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.

Prometheus v3.99, The First Five Albums, Writings Filing

A busy day, we have an extra hour! Updated Prometheus to enhance the NoiseStation file import and imported the old Radioactive in-game theme to transcribe to sheet music, this was done by about 10 o'clock. Most of the day spent completed the first draft of The First Five Albums, the book of all of the Fall in Green lyrics so far.

This make me look at the master file in which I file all of my short stories, books, essays, music booklets. I've got nearly 400 now. The filing hasn't been refined in years and could so with some tidying and amalgamation. Everything has a title and date, and each book has a subsection for publication in different formats (softback, hardback, ebook) but there are some mergings, some differences, and some items are all put together to save time. The same book in different languages (three of my books have Chinese translations) have different code numbers; I think these should really share the same one but have different format subsections.

So, lots to fix and neaten. Being neat and orderly in filing is essential for productivity. This will take a few days. Nothing more for me to do on the book for now, Deb must take a look and do some formatting of her words. One other pending job is some short videos of the Nightfood tracks for short-format social media.

Innuendo, The Joy of CDs, Enzymes

Just been listening to Queen's Innuendo. I now have all of Queen's albums apart from Flash. There are a few artists and bands I have most of their album catalogue: Queen, Kate Bush, Jean-Michel Jarre (and E.L.O. by chance, as Simon gave me his whole collection). I don't have all of any one artist, perhaps one or two albums missing. I did have all of Kate's, for example, but I disliked The Director's Cut so gave it away, and I dislike the drippy and passionless 50 Words For Snow, though I still have it in a paper sleeve of shame.

I digress. Innuendo is great album. Perhaps Queen's best, for several reasons. Primarily it's dominated by and suffused with Freddie Mercury's emotion. An expansive joy, a cry, not present in other work apart from his Barcelona. It's joy, but you can hear that it's a mask of his facing death, anguish and joy in an electric embrace. There's little like it in my collection, perhaps Strauss' Four Last Songs or the Beethoven's Late Quartets. I've not heard a vocal performance like it, again, apart from in Barcelona, the overwhelmingly saddest song I've yet heard.

What a joy it is to listen on CD too. Streaming is awful (I've never listened to an album by stream; apart from anything else, I don't have a device to do this with apart my huge desktop PC). For me, streaming has killed music, handed British culture (and indeed much of America) to a minority of super-rich American tech corporations who are culturally vacant and bleed their philosophy of addiction and greed into the world's minds, into the soul of the young and poor everywhere. If I were Queen, if I could meet Roger Taylor or Brian May, I'd ask them to take down all of their music from streamers and sell only on CD. Piracy, which was one of the main reasons for streaming at all, is less of a problem now because it's easily detected on the major channels; the very streaming architecture does this automatically. When pirated in secret, it's the same as it ever was. I'd ask Roger, ask Brian, to buy a CD player company, and team up with other bands to sign a stream-free pledge, form a collective of like minds to wrestle culture back.

Buy, sigh, even I don't do this. Streaming is, just about, my only audience. Hardly anyone buys my music on CD, I don't think any album has ever sold as many as 10 copies over the past 27 years. Many friends don't even have a CD player. My own philosophy would kill my personal expression. Alas. Alas.

My stomach is fine now. The magic bullet of Solgar's digestive enzymes has allowed me to eat totally normally in an astonishing way, an about-face to what is so often a struggle.

Onwards we slowly march. Head held high. Head held low. Onwards to the setting sun. Onwards to the rising sun. See, our rock-of-art awaits. Hello my rock friend. Hello again.

Nightfood 2026 Complete, Art Competitions

A busy yesterday, first proofing and rendering all of the music videos for Nightfood. Many have two versions, one with and one without subtitles, although some have no subtitles and some have subtitles only. After this, uploading, then rendering the archive versions for myself, which have a lower bitrate. A tedious and stressful part of this process is waiting, here rendering each up to three times.

By the mid-afternoon, all were complete and I spent the afternoon and evening with Deborah, but alas the night in agony again due to my recalcitrant digestive system. I eat at 17:30, but by 22:30 I'm still digesting and have a full or partly full stomach. My digestion is so slow and malfunctional and this causes great pain. By 5am my stomach was still busy, so today has largely been a fast day. All of this may be caused by stress (I hope there's no pathological cause), but once that is gone, the inflammation, twitches and other problems remain for many days. Such things make me fear food. I have great sympathy with Kenneth Williams (and Beethoven, and Ingmar Bergman) due to their similar problems!

Today, a rest day. I heard that all paintings were accepted into the Castle Park Open, so I knew my options for the Grosvenor. As this entry clashes with Castle Park and with Ty Pawb, it means a whole set of new paintings for it. This unusually means that almost all of the paintings I've painted on this productive year will be displayed (or at least entered into) one competition or another, or on show and for sale in Knutsford.

My next jobs for the week: to complete the formatting of a new Fall in Green book of our complete lyrics so far, an item which will be useful as gig merchandise. Then completing music for the Radioactive Soundtrack (exclusively for Steam, it will have a few unique tracks or mixes), and ideally working on the cover for our next single, but this requires that I make a custom owl mask for Deborah which depends on her work schedule. In November I'll work on the sheet music for Remembrance Service.

Dream Of Wasps Video, Quadrophenia

A power day of video work. Completed the 'Dream of Wasps' video, and compiled the subtitles for all of the others now have first draft videos for all 7 works.

One hard part of this is the time and tedium. A rendering in Argus tends to take 2 to 3 times the length of the video, so 8 to 12 minutes for a 4 minute video, and now four renders per video (mask layer, additive layer, subtitles, subtitle mask/alpha). The compilation using FFMpeg too takes ages, so much of the day is spent waiting rather than creative work; and always frustratingly so!

I've done the best I could using the time budget allocated. Also today, uploaded the album to my website and Cornutopia Music catalogue. Created YouTube text for the videos and thumbnail images, both jobs take longer than you might expect. Plus, edited the sheet music to remove the old PRS Tunecodes; I'll not use these in future.

Next, final proofing of the videos, then uploading (just that will at least take a day, assuming the proofs need no changes, most videos are large and have two versions - with subtitles and without). Then making the 3000kbps versions for archiving. Then the video work will be done, and the album technical work complete! Every promotional job on Nightfood 2026 after that is a bonus, but I'm already aching to move on to something else. How soon I become bored!

I've been listening to Quadrophenia. Brilliant! It takes hour of intense study, focused listening many times. Bliss. Of course, I love this sort of symphonic album music. Of note is the importance of the French horn as a key instrument: guitars, bass, drums, French horn, synthesizer, vocals, in rather equal measure.