The Theatre of Voices perform the Cage works on the CD which I bought on Thursday and this reminded me that I have their De Profundus CD (A Part). I was surprised that P Hillier had moved quite that far into the contemporary repertoire � but reading his biog I see he moved across to the US a few years ago and this seems to have given him opportunities to branch out. Misappropriation on my mind.

The Ubu site has some timely Cage material in MP3 format � for example Cage and Sun Ra. I never knew where to start with Sun Ra. This LP has some very interesting solo synthesizer episodes. Riffs off the Keith Emerson stuff I heard a fortnight ago � by the way its his birthday on 2 Nov. One of my points of departure is a set of 5 solo synth episodes which I put down in Spring after NYC and Detroit. This week I got as far as linking the Dhorn up to the CZ101 and doing a bit over non-standard scale drones.

The ToV Cage CD also has Aria on it � a piece written at the end of the 1950s for Cathy Beberian. (I remember Frith saying that one of the things that made him take notice of Steely Dan was a reference to CB). Aria was composed at the same time as Fontana Mix and this is also available at Ubu. The office has just got broadband which makes downloading this stuff is much easier.

I enjoyed the Guardian overview on the Turner Prize though its too easy to say that YBAs are part of the Great British tradition of empiricism in art . A better suggestion is that its a large-scale experimental project along the lines of �if theory X Y Z is true and if we do A B C it may just be art � lets find out.� That�s as much American as a British tradition. - Ives, Cowell, Cage, Young, Reich, Glass for example.

What makes this kind of an experiment an experiment is not just that it leads to an experience. The creation of the experience needs to be rooted in a set of ideas (theories) about what valid/relevant art is now � part of the art-world. If an experiment isn�t rooted in theory, its just a random configuration.

Cage as inherited a bundle of ideas � from Schoenberg, from Cowell, from Duchamp and from Greenberg � and then applied them in his pieces but he tends to be seen � dismissively � as indulging in random configuration. His public advocacy of chance procedures helps of course.

The I Ching is theory and practice with what might seem �random� aspects. But the results are not really �random� at all but examples of formal self-similarity at different scales in how things work out - surprising formal parallels between the macrocosm and the microcosm. (Chaos Theory shows that even in the logical/mathematical world this can happen.)

Cage was close to Boulez and Stockhausen and interested in their exploration of total serialism when he took up the I Ching. Perhaps what he was really �experimenting� with their ideas - creating an alternaive totality, mixing in some new elements like the I Ching. The theory behind the I Ching is certainly rich enough to be adapted in that way.

(By the time Cage got to write Fontana Mix and Aria, Cage had fallen out with Boulez and Stockhausen and had become friends with Berio � who was married to Cathy Beberian. Maybe Cage worked through his ideas too rapidly in the 1950s or maybe he got to enjoy baffling people.)

Keith has lent me a video tape of John Mayall�s 70 th birthday concert with an extraordinary solo by Mick Taylor. I had almost forgotten how profound late 60�s post Peter Green blues guitar could be � the way they found enormous expressive space within the slow blues structure.. Mick also does some great bottle-neck on a Mustang on J B Lenoir�s �Talk to Your Daughter�. Eric�s Strat lacks character in comparison.

Last night on Radio 3 there was another example of that station�s commitment to disruptive discourse theory. I mentioned a week or so ago that they had decided that Delta Blues Discourse was invented in New York in 1955. They were at it again last night� this time with the First World War � whose horrors were created/discovered around 1929. The suggestion is that Owen, Graves, Sassoon etc created a powerful discourse through their poetry which was amplified in the 1960s, against the background of the Vietnam War, in shows such as O What A Lovely War. The task of history is to get behind this art-fuelled viewpoint and juxtapose it with other perspectives. This is actually quite difficult as the art-fuelled discourse only appeared at the end of the 20s as a counter to the official discourse of the heroic war to end war.

Muse theorists might enjoy the obituary of Mrs Graves in today�s Guardian.