More Nightfood Work, AI and Automation

A second full day of preparing videos and materials for the epic Nightfood promotion, something I've not done so extensively before. I recorded two videos late last night in the freezing and dark 'studio' room I use for filming. In the end, the sound, as well as the lighting, was too bad to use, so I spent the morning re-recording two similar videos. I was so inspired watching them back that I decided to upload them both!

Then, a slight distraction of fixing a new brake cable to my mother's bicycle. The original cable was an odd sort which exposed the raw wire in the middle, it oddly threaded through a two narrow rings in the metal frame. Modern brake cables are shielded throughout. The two options were to cut the cable sheath, or drill the metal bike frame, so I chose the latter, and re-threaded the cable quite easily.

After that, work on the Nightfood video conversion and preparation of the many materials I'll be posting and sharing about it.

One part of the talk made me think about automation, both AI and other forms, like music sequencing, and which are better or worse for us, for humanity, for art. I realised that automation that creates more for work us, is a new task-master, is a good thing; and that automation which does work for us, assists laziness, is bad. It's true that the laziness may allow us to do things beyond our skills, a power-saw may enable us to cut down a tree that we may not have been able to. In this argument it's not really 'lazy' to use that vs. a handsaw, but it would be lazy to use the power-saw, then rest for the rest of the day such that both saws would take as long. If you work just as hard with both saws you'd cut down far more trees with the power-saw, thus your skills would be genuinely improved; thus the improvement is still measured by the human work.

If a new tool is making you work as hard or harder, it's probably helping you do more and better. If you find you're being lazier, the changes are it's a harmful tool. At the very least, your (lazy!) competitors would be acting as you, giving you no advantage, but perhaps worse, the machine is somehow taking a credit from you. The labour and intelligence really needs to be yours, not the machines. The work-laziness ratio is the measure of ultimate utility.

Nightfood Promotional Videos

A stressful and busy day. At times I felt I was losing my mind. The time spent filming then editing and assembling short form videos for the Nightfood promotion. I continued to make silly mistakes during editing, entering wrong filepaths and overwriting files (I rarely make any such mistakes). Typing in the wrong text files, being unsure of which video I was working on, and other crises.

Still, I managed to complete the core job of 6 new videos, each promoting a different aspect of the album. Learned a few new things. Many videos featured stretched clips of the main music videos. Of course, the quality is a little reduced, but for phones and TikTok etc. this is less important, and these FFMpeg scripts may be useful to call upon in future.

I have a few more to make and the text to prepare and format. I'd like to do some sort of full video talk, a behind-the-scenes glimpse, and more, but today's tasks are complete as planned and hoped-for.

RBSA Collection, November Plans

Today, a trip to Birmingham to collect 'Punishment of the Sun'. We left by the wrong exit from the maze of New Street Station and spent about 30 minutes being lost. At the same time, my mother was visiting my father in hospital. He seems to have recovered well, though is heavily sedated. I'm so pleased we intervened quickly to dial 999. The response from the emergency services was very fast and first class; the speed vital for his condition.

I have a few key jobs this month: To promote Nightfood. To complete the sheet music for Remembrance Service, the only vocal album which now lacks it. To create new videos for my Amiga music, videos better than any out there. To complete a new face mask and cover artwork for the Fall in Green 'From Eye to Hand to Paper' single, and complete the Fall in Green lyrics book.

I'm not doing much new art. The jobs of the month mostly concern consolidation and promotion of older art. Of course, much of it wasn't promoted at the time. Nightfood was always an album of work in progress, a learning step, like all of my vocal albums of the time. Now I'm happy with it, so it's ripe to promote.

What new work did I complete in October? The new music for the Radioactive Soundtrack, although both pieces were variations of older tunes. Perhaps I need to create more new artwork, though it may be tricky to find the time. I may have time. The time to transcribe the Remembrance Service music, and the time to create the Amiga videos (nearly 40 of them), is uncertain. Am I still an artist if I spend so long filing or promoting old work? I can't only create, I must promote too; and perhaps being a success is more about promotion than creation.

Still, I must remain aware of my actual and perceived genius. It's important that I find time to create the best things I can while I can. Life is short. Yes, life is short.

Radioactive Soundtrack Complete, Francis Bacon

Slept long, until 9:30, unusual after two days of waking before 7. My father fell over on his back, outside last night. Bruised, he picked himself up and slowly crept upstairs, as usual, to prepare for bed. This morning he was difficult to rouse and seemed to be semi-conscious and partly paralysed. A stroke of some sort perhaps, we thought. An ambulance was called. He went to the local hospital and then, in something of an emergency, transferred to another regional hospital. A worrisome morning, though I feel he will recover in a week or two and that he is in the best place.

I managed to complete the tedious and exacting setting up of the sale of the Radioactive Soundtrack (or "Radioactive (The Official Soundtrack)" as it's technically correctly called. This was done by 3pm, and I managed to make two pieces of sheet music too, one for the in-game music, and for the main theme of Xenex.

After 15:00, I tried to fix mum's bike, but the brake cable is rusted into its sheath and immobile. After that, work on a mask for Deborah, a planned concept for the cover to our Tunnicliffe Fall in Green single. It would be nice to finish this and prepare it for a Christmas release.

I watched a South Bank Show Documentary about Francis Bacon yesterday. I took away some interesting ideas. He used photo references, but didn't want to represent 'things' as much as an instant mood; as do I. I capture mine in an instant flash, and try to interpret that faithfully. He said that he liked to use the reverse of canvases as the marks were permanent. I have this exact opinion, and joy from, my watercolours, but my oil work is slow and exacting, not spontaneous. I have, however, sometimes painted freely like that, once or twice. I almost always use photo references, but I suddenly thought that I might be better not doing so at all, painting only from imagination. Drawing skill is really useful. Painting from imagination would negate it, so I'd have to be careful not to let this skill fade, but Picasso too changed radically from exacting draughtsman to 'free' painter. There are a few advantages to painting from imagination alone. First, it's uniquely mine, the artists' style and vision. It represents me to the best degree, what is most human. It's painted solely and wholly from 'internal' references, nothing 'real'. What is real, out there, can be seen by anyone, painted by anyone. As we get better at painting we become more like a camera, and therefore more redundant as artists. Did Bacon decide how closely to copy his subjects when painting? How exactly the likeness, which areas of difference were good, which bad? When painting from the mind, it's all good, as it should represent the personal vision wholly, and camera reality not at all.

Of course, many 'abstract' painters feel this. Perhaps this is the very essence of abtract expressionists, yet are they painting from the mind or just using what is random? The latter I fear. The genre may be called 'abstract' but nothing IS abstracted, it's any 'old thing'. Those three words are the danger. What is represented is as vital as ever, as is the display of skill. Skill, that thing absent from abtract expressionists, yet hugely present in Bacon's work despite it not being photographically representational.

Xenex 2026, Radioactive Soundtrack

A long day working on the new version of the Xenex tune. Has taken a long time, and spent over an hour tailoring the bassline and chord stabs to echo the melody, but in the end this didn't sound quite right, as well as making it all quite different from the mod file, so I reverted back to the original bassline and chord pattern.

The structure is broadly the same but I've added a bit more drama here and there, extended the final up-key verse, and added some interplay between the main lead and the pulse-wave beep that appears later on. The drums have had lots of work, playing along to the melody and driving the energy of the track; and we have synth-tom drums.

So, the Radioactive soundtrack is complete. I need to do final mastering and level balancing. The tracks are:

1. Radioactive
The 2026 recording of the original theme, as featured on War And Nuclear Love.

2. Radioactive Funkatronic Rhapsody
New track on the theme of Radioactive.

3. The Abyssal Plain
A track last dated 24 March 1999, originally written using MED (most likely on Amiga I think, I can't recall having a PC MIDI interface, even if 1999 is after I'd bought my PC) and my Yamaha SY-85 synthesizer. These were re-recorded in 2021 just before I sold my SY-85, but the quality due the mixing isn't very good. The full track has been rebalanced here as best as I can.

4. Xenex 2026
Today's new recording of the theme to this Amiga game from October 1994.

5. The Ever Flowing Waves Of War
The title of the in-game music for Radioactive. It's been changed a little to make it loop seamlessly.

6. Radioactive Original Version
A remastered version of the original game theme.

Bookbinding, Old Amiga Games, Video Recompiled, Xenex Theme 2026 Begins

A busy day, starting with re-attaching the spine to a 50-year old book, a copy of Harry Harrison's Mechanismo. Its glue had yellowed and become a brittle plaster-like paste with no adhesive power, so I first carefully removed it with a scalpel. Then, found some wooden boards, as clamping the book in place for a few days will be important. I used a glue called Vinyl Acetate Ethylene, a water based glue which is recommended for book binding. I put glue on the outer edge of the signatures and the cover, then clamped everything in place, vertically spine down, to set.

Then, I considered how to convert my Amiga music for YouTube. The simplest video would be a still of the title page, but annoyingly, all but two of the 20 games lacked a screenshot for this, so I installed Amiga Forever and ran each game, taking an image of each title page. Then located the mod files. Many games have several tunes. Firefly, for example, has a main theme and three in-game tunes, so it makes sense to put them all up; 39 tunes in total. A simple video of a still and the music is easy, but I could do more; is this justified? A video showing the music running in Protracker is common, and more interesting to watch, but that's quite a lot of work, and I could probably improve on it with Argus without the need to screen-capture. I can convert the mod files to MIDI, import that into Prometheus then save out a list of frame numbers of the notes, so it would be quite easy to make a complex animation; but I'd want a consistent look... and animating like this may take longer than I'd like. It might be 'worth it' in terms of making a better video than others, and perhaps as the author it's my job to do just this. I could also fix the out-of-tune Arazmax main lead instrument too! I need to think on this for many days and perhaps make a test or two.

After this, I had to re-compile the videos for 'Nightfood' and 'The Dream Of Wasps', which I duly did, then uploaded. An unpleasant hour of waiting.

In the afternoon I started work on the new Xenex theme. The original tune is pretty, but simple, boring even, in the backing, like most of my Amiga tunes. I fixed on a bassline and beat and pretty much didn't change it. Now I want to add more, but I'm hesitant to change the basic structure which is intro, verse, verse, mis-section, verse, shortened verse, and two partial verses up-key in a new lead instrument. My guide is that it must be obviously and overtly better than the original.

Radioactive OST, Pre-AI Sound Effects

Two days broadly working on the Radioactive sound track, namely a new version of the main theme. What new can I add? I've slowed it down and made it more funky, groovy, urban, and added a romantic solo piano intro to the start. I've broken the structure a bit, adding new parts and playing with each instrument to keep it more exciting and with more variety than the 2002 version.

I wondered what else I can add to the soundtrack, and thought of some early music, then realised that I have lots of 90s tunes from my Amiga days that I've never really updated. This also led to a search for my first Amiga game, The Challenge of the Matrix. My notes say that it was released in September 1991, soon followed by Spectrum in December. 4 or 8 weeks was a long time to make a game back then! Turns out that there are lots of YouTube videos of The Matrix, but I still may 'officially' put all of my Amiga game tunes on there, on my Cornutopia Software channel, rather than my music channel. Musically they are crude, as were the games, but it is part of my legacy, the start of a long journey.

Of the other tunes, one of the most catchy and favourite of mine was the theme for Xenex, inspired by melodic Commodore 64 tunes. So perhaps I can make this for the soundtrack too. There are many old tunes I made in the 90s with OctaMED, sequenced for the Yamaha SY-85. I recorded these as a '4 CD' set before selling the keyboard, although the mix quality is all rather muddy and poor. I could include one of those tracks too.

I've also revamped the IndieSFX library, and again offered the full library as a download bundle. There seems to be a new interest in these pre-AI game sound effects, perhaps because they were certainly made before AI. The website has been selling them from 2002, the full library complete before 2022, and I expect that internet archives like the Wayback Machine prove this, so developers can be certain that the content won't be flagged as AI. Thus there's an unexpected AI boom, a boom in non-AI creative assets, and unlike other items of commerce, these are locked into the past; a future competitor can't appear because a key selling point is that they've been unchanged since before 2022.

Chesterton Drive, Little Jobs

A lonely day of stomach twitches, swelling and digestive pain. All beyond my control, there's little I can do but eat lightly and wait.

Updated my master index of writings. Created two short format videos of Nightfood tracks, which took a surprisingly long time. I could do more and perhaps should, but need a plan of what to post when. My promotional efforts all seem futile, but I do wish and hope that my work was seen and heard. I was encouraged as a child not to show off, to actively fear being noticed - this was not helpful training. Fitted labels and mirror plates to prepare the three paintings for Castle Park delivery.

Tonight, as has been the case historically when suffering with stomach pain, I went for a long night walk. A surprisingly mild night. My room of 17 degrees feels colder than outdoors. I went to Chesterton Drive. Number 4 was the home of my aunt and uncle as a child. I know the house well and it fills a surprisingly large part of my location brain. The Lego-like houses of the poets' estate perhaps made and make an impression, they always remind me of ancient 3D computer games like Mercenary on Amiga, Driller on the Commodore 64. My memories there mostly concern games, my first look at an Atari game console and Pong. A Vic-20, and later my joy of playing Commodore 64 games like Choplifter and Spy Hunter there, via its floppy disc drive.

The design of the house has bled into my writing. The house is George Vance's house, the protagonist of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. The garden and his kitchen in the early chapters is no. 4's garden and kitchen. The party is in the front room. His bed room the one upstairs and to the left. The under-stairs cupboard, which in reality is just a cupboard, leads in the book to his laboratory.

I must muster a plan and energy for some work tomorrow.