I enjoyed Ricardo�s entry about life, exercise and music. All three confound me and I ought to do more of the middle one - so good for R having started to do more and also having noticed the benefit. In fact today on the M6 in a service station I seriously wondered whether my neglect of this dimension hadn�t reached disastrous proportions but fortunately I managed to get myself back on the road � to Crewe. Just as well as the event went well and I think the enterprise crossed an important threshold. When I got back to the ranch I collapsed into bed and slept for 3 hours, got up at 11pm, ate and fell back into a stupor.

Luckily I woke up to catch a really good bit of music history on radio 2. After Tamla moved from Detroit to LA, Philadelphia emerged as a major centre of pop soul, built round a core of session musicians and the producers Gamble and Huff. I hadn�t realised that a small label lured the core rhythm section up to NYC from Philly to develop a new genre of orchestral salsa disco. This was the genre that pioneered the twelve inch single � at that point club sound systems were in mono and so taking the pressing up to twelve inches delivered a big step in quality � this matched the ambitions of the producers who were using very large arrangements using French Horns, conventional brass, big strings sessions etc around a strong 4:4 beat overlayed by a salsa rhythm. These long arrangements powered the contemporary disco scene as it emerged in key NYC clubs and the records began to sell well driven by word of mouth and club play rather than radio play. This music scene preceded the big 1976 hits of Donna Summer, Love to Love You Baby and the machine driven I Feel Love. Apparently there is more next week about Eurodisco..

Try http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/documentaries/disco.shtml

Its always nice when things work. I was pleased that the CDs recorded off digital radio � Gavin Bryars in Estonia and other post-Minimalism - seem to have worked. I have also downloaded a new Real player which does easy conversions between WAV and mp3. So I can load bits of those experimental music files into Wavelab and experiment on them even more. I have downloaded some more microtonal music plus something that calls itself fractal music.

At the weekend I took a further step and bought a USB-MIDI interface. I already have one but its too complicated for me to understand and I have got fed up with putting notes into Cubase with the mouse. This new interface is a Roland and extremely simple. It seems to work OK except there is an issue about synching MIDI and digital audio. Who knows � I might get to the bottom of this.

Anyway now that I can put notes into the portable more easily I have around 24 bars of something that might be a piece. But I can�t say that I share Ricardo�s feeling of being at home working on pieces � I would say that I felt out on a limb.

I played some music in public with Eike at the weekend. We seemed to get away with it � quite a good atmosphere. I asked her about some of the imagery that was to the fore in Regan�s hexagrams recorded in her workbook � she could identify some of the issues that it may have been getting at.