Iain Cameron's Diary
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2005-10-15 - 11:32 a.m.

I had supper with Stephen and Liz on Thursday and we exchanged views of Lycia. Their photos are of the eastern end of the Lycian Way which if anything looks even better. Stephen climbed Mount Olympos - one of the many in the area.

I have been pressing on with mapping the cluster - I suspect that this activity fills some inner need to make sense of the landscape or something. I think I may have got through to some valid synoptic statement - in the 90s globalisation drove consolidation in the supply chain at the level of the top 50 firms globally. These conglomerates have not proved a brilliant success and indeed something like four of five of the biggest have gone bankrupt or are about too. But the force and logic of consolidation has continued - with smaller firms - which may well have proved more successful because they are more focused. This process is evident in the very wide range of overseas firms that have bought existing manufacturing facilities in the West Midlands automotive supply chain. The breadth is evident in the range of foreign money that has bought into the sector - not just French, German and US but also Norwegian, Swedish and Swiss. The next step is to develop this idea from the data I have brought together.

Vita is working hard on her project about Raymond Briggs, the illustrator and producing some great drawings based on elements from his various books. Some of her mounted photos from last year have come back from school - moments from street life.

EBTG - Walking Wounded - a techno extension of Amplified Heart - inevitable given the success of Missing. They seem to sit alongside Lamb as people who take the grammar of drumnbass and techno and use it within song forms. Is this a step on from what Suzanne Vega does around 1990 when she begins to bring electro elements into her songs?

Meanwhile I blame Glen Gould for getting me back into Schoenberg's Op 19. This is atonal music but without the benefit (?) of serialism. You can see them as short stories. So I am playing around with them wondering for example how I can transcribe them for guitar and wondering about their harmonic and other logic.

I had a brief talk to Nick Brown last week who hasnt been too well.

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