It's been a busy weekend. I dropped back in to the sessions at Green Door for Matt Kivel's album and played a bit of piano, and while I was there Sam Smith also plugged my iVCS3 into his good old tape-driven Roland Chorus Echo for the full authentic Eno ambient effect, with a combination of old and modern technology ... which is fitting given that most of the rest of the weekend was spent on the second edit of our Purcell album which is coming on a treat, for release in June. Joe Davie has also started work on the cover painting which I'm looking forward to seeing very much.

Speaking of next June, I've been letting the schedule take shape for our fiddle band project, and I'm currently on a train to Cambridge so that I can drop in on rehearsals for Barnaby's pipes/harp/medieval fiddle experiments with Bill Taylor and Clare Salaman. 

Meanwhile, El Sistema's magical run of perfect PR in Britain, in particular with the Guardian, the BBC, and the Scottish Government, may finally be coming to an end. I'm sure the Big Noise project doesn't fall into all the same traps that the Venezuelan original did, but even so, public critical analysis of what the 'system' is really about has been very much lacking, and is long overdue.