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JOURNEY OF A MELODY - the 'big work' moves slowly but surely, probably increasing speed but not necessarily tempo. The first 20 minutes will be mixed this Winter.

INVENTION FOR ONE-STRING BANJO AND WATER CISTERN - One of my more provocative offerings for the John Peel radio programmes in the early 1970s - has been chosen for David Toop's compilation 'Not Necessarily English Music' (LMJ11) to be issued with Volume 11 of Leonardo Music Journal (2001) . The water cistern was the main water tank in 208 Ladbroke Grove, London, just above my padded cell of a studio where I made Music From The Body and the music for several films including 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', and wrote all that material for Atom Heart Mother .

ALBUM REISSUES - 'Right Through'(RON323) has long been overdue for reissue. This is coming soon, supplemented by a recently-discovered alternative ending to Side 1 and a separate particularly viscious suite made for BBC Radio 4, New Year 1976, never broadcast.
A Raise Of Eyebrows/ As He Stands has run out. This will also be reissued soon.

BOOGU YAGGA GAL - As a keen appreciator of most Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean music, I recently got interested in Mento, the Jamaican rural music that fed into Ska and Reggae. My son Joe found some cassettes in London and I pursued the source of the original 78s. The result is a CD on Heritage HTCD45 , a true labour of love - coming January 2002. I found that the Cedar de-noising system couldn't cope with some of the worst graunches so I redrew some of the waveforms in ProTools and sat back astonished. Also, I'm fascinated by the notion that the hot single-string banjo work on many of the tracks is a real missing link between early North American finger-style and the later plectrum chord style.

 

THE STAPLED BRAIN - The first part of this complete collected writings, 'Noun Clown', is being prepared for publication. It's an alphabetically arranged set of aphorisms (short, pithy, witty statements or maxims) and anti-aphorisms (far-from-short mind meanderings).

MEDIATE - This comes under my University of Portsmouth work. Shortly after I started there, I teamed up with Drs. Chris Creed and Paul Newland to devise a project proposing to design and build an interactive environment for autistic people. The idea is to allow them to emerge from their seemingly closed world and, to some extent, to show how the've done it. It's certainly not a cure but may have some therapeutic value. Well, after 2 failed applications for decent funding, the European Commission said, 'We think this might work!' and we've just got the final contract.

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