The Modern Game 4 Continues, Shelf Marking

A full day of work on The Modern Game, 4th version. Created a new edit of the 'Masculinity Two' video for the longer album version, and new lyric overlays for 'The Games Played As Children', and added the new (much better!) vocals for this.

Then more work on the cover, small changes. I've mirrored the 'stave' image, placing it on the left. Then created the CD surface artwork, and more on the rear. Then small updates and fixes to the lyric booklet. Most of the artwork is now done in draft, though the images for the iTunes booklet remain.

Then final volume setting, for mastering, and lots more mixing and adjusting. 'Beyond Mars' gets brighter and brighter with each edit. The pianos are now brash and tinkly compared to the original mix; but they need to be, there are so few high frequencies here. There's more mixing to do on all tracks.

I still need to work on new videos for everything, though I hope that I can use the little animations I've created as Spotify Canvases. I expect it'll be 2 or 3 days work to make 10 or so videos, so this simple remaster will still take 3 full weeks, almost all of November.

Also today, work on the new shelves, marking out. The weather is set to rain and be very cold, so I must work on shelves tomorrow. Only 8 degrees, but still the warmest day, and so the best for spray painting. I have very limited resources here, and must pull the semi-dry work inside to dry after spraying. Steps: routing, spraying, assembly joint by joint, fitting to wall to mark and drill, final fitting.

The Christmas Tails tracks are all in. I need to organise these and master the album next week. This must, and should, take a day.

Just watched a documentary about Richard Burton. Inspirational, at any age, even as I approach the age at which he died.

Painting Repair, New Modern Game Cover, Deadlines

A busy day, as well as an angrily miserable one due to the dark weather, persistent rain and dark outlook. I was told yesterday that I was doing fine, as I had a legacy. For whom, exactly? I seem to be terminally obscure. From games, books, paintings, music; nothing is remotely popular or remotely valued. Well, all I can do is keep creating and trying to improve in my creations.

Started today by printing some photos from 2024 events. Then some work on a painting restoration job. I need to patch a torn canvas and repaint to cover the damage. It's a cheap cotton canvas, barely stretched and the wedges were not correctly used. I thought that a very thin cotton patch would be best, almost like silk. I found a white cotton handkerchief for this. I considered two main options for glue, either Paraloid B72 resin; an acrylic resin which is solvent based and archival, or PVA. Acrylic medium is possible, and stable, but it becomes waterproof and hard to remove. PVA remains soluble, and forms a hygroscopic relationship with the canvas. PVA can become mouldy.

I has a spare small canvas of the same material, so performed a test.

The B72 was my primary choice. It was difficult to apply as expected, with a mix of resin and acetone. The resin seeped through the canvas and left a thick hard gloss finish where visible. The patch was somewhat stiff when dry. The PVA discoloured the area with its water, but I expected that this effect would be minimal on a painted surface, and the result was a lot less messy. I chose PVA, using a 1:1 PVA:water mix, less water than in my test, then added a layer of Golden GAC400, an acrylic stiffening agent.

The result was good, though the tear in the painting remained concave, mirroring its shape from the front, as though the canvas was stretched and dented by an impact. This may be difficult to fix; removing any dent in semi-rigid fabric like this may be impossible, it's a bit like removing a dent in a sheet of tin foil. However, I plan on adding a thicker and stiffer patch over this, made from the test canvas.

After that work, I got to work on The Modern Game artwork. I like the Marius cover, so the main job is changing the name. As with Marius, I drew the name by hand. Here it is so far:

Then, work on the vocals for 'The Trees' and 'The Games Played As Children'. They are adequate, certainly better than the old ones, but I didn't feel in the mood and felt tired and restricted. I may re-record everything.

Throughout the day I've also worked on a new music pack for Flatspace, one for Another Violet Night.

It's now one day until the deadline for the Christmas Tails tracks. All of the tracks bar one were sent in weeks ago, and I'm still waiting for one. I have zero tolerance for people who miss deadlines. Deadlines are an excellent test of honesty and reliability. Not one minute's grace will be offered.

Singeth Sheet Music, CD Shelves II Begin

A slower day today which included a nice visit from a friend.

Several hours were spent working on the Fall in Green sheet music for our Christmas Tails entry, 'Singeth To The Body Winter'. It's a simple tune and took far longer than expected. It is in essence a string quartet, so it is scored as such. There's a clarinet in there, I may add that later.

Then, sawed some wood for 'CD Shelves II'; a second, hopefully improved, version of the first rack, which are too weak. These will use 12mm MDF throughout, have a vertical spine which runs from top to bottom, be spray painted before assembly, and have each joint fixed and glued once at a time over several days rather than all at once, with the aim of greater angle accuracy and less internal stress. The next step is the 12mm routing. I did the sawing today outside as today looks like the only dry day within the next two weeks.

Nothing else done, yet my to-do list is bigger than ever.

Another Violet Night Review

First album review:

“With Another Violet Night Mark Sheeky stands like an Easter Island head on the Cheshire Plain, a conduit of the passing ages but placed in the 21st century here and now. Songs to see you through, a flood of media and gadgets which define the now, to whistle defiantly as the familiar powers that be play on our paranoia.

On that windswept Cheshire Plain the sounds of Syd Barret, Depeche Mode, the Penguin Café and John Taverner, travelled the airwaves to the stone edifice of Mark Sheeky who was listening and absorbing nuances, gathering, mixing and adding his own identity.

Here are tunes and words to give courage in the predicament of a cruelly evolving world where defence comes in the form of show tunes and music hall with synth beats to accompany the disco of disaster.

In this instance the show tunes are an insight into the creative process where this is, the Mark Sheeky show.”

Peter Lilley, Nov 2025

Good Vibrations, Remasters

A nice singalong at the fortnightly Good Vibrations event in the library. I felt somewhat weak and exhausted and didn't play well, but the joy of these events is that it didn't matter, the music is part chaos but all joyous. Mike's leadership of each song is so vital. The after show lunches are becoming special events in themselves. We had a table of nine today, a record. We may need to start to book.

After that, lots of shopping for various winter related oddities like presents, spray paint, Japanese foodstuffs, old CDs.

As I've said to an interminable degree, I had hoped to complete a remaster of The Myth Of Sisyphus this year; with my plan of remastering one old album for each new one, but the change of distributor meant remastering a lot along the way for various reasons, so Sisyphus must wait! This should be no surprise, as I found out today that I've released a new (or remastered - which for me means partly re-recorded) album every month but one this year:

2025 Releases

Jan - Fear Of The Thing Itself
Feb - The Dusty Mirror
Mar -
Apr - Letters From A Square Spoon [new]
May - The Arcangel Soundtrack
Jun - Flatspace (The Official Soundtrack)
Jul - Finnegans Judgement
Aug - The End And The Beginning
Sep - All Controlled By Someone [new]
Oct - Another Violet Night [new]
Nov - Christmas Tails [new]
Dec - Tree Of Keys

Modern Game 4 Lyric Videos, Argus v1.61

Yesterday, bought more wood for shelves part 2, plus some for a future wardrobe.

Mixed the new Modern Game a little, making important changes. Most of the changes are movements from the bass, adding or enhancing higher frequencies. I also prepared for more vocals, for the last track 'The Trees', although today I realised that I'll have to re-record the vocals for the B-Side to 'Masculinity Two' too, a strange and fear-laden song called 'The Games Played As Children'.

Today, a long and often frustrating day creating the overlay text for animated lyric videos for these songs. I wanted to get the basics of the subtitles for every track. It's past 7pm and all are just about finished, apart from those two tracks that need new vocals. The subtitles were complicated by the fact that the three extant music videos are 30 FPS, when I now typically animate (and create the subtitles) at 25 FPS, so three of the videos had different timing and different frame numbers. A change I made to the last version of Argus also stopped my ability to split up the Set Modulator events, so I re-added the feature and therefore updated Argus to v1.61.

I've generally felt cold, weak, ill and anxious to the point of despair; yet used this as an incentive to work as steadily as ever. I like these songs more and more, even though I've heard them thousands of times, and it's important that the words and meanings, their art, is shared as best I can. So, the job of making the videos is, I think, necessary, so the faster I can complete this necessary job the better.

Other jobs on this album are those new vocals, and the lyric overlays for those; new cover artwork; updating the lyric booklet (one word has changed in the lyrics, and some capitalisation, I even spotted a glaring error); a new iTunes Digital Booklet; mastering and final balancing; dividing the tracks; admin and registration of the new works; final videos created, compiled, uploaded.

The last of the Electric Sprout songs should be coming very soon, so I must also master that. My hopes of remastering or re-recording The Myth of Sisyphus this year are perhaps overly ambitious, especially as I need to transcribe the sheet music for that. I must also complete the new shelves this month, and perhaps a painting for the Nantwich Open Art Exhibition... and I'd hoped to record some audiobooks and perhaps work on a new book.

Onwards we battle.

Binary Quantum Gravity

I've been thinking about some issues regarding gravity, and the need for gravity to be quantised, not for reasons of unifying any current laws of physics, but due to philosophical problems with classical gravity.

For gravity to operate, the curvature of space at every point needs to be stored. Mass shines out its existence at the speed of light with a ray of communication. Some points of space are more curved than others, depending on the strength of the gravity, but in essence this 'strength' is a simple result of the density of the rays emitted from the massive object. Let's assume these rays are streams of particles, the so-called graviton.

In classical gravity, this curvature of space can vary smoothly; sometimes shallow, sometimes steep. I presume that in a place without mass, space would be flat.

Space must be divided into tiny cells, grids, which store information like this. If not, there would be no sense of scale, no root, things would slide to infinity. Classical gravity has this problem, quantum mechanics does not; and the quantum must be correct. There are no infinities in the universe. One infinity would create another, and quickly and infinite number of infinite everything. If we find or need infinities, we, I submit, are wrong.

So, space is divided into cells which store information on the curvature of space into time. What sort of value is this? We may imagine it's a variable quantity, a 'steep' curve, a 'shallow' curve, no curve, an 'infinitely steep' curve. If this were the case then what value is the curvature of space on the boundaries between cells?

Thinking of this reminded me of the problem of dithering a sound wave into a low-bit resolution. I've written another piece here about audio dithering and quantum mechanics but I'll recapitulate. When digitising a smooth wave, we can assign a value to the nearest number that the wave amplitude corresponds with, sort of like fitting the wave into a series of boxes and choosing the nearest box to the current amplitude. See here:

Were are converting our nice smooth wave into 8 bits of digital, the 8 boxes on the right. Value 1 is exactly in the centre of the box, so that's perfect for the top box. Value 2 is not in the middle of a box, but it has a nearest box, so we put it there. Value 3 is on a boundary though... which box do we put it into?

We can choose top or bottom consistently, but there's something not quite right about it, because the reality we are trying to represent is that the sound is half way between, not in one box or the other.

The solution to the problem is dithering. We choose a random value, roll a dice so to speak, and 50% of the time we choose the top box and 50% of the time we choose the lower. For Value 2 we choose the upper box most of the time, but sometimes choose the lower box. This random value doesn't add 'noise', it makes the results more accurate; and quantum mechanics does the same thing. Dithering in this way is how and why quantum mechanics can be both accurate and random, and how it can avoid infinities by using random values in a digital arena.

Gravity must do the same, because without it any storage of analogue information on a cell-by-cell level would create inaccuracies across the cell boundaries. So, the curvature of space must not be a variable quantity, but a binary one. At each cell of space, space is flat or infinitely curved; that is all. What do we mean by the curvature of space, and flat and infinitely curved when we have already railed against infinities? General relatively shows that spatial dimensions are curved into the time dimension. Objects move fully in space, and the faster they move, the slower they move in time. At the speed of light, an object is moving fully in space and not at all in time. Stationary objects are not moving in space but moving fully in time. As an object accelerates, its movement through time decelerates.

This seems like a smooth, analogue process, but I postulate that it is not, that it is merely two extremes. At every point we either move fully though space at the speed of light, or move fully though time and are stationary. These are the only two values for the curvature of space: zero and one. Thus the map of the spatial curvature of our solar system is not smooth, analogue, and 'greyscale', but black and speckled with white. Compare these two photographs:

The latter is a binary image of the former, it uses only black and white dots, yet from a distance, the level of grey can be inferred due to random scattering. It is in this way, I postulate, that the curvature of space is stored. Objects which move though this space move, on a per-particle basis, fully through space or fully through time, but on average, it appears that the whole object is gliding through space-time in the correct proportions.

Problems regarding infinite spatial curvature in the centre of black holes vanish; objects are either stationary or moving at the speed of light. Everything on a quantum level is only doing either of these, and in our macroscopic experience changing rapidly between the two to produce the illusion of something in between.

Looking for a Lover Version 4

Two days of work mostly on The Modern Game. Recorded new vocals for 'Looking for a Lover' and 'Coming Back to Earth' yesterday, as well as Deb's vocals for our Christmas song, and have added all of these today. 'Looking' was always a bit of a production struggle. I always thought of the song as a Thriller-era Michael Jackson song, so I wanted some staccato-style vocals, but these carry a limited tone. The first two versions of this song used relatively normal vocals throughout. Version 3 used band-limited vocals with a scratchy telephone sound, which sounded rather nice. The new version uses a bit of both, and the fourth verse doubles up the vocals in octaves for a time, then breaks into the higher pitch before the chorus.

'Coming Back to Earth' by comparison is very similar to other versions, but does benefit from new, richer vocals for the plain verses, and better bass balancing.

I've also tweaked the mixes on all tracks. 'Beyond Mars' has higher pianos. I have a book on mixing. The most useful tip, the only useful tip in the book, is that all mixing desks have a high pass (bass-cut) switch and that most tracks are high passed. They cite a piano as an example of what not to high pass, which is terrible advice. Pianos and vocals are almost the only things that are always high passed. Every piano on a rock or pop song is twinkly and pushed into the high frequencies. A natural classical piano is quite muffly most of the time, and fits very closely within the frequency range of a voice, which is why it's best moved up, even the bass notes are high passed; if not especially so because they can so easily boom.

All songs are now finished apart from 'The Trees', which needs new vocals, and the final mixing and mastering. This is only the first half of the remaster; the new art and new lyric videos will probably take longer than the music.

I'm unhappy with my CD shelves, which are drooping in the middle by about 9mm. A shelf should be considerably heavier than the weight of the objects on it; this rule is one I've only just made and discovered after making these. Well, version 1 of everything is always, and should always be, about learning. I can re-use the screws, fittings, and everything apart from the wood, so a second version of the shelves is now in planning.