Filtered oompah trance-out disco darkness weird driving machine factory music = Doppelschnitt . You have to tread carefully with post Harmonia/Cluster stuff, but this particular offering is suitably unheimlich and cute in equal measures.

I must be getting better, because this is almost pop music.

As I got iller and iller as the week went on I didn’t want to listen to anything nice or comforting. Abstraction suits fever; noise suits infection; sequencers suit viruses. That was my theory, as I huddled under my blanket trying to transcribe interviews and plan stuff but really not getting all that far.

Somehow, though, I must have locked into some kind of editorial autopilot function, because a lot of stuff did actually get done, commissioning and so forth. I read back emails I don’t really recall sending, and they’re not quite the ravings of someone with killer throat flu, although I detect a slight paranoid tone in some of them, which I think was a symptom. At the height of my illness I became a more compulsive than usual internet botherer; I mean, I hardly ever just sit and look for stuff, follow random leads, waste time. But somehow, because it was the only physical exertion I could actually muster, I ended up late one night doing the University of California Absolute Pitch Auditory Test. They are - or they were - trying to ascertain the genetic origins, if any, of absolute pitch, and I thought, well, it is my duty, is it not, to help ‘em out, so I filled in the form about my musical background and all that, and clicked on ’start test’.

It was a real clever one too, plenty of stuff to catch you out, but I was relieved to note that I still had perfect pitch (even after all those years using headphones and going to noise gigs), and that I was an AP-1. That, I think, is like the best you can be, the top cluster. Sweet. Thanks UCSF! What this information means, and how it will benefit me or anyone else, is beside the point. It was just a funny thing to do in the throes of illness, to prove to myself one of my faculties was still intact.

Got an email from a friend asking for a mix CD. He wanted to know what was going through my ears and my mind, those were his words. English is his second language; I like the way he uses it.