Yesterday I managed to get to the Ikon gallery where I heard an installation by David Cunningham who studied art at Maidstone College in the mid 1970s. In the creative atmosphere of the time, there was a mix of structural film-making, conceptual art, experimental video and minimalist music. He started a collaboration with Stephen Partridge who went on to teach a pioneering video course at the conceptual art oriented college in Coventry.

The Cunningham piece at Ikon is about 10 years old and called �The listening room�. It involves a micophone, amplifier, limiter and speakers. Feedback from the speakers through the mike happens at the natural frequency of the room or a harmonic of that frequency and is stopped from going too far by the limiter. The system tends to oscillate at a cycle of several seconds but parameters of the frequency and amplitude cycles are affected by ambient noise and by the presence of people in the room.

It cheered me up to read in the notes with the piece that Cunningham has been influenced by Alvin Lucier and John Cage. Lucier was a member of the Sonic Arts Union which grew out of the ONCE Festival which was held at Ann Arbor in South East Michigan in the early 60s and which brought avant garde figures of the time such as Eric Dolphy, Lamont Young and the Judson Dance Theatre to the area. I have one CD of Lucier which is one of the most minimal bits of music in my collection. I could see the link between this limited amount Lucier�s music I have heard and the Cunningham installation , for example they both share an interest in natural resonances.

The performance documentation with the piece also includes a 1990 lecture by John Cage about his life. I hadn�t realised until reading this that Cage�s mother started life in Detroit before moving to LA where Cage was born in 1912 or that he had studied with Henry Cowell before he started with Schoenberg. Cage also mentions that the composition of Music for Changes preceded 4 mins 33 secs � which I think I got round the wrong way yesterday.

Cunningham was at the centre of the Flying Lizards who had a hit with an early 80s version of Money.

CDs of Cunningham�s music were available and I bought one of a 1990 collaboration with John Greaves who was the bass player in Henry Cow. I have just one other of his solo CDs which dates from the late 70s and which I really have yet to engage with. I have been looking at a WAV which I extracted from that earlier CD where the lyrcist, Peter Blegvad, says �The fountain pen which Nijinsky designed in the asylum� wondering whether to do with these words which are quite bouncy.

So I listened to the Greaves/Cunningham CD as I drove the pretty way back from Spaghetti Junction to avoid congestion on the M6 � down the M5 then past Tamworth in Arden along the M42 and M40 to the Avon valley. I was pretty impressed. Maybe my ears are biased by listening to the Stainless Steel Gamelan this morning but I thought it was like a mixture of the Marble Index and Cale�s greatest hits. It reminded me slightly of the settings of Rimbaud which I bought along with the Greaves CD in Greenwich � Cale is implicated in these as well.

I also bought a CD-ROM compilation by Cunningham and Partridge. According to the notes to this CD Partridge was swept up by video in the mid 1970s � especially the way in which image and sound are given equal status by the medium. The CD-ROM contains a number of self referential sentences eg �This doesn�t make sense�. Often the sentence is repeated while different �responses� occur � both sound and vision. Many of the sentences are not perfectly formed. Of course I was really pleased to have got something audio-visual of my own from this tradition.

Here�s a review of Greaves Cunningham from somewhere or other on the net:

�Try and out-obscure this, then! "Greaves. Cunningham" is the end result of over three years of occasional collaborations between one John Greaves (who has worked with Henry Cow, Slapp Happy, Robert Wyatt and Peter Blegvad) and the slightly more famous David Cunningham (ex-Flying Lizard and Michael Nyman producer), originally released in 1991 in Japan, and now up for more widespread appraisal. In the words of the twosome themselves:

"We wanted to explore the technology of sequencers and samplers to find uniqueness; in the same way that analogue devices, electric guitars and so on have their unique sound, such as delay or distortion, we were looking for characteristics special to computer technology, to allow the technology itself to dictate structure and process.

One of the reasons for working in this way was to find a way to integrate song structures with the use of studio processes. We adopted this approach as we saw this work developing independently of ourselves and to allow development beyond the bounds of what either of us would instinctively allow".

Well, thanks for clearing that up. The dead giveaway use of words like �structure� and �process�, and the fact that both Greaves and Cunningham credit themselves with �treatments� may well have you already thinking of the works of a certain diarist named Brian Peter George St. John Le Baptiste De La Salle, and, now you come to mention it, vast tracts of "Greaves. Cunningham" don�t half sound like the less interesting bits on Professor Eno�s mid-70s �song� albums, aided and abetted by John Greaves� very Eno/John Cale vocals and catchy, singalong lyrics like "Decent man, inner greyness/Unfamiliar engines, black scent/Symbolic engine, definite biology". Which is, of course, not a terrible crime, but a bit platform boot this close to the millennium now that anyone in the slightest bit interested in "characteristics special to computer technology" is making evil madbastard dance music. �

Yes well I could say that this puts me in my place. But in my defence I would claim that I started by pulling threads attached to that kind of music and this is where it leads. And of course I think that structural stuff is good, of course � they could have done more of it.