Forces of Chaos

It's been a hard day but sometimes the forces of chaos throw obstacles in your path. Every day you must fight, battle, wrestle through each obstacle and problem. You must impose order and stability on the chaotic universe, and sometimes all of your energy is spent doing only that, not charging forwards but frenetically organising, repairing.

I've sketched a few more lines and shapes on my painting, wrestling to make it symphonic, but imposing order and structure here is difficult. Ultimately, the painting is about childhood fears, but also genetics and circumstances, how the personality emergent at extreme youth imposes itself forever, it cannot be cast off, we are eternally trapped by fate. Yet, I talk of fighting.

I'll finish this idea and move on. You must think a little before you act, but not much. If there are corrections or improvements, they can be made on the next painting, and so on forever. There should be a certain amount of planning and reflection, but always action too.

Onwards we battle.

Composition Battles, Morecambe, Emails

Charged into painting yesterday, work on one of the three new ones currently called 'Can There Be A Refuge From The Terror?', but it was a hard fight. I continually disliked the painting, and threw out the design, only to come back to it, find or create more source material and try again for another battle.

We have heard that Fall in Green have the chance to perform at the Morecambe Poetry Festival this year, a last minute addition to the preview event on the Thursday; a day before the it all starts (and before we were planning to attend). Our slot will be 20 minutes, similar to the Nantwich Words & Music Festival performance, though much more difficult logistically. We're awaiting news on the technical details.

Today, an email bounce-back plunged me into worry. I've spent all day researching and trying to update domain verification settings. There are 3 verification protocols: SPF (IP Security), DMARC: (General Mail & Domain Security), and DKIM: (Email Security). The first two are relatively simple. The third requires two codes; one half tied to the email service, one tied to the domain; when both match identity is confirmed. This seems like a good solution, except that each email service creates or assigns the DKIM differently, it might even be there, but unseeable or uneditable by us mere users. I've spent all day trying to fix the problem. I've made some experimental changes, but they apparently take 72 hours to work. Yes, even in these modern days of email it takes longer than an actual postal letter to activate.

It's nearly evening. I must work on art as best I can.

New Painting Drafts

A sleepless night of nightmares.

Small jobs today, little done the day seems to have flown. I started work on three new paintings. All three needed paper of the final size preparing. For two of them, I scanned the idea sketch, blowing it up to final size, then tracing over the scant and very rough lines. In this way I can match the composition, balance, and feeling in the final painting. Tracing over is a matter of printing lots of A4 sheets; this is very rough tracing, very light outlines, loose guides. These will be hand erased and drawn again as I work on the final underdrawing. One of the paintings, 'Wilderness of Calcified Ovaries', is a montage instead, I'll hand draw that. That idea is at least 2 years old; time to finish it.

Little jobs between this. I listed Spotify Canvases for existing albums, and ordered 40 new Cycles & Shadows CDs, of the 2024 remaster (the 2nd Version).

Argus v1.58, I Was A War Baby

Updated Argus again today, with a few useful cahnges. First, the ability to set the speed of a modulator to one beat if a beats-per-minute values was entered, vary useful for music videos. Then, a complex calculation to split tracks into the optimal number. If I create a list of objects, say 1000 snowflakes, that appear 5 frames apart, and these fade away over 100 frames. How many snowflakes can be visible at once? 20, 100/5, so this list needs splitting (interleaving) into 20 tracks. The new routine calculates this by checking very object to determine the maximum distance needed, then every split to wrok out the distance between resultant events.

In between programming, Deb and I went to Bickerton to collect my paintings from the exhibition.

After that, did some painting, and added a layer to a paniting I started this time last year; now called 'I Was A War Baby':

LC Codes, Album Versions, Videos

Spent yesterday transferring 30 to 40 lyric reading videos from my YouTube music channel to my art channel. These have hardly any views, 1 to 30, but they usually have some, and are a unique art form. They're as much a historical document as anything else, and if they remind me how good these old songs are, they will remind others too.

After that, I started work on music videos for Another Violet Night, even though I should be painting at this time of the year. The music admin work is now overwhelming, with many albums to transfer, remaster, transcribe, update.

One thing I do is get better over time. This is a key part of my philosophy, and why I work so hard on older material. I'm a proverbial tortoise not a hare. Even my oldest games, like Radioactive, have changed hugely over their life-span, always getting better. This is achieved by working out what can be imrpoved, and after a good level of improvement, going back and making that change to older material.

My albums have many versions. In music there are 'remasters', where the source material is not re-recorded, or even remixed, but with some changes to the equalisation balancing, and changes to compression and loudness is applied. I've rarely, I think never, remastered an album like this. New versions always at least rebalance tracks to some degree because I don't apply EQ to whole tracks, that's done at the mixing stage in Prometheus. The new End And The Beginning remaster is an example of this. Very little was changed apart from adjustment to the bass levels, and loudness. This is a fuzzy borderline between remixing and remastering, but the relative loudness of the parts (vocals vs. instruments etc.) are unchanged.

I also re-record parts, often vocals. This is particularly common since 2020 and my charge into (and growth of!) vocal music, and was intended from the outset. For the Burn Of God 'remaster', I recorded new guitars too; yet most of the rest of the album is not re-recorded (everything will technically, on a byte-by-byte basis, be different because normally two renders in a row by Prometheus will be different due to lots of randomisation/humanisation, which I tend to use). Still, these are technically 're-recordings', and most of my new album versions fall into this category, even if 90% of the new recording will be identical to the old one. For some albums, like the second version of Tree Of Keys, almost all of the tracks are completely unchanged, but one or two are tweaked.

Finally, I sometimes re-make an album from scratch. The four versions of Synaesthesia are quite different. The first was recorded from my SY-85 synth, driven by MED Soundstudio. The second used Noise Station for most of the tracks (but some tracks were duplicated). The third was a hybrid, with some Prometheus tracks, some from older versions. The fourth (current, but not yet definitive!) version is a complete Prometheus version. Crucuially, sometimes the tracks and compositions were different. 'TV Hell' from the first version is loaded with unlicenced samples so will never be released officially, and the track is unique to that version. 'The Journey', the equivalent track on other albums, is comparable in feeling. I still consider each version the same album. They're more than re-recordings, but for me, it would be a stretch to consider each version a new album. Jean-Michel Jarre has similar issues with his many versions of Oxygene, but of course he may let his record label worry about the filing implications.

So rather than call albums remasters, re-recordings, or 'new', I'll call new versions of an album 'versions' from now on. Today I've updated my artwork templates so that CD artwork will now include the album code, the version number, and release date for this version. It will also include the German LC code for the first time. I technically should have included this on all CD album artwork, but as I make and sell my own CDs, and have never sold one in Germany (or rarely anywhere at all!) this is less vital. The code is used to allocate royalties to myself, which I don't need to do, but one day my music may explode across the planet, so it's time I started to include this code.

Another Violet Night will list version number, LC code, and release date for the first time. So, another small upgrade which will be applied from now on.

Backups, Engram High Pass Filter, I Can Heal Video

Backups today, and created a new, unique, audio effect for Prometheus. The concept of 'fast duck' amounts to turning down (and up) the volume of a track in real time relative to the contents of another track. This can be called 'riding the console' as volumes, like vocals, are turned up and down live to fit just where needed.

This is easy nowadays. In Prometheus I have things called 'Engrams' which store data from the track to monitor. This can be used as an import to a noise gate to turn down a track. I use it typically to turn down the backing (piano, strings) just a tiny bit when the vocals sound, so that the vocals are clearly audible. Today, I modified this concept by creating an effect which can set a new high-pass filter frequency based on a gate like this. Not sure if I'll use it, but it can, for example, add more bass to a vocal when the song is in a quiet moment, but cut higher when the song becomes loud.

After that, in the afternoon, I worked on a music video for 'I Can Heal'. It's taken an few hours, longer than normal, but is very pretty.

Subtitles Complete, Argus v1.57, How Lonely

Woke early, completed the remaining subtitle videos by 12:00, then moved to an update of Argus. I made a few small changes, and one bug fix where correctly imported values were reported as not imported. I added to feature to return the quantity of values imported, and added 'guide' tracks, which are not played or shown. They behave as though muted, but are not affected by soloing or all-tracks-on commands. These are useful for guide data, events to highlight key frames (in this case, the frames the vocals for each line appear). Guide tracks are one of the better features I added to Prometheus, so now added in Argus too.

After re-listening to my music when working on these videos, I decided to, yet again, tweak some mixing. In particular I've raised the high-pass on the 'How Lonely' vocals and it instantly made the song better. I think I need to generally set this higher than I typically do. It can depend on the type of song. Richer vocals work better on slower, or more intimate or more spartan productions, with higher frequency vocals for busier pop productions.

Violet Night Video Subtitles

I charged into music video work today. The animated subtitles in Christmas Smells and The Dusty Mirror tracks are a definite step up compared to previous videos, so I aim to add these to every music video now. I must at least create subtitles for the 13 Violet Night tracks, plus some for the new video for 'A.I.' from TEATB, and the new B-Side 'I Can Heal'.

First step is to save out the structure of the song, then place a note at the start of each line, so that the frame when the lines are sung can be calculated. This list of frame numbers, one per line, is then saved. This can be used in Argus for a per-note import. Then, to create bitmap images for each lyric line. These are saved with alpha in DDS format. Each video needs 10-30 such lines.

Today I've created over 150 such images for the 7 music videos worked on today (this is the most tedious part of the process). These look much better than cheap automatic subtitles added by YouTube. The font and style match the album, but more than that, the words appear just before the line is coming, then prettily float away when the line is gone. My subtitles are useful as well as pretty.

After that's done, I create an animation in Argus of the full music video, and set each line to appear at the specified frame. It's all a lot of work, one or two days can do all of the subtitles on an album. Any other animation can easily be added at this point.

The new video for the old song 'A.I.' used an 'addition' effect, so there's no black line around the text, but it's still readable.

Money is such a struggle at the moment. Everything is such a struggle, and I'm making things with little goal other than an obsession to make things as best I can. This is at least something. I should be able to finish these basic subtitles tomorrow, all ready to add some sort of proper video behind them, as and when needed.