I've always been a big fan of Paul D. Miller(aka DJ Spooky), since first picking up the CD of the Necropolis: The Dialogic Project and then a little later, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I would say that my sound design work was pretty heavily influenced by him, particularly for the production of Brecht's Turandot. Lots of taking environmental sounds and layering/effecting and wrapping them around one another.

Tonight I was invited to a dinner hosted by Lisa Lee, the director of UIC's Hull House Museum celebrating the opening of DJ Spooky's new installation, Link City Chicago at the School of the Art Institute as well as a reading/lecture on hip hop literature at UIC. It was at a cool little Mediterranean restaurant called Tizi Melloul, and we were in this cute little circular room at the back of the restaurant. I just happened to arrive at exactly the same time as Paul, pretty well ahead of most everybody. That gave me a chance to sit near him and chat a bit. The stuff he gets to do is just incredible. A week ago he was off in North Korea, and up soon he's heading off on an icebreaker to Antarctica to record the sounds of the ice for a project.

I'm really looking forward to Saturday night's performance. And I definitely want to get down to the SAIC to check out the installation which was described to me as 7 channels of high def video merging footage from our archives with new footage which they shot in the city.