By the time you read this I will be trekking into forest communities, where we commence work on the micro docs series, Sarawak Gone.

I should be back by Saturday at the latest to join the Rainforest Music Festival... a curious title given the ever decreasing rainforests in Sarawak!

And here, like so many places in the world, much work is still to be done... There is NO comprehension here of global warming let alone the dire food and energy crisis in the region. People are satisfied with their monstrous McMansions, 6 7 aircon units, 2 cars, plasma screens and Nestle diets. The few who care are few indeed and there are even less that work to make a smidgen of difference to the lives of those most affected by the plough-share mentality that has recently seen the destruction of a cave network nearby, barely explored. We are told these caves once provided natives with passage through the mountains, from one valley to the next... and all this on native title land that developers ignore because of the tight connections within government who will resort to courts and hit men when their idiot public relations campaigns fail.

In the few days I've been here the quality of the Kolo Mee hasn't been as good as in previous trips. I'm told most vendors have stopped using pork fat as the base which has affected the taste significantly.

The one Laksa I've had was a little on the lame side, but the fern salad was, as always, sensational!

Notes for a new structured improvisation in the Drift Theory series for the Terminal Quartet.

Licht Drift is the eighth collaborative composition in the Drift Theory series. Drift Theory is a structured improvisation, each performance entirely unique, each performance influencing the next, exerting notions of drift as it may occur in creative, social and psychological development, both of the performers and the piece itself.

Licht Drift, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's epic operatic cycle, Licht, is based on four movements, each movement draws references from sacred music, sounds and text the world over.

All four movements, conceived independently by each performer, and in isolation from each other, must ensure that principles of drift influence the overall direction and outcomes of, for example, any cultural, political and astronomical contexts explored.

Drift is used to define a system having a distribution of events, objects, associations and intentions of individual velocities.

The theme(s) of the piece would be based on music as a communal, cultural process that seeks to transmit that which separates and that which brings us together...

In effect, I'm talking about creating an electro acoustic work that expresses separation, longing and unification - a contemporary work that draws on the sacred, that communicates to audiences through the relentless pace of commerce, its unyielding drain on finite resources and the homogenisation that results from its opportunistic outreach.

For more details about Licht Drift, go to the Secession wiki.

The Building an Australian Commons conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is hosted by Creative Commons Australia with the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the State Library of Queensland. I will be performing at the ccSalon with the Terminal Quartet and present on a roundtable discussion exploring the possibilities for music under Creative Commons in Australia.