Iain Cameron's Diary
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2010-08-13 - 12:55 a.m.

I met my XXpatriot mate and his gf for lunch in Sloane Sq. We went to a pub just a little off the beaten track which served Fullers and was quiet and relaxing. He has just been offered a job in the Gulf. We are planning to go and hear a band made up of people who we were at school with - in the first part of September. On the train I nearly finished Fear of Music - I will be sorry when I get to the end of it not least because I am running out of things to read. I am not sure the main question is going to be answered - why is modern music such a poor relation compared with modern art? Music gets cheaper and cheaper and art doesn't.

PW asked about EE's take on ND and that led to an exchange on what we thought of the whole project of turning the songs into records when they originally existed as items for gtr and voice. This is an especially big issue on Bryter Later. James McG mentioned that he was listening to PW's Seachanges and I have mislaid my copy. By the way the words are here:

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/PWcd2.html

Sooner or later another copy is likely to find its way into my hands - which I am looking forward to. I copied James McG's comment on the Larger Stories to Gilbert. He was in Aix yesterday and looked at his emails and so he mailed back some positive reaction to the reactions. I also mailed him a few thoughts so far on SMS. PW said he is using Garage Band - I wonder what for.

I am feeling overwhelmed by SMS. Compared with the sequencer I learned on it brings so much more possibility. Part of me is saying that it is a mistake to think that one has to make acid music on it just because that's what it's designed for. It is full of found musical items - you just find them on the disc - I have no idea what the structure of this archive is - maybe one should just pull things out at random?. Any one of them could be processed into a piece - especially given the power of the effects. On top of that there are all the found items I recorded a few months ago off Last FM - fragments that appealed to me. Just one of these has morphed into a piece this week. I thought earlier yesterday I was going to throw it away - but I filled in the lower part of the audio spectrum under the main loop with a rather quixotic musical gesture and this has changed my attitude to it. I think ideas will keep on coming.

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