a set of hommages (as it were) to contemporary "classical"-for want of a better word-composers, including Cage and Feldman... Do you spend much time listening to that kind of music?

FF: I spend less time listening to it now, but I listened to it a lot in the Sixties and Seventies. It's very much part of my blood, and since Feldman died there's been a lot more of his music available on record, so I've been able to hear things which I hadn't heard before, which are very interesting.

SOOO: In writing these pieces did you go as far as embracing the open indeterminacy of Cage, or did you still choose to have an elemental of compositional control, structural backbone?

FF: Well, these three pieces are all very much geared towards the kinds of soundworlds that these composers create, although they're written by me so they have my own preoccupations in them as well, but structure of the Cage piece on "The Previous Evening" was largely generated by chance methods, for example, and a lot of the material within the structure is also aleatoric.

SOOO: Your last album was a set of hommages (as it were) to contemporary "classical"-for want of a better word-composers, including Cage and Feldman... Do you spend much time listening to that kind of music?

FF: I spend less time listening to it now, but I listened to it a lot in the Sixties and Seventies. It's very much part of my blood, and since Feldman died there's been a lot more of his music available on record, so I've been able to hear things which I hadn't heard before, which are very interesting.

(Joke about form and seriality and self-reference � well joke is maybe a bit strong - IC) .

SOOO: Did you yourself play experimental music back in the early days?

FF: I played some of Cardew's magnificent "Treatise", so I've always been attracted to the graphic score world. As a student I was also very much interested in Terry Riley, Steve Reich, that kind of nexus, back in the Sixties. Cage I found much more arresting as a writer than as a composer, but that's also because there weren't many opportunities to hear his music; at the time when I was reading him, there weren't many Cage concerts about. I wasn't a Londoner, so I wasn't living where everything was happening, you know-I was out in the sticks... It wasn't so easy to get to hear stuff.

SOOO: your apartment's on fire, the wife and kids are safe, and there's just enough room in your suitcase to bring along your ten all-time favourite records.

FF: Ten records, off the top of my head? Tomorrow it'll be ten a different ones. (Pause) I'd say... "For All We Know", Billie Holiday. (Pause) "Kind of Blue", I guess. Miles. Can't really avoid that, can you? (Pause) Glenn Gould playing Bach. Just about any of it. (Pause) "Rothko Chapel", Morton Feldman. (Pause) That piece of Messiaen, "Des Canyons aux Etoiles", is it? .

I'm a big Messiaen fan, structurally also, very much. Probably ten years ago I'd have chosen the "Turangal�la Symphony"; now I like the later things. (Pause) That's five, isn't it? Five to go... (Laughs) The second record by The Band, the one with "The Night They Burned Old Dixie Down" on it. (Pause) Erm... this is when it gets hard... I'd say Asha Bhosle singing Ghazals from Indian film music. (Pause) Julian Bream playing the music of John Dowland.

NNNNNNNNN

Actually it took me about 25 years to see what Fred was getting at about with that Band album.

More generally though inmy life � a visit to a US city usually means getting some of the New York School on record � Cage�s 16 Dances in DC, Zorn in Detroit, a late Feldman piano work in San Fancisco, more Feldman in Boston, Earle Browne and late Feldman in NYC. The other thing about the US is that each time I go there I meet more and more interesting people and do more and more interesting things � culminating this year in making my jazz debut.

I have always been struck by the variety of music available on the radio in the USA � all kinds of genres that never get an airing hereThe more I turn this stuff over in my mind the more it seems that there is some kind of cultural liberation available in the USA as Fred suggested in the quote I put up yesterday. I was reading just now in the Wire about how well Eno got on in the Downtown milieu in the mid 1970s.

Of course many Americans one meets envy the cultural life in the UK � I am sure its easy to exaggerate the benefits in both directions. What might be more important is to try to understand why the UK is such an unforgiving realm for most kinds of non-standard musical endeavour. Even talking to Gilbert it sounds as if its easier to find suitable gigs in Belgium and Holland and indeed other parts of Europe. You only have to look at the touring patterns of major innovators like the Westbrooks.

Yesterday I scouted the net on Darmstadt and found an article discussing the impact of the Summer School on the UK music scene. This was exclusively about the spread of serialism to the UK � and in particular how serialists tended to get jobs in the new universities. Then how �difficult� music fell out of musical fashion in the 1980s for a number of reasons. All of this sounds right � but it doesn�t explain why the article doesn�t event begin to consider the impact of Cage on Darmstadt � and on Cardew and Young. Its as if this later agenda isn�t even on the map at all.

One eye-opener for me within the last five years was a TV programme about Merce Cunningham , the dancer and choreographer, and Cage�s long time partner. I realized that in his dance company Feldman, Young and Cage were providing the scores while Rauschenberg and Jaspar Johns were doing the sets. Woww I thought, that must have really been something � being able to get all this cutting edge originality in a single cultural event. In fact the company especially prospered after a tour of the UK in 1964 � they must have hit the country at exactly the right moment. And then I began to look into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Cage�s 16 Dances � well I�d better not start on that.

Anyway none of this is a reason for giving up the enquiry - back within the �Intense Faction� another view of 6 Piano Pieces comes to light:

�These pieces express as powerfully as any of Sch�s work the urge to total introvesrion. This is a music of brief glimmers and unexpected exclamations within the piano�s monochrome timbre. S seems intent on attaining a chill abstraction. Webern was working towards an ideal of concision at the same time but S differs significantly in his choice of the piano as an instrument and in the tendency to move forward by association in an �open form� � antithetical to Webern�s intensely organized material with its elaboration of intervals and motifs.

The second piece is based on a stubborn but irregular repitition of major thirds interrupted by fragment of melody.

The first half of number 3 sets forte chords in the right against vague pianissimo octaves in the bass.�

I made Gilbert a CD yesterday which includes a version of the 2nd Little Piece - a lot more extrovert than this account would imply � I think it�s the trombone solo that pushes it that way. I didn�t send him the third which I programmed yeterday and at the moment I think sounds a bit like incidental music to the Avengers. . When you have a definite bass line you can explore it by seriality � on occasions I have used a device in Cubase called a timbre alogorithm � in fact there�s one in The Last Eleven Bars. Maybe the next step with this is to get Piano 3 into Cubase Go and apply some plug-in FX.

I included a piece called �Day In Day Out� on the CD for Gilbert which I think was my first conscious homage to NYC � before I�d ever been there � a kind of thought experiment in which a crowd of 60s free jazzers interfere with a chugging mid 70s Minimalist piece.

There�s two versions of Faces and two of Fifths plus Approximately Four Minutes and The last Eleven Bars � the Good Vibes Sketch

Something about Eva Cassidy: Andrew K wrote about hearing a recording of her a months or so back � and what an impact it made on him. Someone �did� EC on Junior Stars in Their Eyes a week ago. I thought it was a really difficult choice but she won all the same. This morning in Sainsbury�s I saw a new CD of previously unreleased material which contains a version of Who Knows Where The Time Goes. It sounds frightening doesn�t it � considering where she gets to with Over The Rainbow.

(The only thing about pruning is that I tend to damage my fingers � mostly on my left hand.)

Andrew�s thoughts on returning from holiday and �back to reality� are really on target. In the 1990s I gradually realized that I kept reading things on holiday which were having an amazing impact on me � The History of House Music, a collection of essays by artists in St Ives about the role of their studios in their creative lives. I would make some conscious changes or develop strategies as a result � for example in 1996 I bought the Casio CZ101 as a result of reading about what the Detroit pioneers did with 2nd hand synths. I started deliberately putting drawings up in my office as a result of reading about studios. I think now that I tend to write more and better music � between September and January � as the input from the �unreality� works its way through.

The last month has been no exception in terms of a quantity of stuff arising � we�ll have to see about quality of course � even though the �real� side of reality has been a bit unrewarding. The next four weeks have to be different.

I have settled on a signature sound for the Telecaster � a virtual Fender Bassman with a flutter echo. On the Dusonic I am less sure � in fact I wonder wether the dirty channel on the real Fender DeLuxe 112 isn�t the thing. Looking at the reviews a lot of people are fairly underwhelmed by this side of the amp � but I think the unusually powerful single coils on the Duo are suited. No one has a word against the Fender reverb though.