The Orthodox Church is making a big return as well. Perhaps it never really went away. Everywhere there are people selling cassette tapes of Orthodox services out of suitcases almost like they were Grateful Dead bootlegs. And the music is transcendentally fabulous - a group of monks or priests singing acapella in what sounds at first like elaborately filigreed, counterpointed Gregorian chant. In it you hear so many different, rich worlds - the Western religious tradition, the more exotic southerly and Greco-Arabic influences, and the austerity of the far North.

What you sense in these musics is a complete absence of people walking back into the control room and saying, "Can you stick a bit more reverb on the snare?", a complete absence of producers dicking around with the sound, of engineers getting people to hammer kick drums all morning, of blokes in faded black T-shirts sitting in front of computers and making loops.... what you hear, in fact, is the complete absence of the workaday process of 'making a record'. These people are not 'making a record', they are making music because it creates for them a world they want to inhabit, makes them feel alive, and that life floods out over the edges of the recording and into you, the listener.

And that, I'm starting to think, should be an artist's minimum ambition.

That second-to-last sentence is what I'm trying to accomplish with my current pieces. The Fantastic Domestic. Mark Amerika discussed possible- or fictional- personae as a means of stepping outside the self; that was behind my skin pieces a few years ago. Now I'm working on fictional places or artifacts.