War And Nuclear Love Vocals

Okay, two slow slow, but progressive days working on the War And Nuclear Love album. Found space to record vocals for 4 tracks yesterday. This always takes a bit longer for new tracks compared to re-recording vocals for older songs, as no matter how much is planned there's always a degree of experimenting with layers.

'After The Battle', and 'Rememebering Hans Blix' are pretty much complete.

I found 'Post Apocalyptic Playground' a little annoying as it hovers around E3 to A3, rather low for my range. In mood, and range, it's a bit like 'The Cat Phone Song', so I reminded myself of this. It also has elements of Bing Crosby's range, so I listened to some Bing while I thought about how to do it. An amusing and light tone is just right for this ironic song, which on the face of it is a romantic walk through the park, but the title and the somewhat zombie-like thumped piano solo taints it all with something darker. After recording these simple vocals, they seem perfect. I've added a harmony layer for the chorus, and some fill vocals here and there.

The vocals for 'War and Nuclear Love' are more complex to work on. I was reminded today just how hugely Jean-Michel Jarre's album structures loom large over my music. He tended to start with quiet, or at least long intro tracks, then at some point added one 'single', a highly melodic tune which seemed to be designed exactly as a single release, then obscure ones which were almost an opposite. I seem to have one pop-type, single-type, hit-type song, which leads into others which have less of that feel. Here, the single is 'War and Nuclear Love'. In production terms it reminds me of 'We Built This City' by Starship from 1985. The backing is very synthetic, and the verses are spartan apart from a bass and pumping synth stabs. My track is loaded with more energy. It may be finished with these first take vocals, but I'm unsure. They certainly sound thin and lonely compared to the fat and rich vocals in the Starship song, yet, mine seem to say enough. I've layered up the chorus with harmonies, and a planned vocoder.

Anyway, the Hans Blix song in particular seems to bend this album towards the present, so I feel I must rush to finish it, though I constantly wonder why I push myself so hard for this.

Onwards we charge like a rocket!

After The Battle

A day of work on this war music. At times I'm unsure why I'm doing it, perhaps over-pushing to work on this music despite the lack of a muse. The key factor is that it must be sufficiently new, sufficiently different from before, and ideally a tiny bit better too. My motivation, the original reason I started any of it was that the Radioactive theme (titled 'Radiation' since I wrote it in 2001) and the old song 'Written on Rice' are complete and worthy of a proper release, so I needed to make something to unify the release.

Yet, I underestimate the work of such an endeavour. I'm now keen to get all of this music done as quickly as possible, but with that caveat of originality or quality. Both are difficult.

Much of today, like yesterday, was spent on 'After The Battle'. Today I added a new synth guitar solo, this time recording the MIDI - I needed to redo this as yesterday's part only covered the first half. This gives the song much more feeling. Then I added some synth strings, here influenced by 'Running Up That Hill', as my constant chords and incessant beat made me think that song and I was interested in how energy, drama, contrast can be added by backing which seems to be mellow and regular. Kate's music is always more dramatic in my head than the plain written music seems. Here are my words so far:

After The Battle

The ash of my parents
Flavours the breeze
Over the dawn of winter's weeds

The guilt of the damage
Shakes me cold
The moon, cruel and new
Says goodbye to the old

To whom now can my love and loss be told?

Fragments of people
Seeking out fire
Can any stranger see my mood?

Life goes on
Says the sun
And the moss, four billion years
But little is lost

Unsure of it all at the moment. I must keep working and doing my best, by analysis. What does it need? More drama, more imagery, more emotion, stronger everything. Analysis analysis; but as I keep saying, time is short. I should be making things of depth and power, of brilliance. Can I do this here? I'm keen, by April, to move towards new visual art.

War Music, CDA Digialbums

Slow, slow day, but one at least focused on attacking music. I've written a one minute sequence called 'After The Battle' which is little more than an A-minor trawl, the aim that it was like an ending of the 'Radiation' tune, now tagged onto the end of 'Love and Nuclear War'. This evening I've added a purely synthetic electric guitar too it, which sounds much better than any other synth guitar I've added so far. I recorded this live, so don't have the MIDI. I always regret this, but it is much faster to add it to the song this way.

I digress. The tune sounds rather like a Flatspace or Taskforce tune.

In the first half of the day I thought about an old Amiga tune I wrote in around 1991 called 'Metropolis'. I didn't seem to have the mod file, so I looked online and found a few of my old Amiga modules, which I thought I'd lost forever. I did have most of them on virtual Amiga (dms) discs, but there were certainly a few mods there that I didn't have, including a sort of cover version of 'Wanted' by The Dooleys, which I have absolutely NO memory of ever writing - but it sounds like one of mine, and that (rare) song is one of my favourites, so it is something I may well have written.

My music back then was crude to say the least, poor in quality by even by the audio standards of the Amiga. This was literally the first music I ever wrote. I loved it, it was a hugely exciting discovery that I could actually create music. I had a very limited range of samples for instruments and percussion. My later music, by the mid-90s was better. These early tunes were often melodic, but with very little expression or delicacy, often a blasted out melody next to a blasted out bass line and blasted out drums, but a few of those tunes, even today, stick in my mind, like 'Metropolis', and 'Starfoce Nova'...

Reviews of the time were extraordinarily kind:

I made several CDA 'Digialbums'. They were not really Amiga demos, but like an album of mod files on on disc. Alas, at least 4 of these albums (and all of the music) are lost, almost certainly forever. Here's a complete list:

These exist online:

Reflections: Reflections, Warz, Overlord, Robot Revolution, Lightforce, Metropolis, Latham
Limelight: Digitania, Isometrica, The Visitor, Dictator, Chopsticks Revenge, Genesis
Hypnosis Cycledemo: Hypnosis, Hypnosis 2

These are lost and exist only in my memory:

Iris: Starforce Nova, Samba, Megalomania Pt II, Roborock, Imp, Dance of the Hydra
Tesselations: Dreamscape, Revelation, Atomic Solutions, Cyclotron, Speed Metal, Echoes I, Echoes II
Phase IV: Phase IV, Total Recoil, The Matrix, Dreamscape, Contours, Megalomania Pt I, Technorock
After the Battle: Theme from Crustacea, Quadrillion, Solaris, RXD-PIN, Aquanaut, M+S, Cybernaut

Plus Xmas Demo, which wasn't a CDA Digialbum but a techno version of jingle bells with a house picture which flashed the windows to the beat, and Nemesis Games Music which I don't think was a Digialbum either but included Cosmic Fantasy, Nemesis, Shadows Intro.

Interestingly Iris was reviewed in CU Amiga magazine, but doesn't seem to have ever been distributed by any PD library.

Hans Blix Work

More work on 'Hans Blix' today. The initial piano backing was one take to sing to, but I decided to split this into two separate parts for verse and chorus, to give me more control over the pause between, and record a new intro. Work on all of this album seems somehow tight. I must work harder to add more imagery, more drama and power, more generally.

I feel weary, full of anxiety aches and in need of a reset and refocus. My approximate plan is to work on this music until the 21st, then charge into painting. The music work, in my plan, is supposed to be gentle, restful, pleasurable; a break - but it hasn't been any of that so far and probably won't be. I find doing less far more stressful than being frantically busy. It is as though I have a fixed minimum of energy, which is always a vast amount, and any not channelled into work jumps into my body to create mischief.

Onwards I must move, forwards. The heavy rock has been waiting while I've stared at the sun, while I've railed at the gods, eyes wide, long white beard flailing. Now, we must try with care, love and strategic aim, to roll back to our assigned track.

Tooth Problems Persist, Hans Blix

My tooth problems persist, though differently. On Saturday my tooth became loose and wobbled for a day before, today, settling in a new position, where it aches slightly.

While trying to forget all of this annoyance, a generally good day today. Started by trying to get an phone-only app to run on PC with an emulator, but it was tricky to set up, so I gave up. I helped fix the carpet downstairs and ordered a cover for the greenhouse for my mother.

Then, worked on the music for a new song called 'Remembering Hans Blix', for the nuclear album, now to be called War And Nuclear Love (note that I capitalise all first letters of album titles). Music for 'Post-Apocalyptic Playground' is just about done too. Much done today.

Here are the words to Blix:

Remembering Hans Blix

Hands up if you remember Hans Blix
Wonder if he is still around in twenty twenty six
We really need to find him and his magic box of tricks
We've many invisible weapon problems he can fix

We need Hans
We need Hans
We need Hans
We need Hans

War And Nuclear Love

Weary today, but a first day of work on music, on being originally creative, in a while. Finalised the production of 'War and Nuclear Love'. The song is part of this war-themed album, themed because it's being developed to complement the Radioactive theme. The music is similar to that, very analogue-based electro-pop, in the mould of Yazoo or Erasure. Worked on a second song called Post-Apocalyptic Playground too. Here are the WANL words so far:

War and Nuclear Love

Here in my bunker
Surrounded by toys
Dreaming of the people I could conquer

Long blonde robots
Keep telling me I'm great
I'm feeling in the mood to procreate

I take my fuse
And masturbate as I muse on

War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear
War and nuclear
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love

There's something in my shattered past
That gives me a need to dominate
And if I can't attract a mate
I'll seek a rubber weakling and inflate

Look at the buttons
Awaiting a push
There's something of a Christmas morning here

Handsome generals
Encourage me to play
And I've nothing better to do today

I pray to God, grip my fuse
And he tells me that he approves of

War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear
War and nuclear
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love
War and nuclear love

Phantoms

A night of strange flowing face pains growing to a horrible peak, then falling away over the course of 8 hours. Now, this has been going on for some days, since Tuesday, and this morning I had a slight temperature of 37.7 degrees too. Yet, I suddenly became logical and sceptical, my personality instantly flipped. Pains only at night are more likely to be psychological, as diseases happen day and night; though of course we are distracted in the day, so at night all bodily senses are amplified.

I began to see everything in new terms. I'd not heard of Trigeminal Neuralgia until the doctor mentioned it, but much later realised that I had, having read a BBC News article about it only about a week earlier, not consciously noting the name. What if I'd unconsciously created the disease and it's symptoms for one day, and what if the pain had vanished because of the idea of taking pain medication? And the dangerous side effects appeared exactly because I was warned that they might?

The intense agony triggered by even a drop of warm liquid on Thursday was real, that's for certain, yet, the day before my mouth had been numbed by dental anaesthetic, so perhaps they became hyper-sensitive as a counter reaction. Since reading about TN, I've avoided eating with that side of my face or teeth, but perhaps I don't need to. Perhaps this disease was only there on Thursday?

My throat hurts, is this tension caused by gulping strangely, or something else? Have I raised my temperature to 37.7 by the power of will? I'm sure this can happen.

For the moment, art should be my focus. The external.

More Trigeminal Neuralgia, NHS Matters, and War ANL

Pain free yesterday due to the very effective Carbamazepine, but woke last night with a sweat and a raised, though not technically feverish, temperature, ranging from 36.2 to 37.3 degrees and feeling not-quite-well. Today, the glands in my throat on both sides are a little swollen and sensitive, swallowing notably a little painful.

Today I read that Trigeminal Neuralgia is more commonly missed than diagnosed by dentists; often the first point of call for sufferers. Perhaps dental surgeries need informational posters or leaflets about this.

In the late morning, I went to Crewe Market Hall with Deb where she was due to read some of her poems for tomorrow's International Women's Day. After that, I worked on the 'War and Nuclear Love' song for some more time. It's a very complex production, and for me will remind me of Duran Duran's 'Ordinary World'. Not necessarily because the song it musically related, but I watched a Rick Beato YouTube video about it and marvelled at the strange chords, which Duran Duran excel at.