My memory of Baal ties in with Ricardo�s current thoughts � it really is a bleak work.

I commuted into London � reminding myself that I still haven�t lost my intense dislike of South West Trains.

My MD recording from Wednesday night has been corrupted but I am not going to defeated by this minor setback. I bought some general MDs and am going to have a crack at some 4 track developments of the same approach next week.

I have been studying Bockris� biography of Patti Smith and finding some interesting new connections. Around 1967 PS was living with Robert Mapplethorpe and I am fairly certain that she saw the Pollock retrospective that year in NYC. At that point she was working more with graphic/visual ideas than words or music. In 1972 when Seventh Heaven is published she gives an interview in which she says that she creates poems in the same way that Pollock created pictures. In 1980, just as she has married Fred Sonic Smith she and he give a performance in Detroit where the famous and destructive Pollock film is played silently (ie without the Feldman track) and Fred leaves he Duosonic against the amp to feedback � while he and PS improvise freely � she on clarinet. She did a little bit of free improv when I saw her at St James� Picadilly two years ago or so. We also know that heard the Coltrane Quartet. It looks pretty much to me as if she could clearly see the connection between abstract expressionism and the free jazz in the 60s and this has actually been part of her creative agenda for decades,

With all the excitement in Detroit, I didn�t actually manage to track down any MC5 recordings and so I have yet to hear the alleged link between their approach and Coltrane � although others say it is there. But the Detroit Institute of Art was a major buyer of NYC 60s art has the best collection of Fluxus material that I have ever seen, My feeling is that the Detroit Underground embraces an input and development of the really leading edge NYC art and music scene of the 60s and early 70s.

I have managed to discover that the Detroit hard rock scene rather subsided as the 70s progressed. But the interesting potential link is the crossover to the emergence of techno. The Derek May recordings in the exhibition were very very powerful � how he believed that the music was abstract and focussed on the future � how strongly he believed in his art when no one else did. His words are inspiring stuff even when you hear it on tape.

Derek May followed on from some original ideas developed by Juan Atkins whose younger brother was a friend of May. Atkins seems to have got his first synth is his last year in High School which I think was 81 or 82 and used it to work on synthetic drum sounds. His first cassette produced at this time �contained somewhere inside the genetic code of Techno�. He moves to Washtenaw Community College and teams up with Vietnam Vet Rick Davis � and discover a common interest in synths and the futurology of Alvin Toffler � going on to form Cybotron who release Enter in 1983 after which Atkins leaves to form Model 500. Its during this time that the Smiths happily married and resident in Detroit. Well I wont speculate � but there�s an agenda here. Especially for me there is a synoptic agenda to use the CZ101 and the DH500 exploring that span of ideas and connections in 4 track digital.

I also need to go back into my early Chicago House triple CD - Chicago is about four hours drive away from Detroit and check out the chronologies � I have this stuff mapped as mid 80s at the moment.

Having read bits about PS in Paris at Morrison�s grave I bumped into a cheap copy of the first Doors album which I just couldn�t resist.

Claire the producer from the Cutting Room mailed with some succinct observations about 10 Short Stories.