Weekend release

Well, that's another week over. I've just been to the first-year English lecture: The Renaissance in 60 Minutes - fascinating as always.

On the menu this weekend is another trip to Stoke. My grandmother has reached her 97th birthday, though I'm not sure how much she knows about it. I'm fully convinced that she's immortal.

I'm also off to an all-Steve Reich concert in Birmingham (here's his Myspace page). It's my Third Reich concert (sorry, couldn't resist). He's a brilliant minimalist/post-minimalist composer, a very early adopter of sampling (twenty years before pop music caught up) and of African rhythms, particularly in the centrepiece of this weekend's gig, Drumming. Minimalism's brilliant: it hypothesises that within an overarching framework of repetition, tiny changes in pace, pitch and tone will take on huge significance.

Here's Drumming (part 1) and some of Piano Phase, one of my favourites. I'd also recommend his stunning tape loop voice-and-quartet piece about the Holocaust, Different Trains and the electric guitar piece Electric Counterpoint.