Music Videos and Tit for Tat

Quite a slow few days and suffering the effects of the anxious and excited weekend. Continuing to work on music videos, and hoping to move as efficiently as possible to complete a few videos, and complete The Modern Game. Time is short, and I have so much new work I must create.

I've sketched scripts for three videos so far. The trick is to work out some sort of narrative with characters in locations I can easily access. Most of my music is without lyrics, so there is a lot of freedom, but stories often need a story in the music, which can be an ethereal thing. All videos should be appealing and have a similar tone and feeling to the music. For a relaxing tune, like Islands of Memory from Synaesthesia, there might be no need for a plot as such. Ths video for this is a pretty computer animation. I would have preferred something about deep water, wildlife, old photographs and all sort of things. For now, the existing video will suffice. I really should have done this sort of thing at the time of writing the music, and find it annoying that I can't move on, but once again look backwards. I want to forget old work and push on, but often feel trapped in refining and improving and sorting out the past.

One Monday I started to make a full size mock piano, or part of one, for filming, and yesterday bought a few more props. I've also started to modify my music software to export frame numbers for different main sections of the music. This was a feature I programmed in for the Challenger music video (I think) but it could have benefitted from a few tweaks to give me some clues to where in the song different frames are.

I've also been thinking about game theory and tit for tat strategies, after watching a BBC4 programme about it. It made me wonder if this reflective behaviour, with an essential small amount of freedom that leans towards co-operation, might be some sort of universal law that can apply to economics and physics, as well as behaviours.

More Channel Progress

Have spent today finalising the existing videos for the new Mark Sheeky Music channel. I've decided to remove some of the existing videos which aren't of perfect quality, but keep those on the artworks channel. They are artistic historical documents, and these can be gradually replaced with newer videos if needed, but this will keep them on YouTube to some extent, and the experimental nature of some, like China Syndrome, is artistically interesting, even if I find them a bit blurry and grainy these days.

Most of the rest of the chanlled is now set up and the new Challenger video in 1280x720 look stunningly beautiful.

This will go live on the channel in mid August. Now, what to do. I have a huge list of music that needs a video. I'd love Tor to come and film a video for some of the great The End And The Beginning tracks, like Nineteen Eighty Five. Perhaps I could relaunch the album, and work on a sequel for us, or something.

I also have Marius Fate to work on. Oh, so much work and possibilities.

New Music Channel

Had an enjoyable hour last night on Tim Lee's RedShift Radio programme, The Doorstep Mixtape, talking about many aspects of art and music, fitting an enormous amount in actually; from A.I. and computer game programming, to feeling in music and acoustic instruments versus synth music, to Marius Fate, Fall in Green, and painting too. I also enjoyed hearing about his album project, Tulpa, in between tracks, which has some elements like The Modern Game.

Today is mercifully cooler and I've had a very full day setting up a new Mark Sheeky Music YouTube channel, converting short introduction videos to introduce each album. I recorded ten of these yesterday, although I decided to re-record one today. I've also uploaded a few videos that are of sufficient quality.

Now, should I leave the old, existing music videos on my other channel until I create new ones, or delete them? It would make more sense to leave them there, as people might discover the music that way, but my sense of order and completeness makes me want to delete anything that is imperfect now, and restart building a new collection of music videos on the new channel. I also have a dream of remaking some videos, like Islands of Memory, which were good quality enough in the first instance. All videos must now feature at least me.

One discovery was that I could convert the original 720x576 resolution Gunstorm file, cropping the ancient credits and adding a new ending. This means that I can upload a new, visibly higher quality version of the video to the new channel, ready for a spectacular premiere there. The video has been uploaded twice so far I think. First before Tor changed his name, then again with new credits, which meant that a few thousand people seemed to miss it as the popular video creator, Dr. 'Ashens' Ashen, had plugged it with the old address and artist name.

Music Videos

Annoyingly hot, too hot to work or compile music videos. Didn't get below 25.5 degrees in my room all night and the computer only makes things hotter.

Have recorded a few short videos about selected albums, but this too is very hot work and the small room I film in is over 30 degrees. The conversion process is long and I'm unsure whether to retake videos or use what I have. Often a first take is the most direct and honest, but I regret not researching details such as track listings before talking about the music. It would have been better to record a small number of videos for this reason, to iron out the learning process.

Heat and Video Work

A day of burning heat. Awoke at 01:50 by a violent explosion of thunder which shook the house. The storms that followed were amazing to see, fantastically bright and terrifying fork lightning. The day remained blazing and too hot to venture outside.

Spent the morning converting and uploading the remaining three art videos, so five new films in total are all set to appear over the next five weeks. The Tower of Bees painting is due to be shown at the Bickerton Art Exhibition, so might even be sold before the video premieres, which is an interesting notion.

After that I started the account set-up process for Apple Artists. I will probably create a new channel for music videos, and will revisit all of my current videos and work out how to efficiently make new ones in high quality. The newer videos are far better than the few older ones, and grainy video experiments like the Mice or Chine Syndrome video were fun and useful at the time, but now seem horribly dated. The workload to remake some of these can be immense, so I must make the result artistically useful and engaging. The film quality of great films of the past like Un Chien Andalou or Nosferatu is irrelevant compared to their artistic quality, so I must aim for a video that captures some technical and contemporary psychological zeitgeists, as well as complements then music.

I remember updating the ultra-complicated Challenger video before. Now the script seems remarkably simple. The experiences of ArtSwarm have truly been good training for video creation, which was the primary role of ArtSwarm. It is this that has led to my current renaissance in video.

Anyway, I was digressing. I was amazed to find out that Challenger was still in V.G.A. quality, rather than H.D. so I spent the evening updating the graphics to 1280x720 and preparing to cross my fingers for the mammoth graphics render of this. At any point, memory might give way on a project like this. One option is to render the separate components as separate films, then overlay them rather than do it all in one process. It takes about two hours for my computer to build this video. I will wait for a cooler time. It's simply too hot to subject the computer to such fan whizzing. Here is a still from the H.D. version.

Meanwhile I will start storyboarding for new videos and try my best with my limited resources. I really need my old camera cleaning and its damaged lens fixing, but we must work with the poor tools we have, and with our magic fingers and minds, produce wonders. Limitations are so often beneficial.

Wirral, Bickerton, David Lawton

Began this hot day by converting and editing some new painting videos, then heard that I'd got two of my three submitted paintings into the Wirral Society of Arts Open Exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery. I've often thought about entering this exhibition, and it's been recommended to me in the past, but I don't drive so public transport access to any exhibition venue is a vital to me. Carrying paintings also limits their size. My love, darling queen of art, Deborah, helps me with deliveries and trips as much as she can, but can't always do so. In this case, the fantastic print maker and W.S.A. member, Barbara Barlow, has helped and made entering this possible. If I could get to the gallery more easily, I could probably apply to be a member; but I cannot for this reason alone. This is nothing to do with art ability. Social connections are made from overlapping webs, and those of mine concerning transport are frail.

Some exhibitions are easier than others to get to. The difficult ones for public transport include the day-trip to Machynlleth for their annual exhibition, or local galleries like the Chapel Gallery Ormskirk, and here at the Williamson. By comparison Birmingham or London are easier to get to, but everywhere is expensive. It's rare for a competition to cost under £100 in transport costs and entry fees.

In the afternoon Deborah and I drove to Bickerton to drop off four paintings for their annual exhibition and sale, another difficult place to get to, but many artists visit there, so I can often find a lift somehow. I've shown work there for many years now, this village show grew from many local village shows and has a wide mix of art; generally conservative, pretty, low priced. This show opens on July 27th and runs until the 4th of August.

After that, a trip to see David Lawton for some portrait photography and art inspiration from this master and master enthusiast of painting and literature. He is a unique artist, spending long days and weeks working on a small number of exquisite portraits, driven by an unstoppable internal passion.

Art Videos

A difficult night due to my regular abdominal pains from which I awoke lethargic if not actually exhausted, but I pushed on with work and decided to film some more painting videos. I would love to make some more music videos. Looking back, I see a lot of good music that really needs a good video, and I'm generally unhappy with the quality of almost every video. In some cases poor tracks have been chosen, for various reasons. The Tree of Keys album, for example, evolved from ArstLab and ArtSwarm pieces, so some of those tracks use those videos yet many of the best tracks don't have videos.

The Jarre's Party video from Bites of Greatness was itself made hurriedly as an animation experiment, rather than a conscious choice to find a track something like a single; Pandora or Jellyfish or Trax are more catchy. Ultimately, the work of making a good video is large, and making 20 or more would take many weeks or months.

Generally, newer videos are quicker to make and higher quality. I need to develop some sort of strategy for this. I am as much as recording artist as a painter, but the quality of the videos does not always indicate the quality of the music, or the work I've put into the music.

The new art videos are filmed but not yet edited. This will take a few days. Tomorrow I will deliver some paintings to the annual Bickerton Art Exhibition, then visit the great Chester portrait artist David Lawton.

New Love Symphony Video

Still thinking of music videos, so much missing. As a result, I have revisited The Love Symphony. In 2015 for the Phenomenology of Love exhibition I made the 42 minute Love Symphony film (the details are probably blogged here), but for reasons of file size I didn't keep all of the source videos. I'm constantly aware of the efficiency of storing the right quantity of data. In this case, it made it difficult to make edits or new versions of the film without a crude and destructive cut of the full film.

Last year I re-downloaded as much of the source material as I could locate. At least one film is lost forever, simply deleted from the Internet Archive. Most of the other films (at least 20) were still there, but needed re-converting, and I was unsure whether I had resized these, or converted the frame rates. There were also some self-recorded films which I also deleted (perhaps most foolishly of all as these were certainly unique). These were however very short segments which were made hurriedly and can be easily mimicked.

I've spent part of yesterday and today recompiling the footage for the first 10-minute track, There is no Love and the More I search the Less I Find. The result isn't 100% like the original but is very close. Some segments, such as the San Francisco Earthquake segments seem to have changed since 2015, they seem more grey (rather than pinkish, apparently not a result of my colouration) and perhaps a little cleaner, but this might well have been due to my original conversion. I am using identical software however. There were two hand filmed segments; of a receding clock, and a clock face. I have re-filmed these hurriedly in one take, although arguably these look little better than the original because they are now the same clock and seen from the same attitude, conveying an air of reminiscence. The original 2015 clock was a rather beautiful, antique grandfather clock owned by the artist Jan Pienkowski.

After compiling the final film, I used AviSynth to set the original film side by side with the new one to check that it was frame identical. In timing it is, and many frames are identical. There are some slight changes due to 'hand' editing of a few sequences.

I'd like to make a higher quality remake of this film one day. For now, this will do. It's a piece of history. The final segment is also quite complex. If I can edit that together, then I will have the vast majority of the material of the original 42 minute film. For now, this new edit is set for a YouTube premiere on Saturday 27th July at 6pm.

I still wonder whether a separate YouTube Channel just for my music videos would be a good thing. My channel broadly covers art and painting, performances of various sorts, experimental films and ArtSwarm-like video-poems, short musical pieces, and full 'official' music videos. This might make it harder for people who only like one thing to see just that one thing, although everything is divided into playlists. One argument against this move is that I've got some music that isn't officially released, like the Plastic Superman song, and other ArtSwarm music. Would that be for my art channel, or music video channel?

Ideally I would now blink and have videos for all of my extant music, well, those highlight tracks currently shown on the Cornutopia Music channel.

Now off today to deliver a new painting masterpiece to a customer. This work is a paragon of my new symphonic style, and I hope to talk about its merits at some point, but for now, it must remain a secret.

Marius and Stockport

A slow day yesterday but jobs were done; completing more artwork for the album. Now 8 pages of 600dpi images are done, but I think it would be a good idea to make more art, perhaps one image per album track, perhaps more. This must be a new total artwork. I have many ideas.

The main job was spending a good few hours creating a new YouTube channel for Oldfield 1, and putting basic music videos there rather than the Cornutopia Music channel. This made me lament that most of my old music doesn't have videos as such, although most albums have a few key tracks on YouTube with simple still-type videos. The ideal is that these have videos too, but the thought of revisiting old albums and spending weeks making new videos for the material make me shudder; yet this is something I should have done from the outset. The songs for The End and The Beginning, still a great album, really needed videos from the start. If only I'd have committed to that, as I did with Gunstorm.

The problem with new videos to old music is that people might think the music is new or confuse it with new music. Are either of these bad things? Perhaps new videos need to be made in chronological order of the tracks, or perhaps in quality order, from the best tracks to worst, so that at least the best music has videos?

Which music am I most proud of, that needs the most video attention? Perhaps The End and The Beginning songs, and perhaps the newer work, like Cycles & Shadows, and Music of Poetic objects, if only because that music represents my current direction.

The New York ArtSwarm has premiered and I've decided that this is will be last year/season for this format. After that, I'll showcase the occasional single video, or live performance piece.

Today I visited the Stockport Open Art Exhibition opening, and spoke at length with John Keane. The art has mixes of good and bad in beauty and imagination. We both liked Harvest Festival in Japan by Ryuji Goto.

Invisible

Listened to fragments of Aerial tonight, inspired to write a poem, here's the first draft.

Invisible

I found a way to be invisible like a sort of better Kate Bush in the eyes of a solid air like a glass snowman.

Wind, brush my skin of breath with the dust of the dead. Did you feel that, the warmth? It was my soul, you felt it didn't you?

Close your eyes, now, do it! See, that's me. I am here with you. Here inside you. I am that nothing which you don't feel.

I found the door by chance on a road to Tibet, a sprig of herb shivered and whispered its secret.

I looked at myself anew and had become snow a single flake in a white sky.

Now even the sun can't see me, but in my heart its rays reflect around my ice and I feel it.

Graphics Continue

More work on The Modern Game today, a few pages of graphics, including the CD surface and rear. I've decided to make many of the graphics 600dpi for the first time, in case the artwork can be used for other purposes. Here is the art for the CD surface:

I've made a few slight changes to the music, the final tracks blend more smoothly together. It's quite amazing how this album is similar to my first, Synaesthesia, in the theme of space, moving into earth, then away again, although that album moved into heaven, this moves back into space and back to the beginning in a cyclic fashion.

I'm pleased with the music, but the really difficult part is telling the world about it and getting people to listen to it; finding people who will appreciate it too, and hopefully be as inspired by it as it has inspired me. This is my 45th catalogued music release since 1999, which includes 5 singles, 6 Flatspace Music Packs, and two very limited edition CDs (The Sky Disc, of which I still have a few copies, and the first Synaesthesia album which I think only ever had two copies; one for me and one for Rev Records in Scotland).

I sigh to think that hardly anyone has heard any of my music. A few friends, Andrew Williams perhaps, and ex-music journalist John Peters from The Borderland website has heard perhaps most, and in John's case it is largely the older electronic work that isn't like my current music. My more recent music; The Anatomy of Emotions, Cycles & Shadows, Testing the Delicates, and the new Music of Poetic Objects has probably reached at least as many people, and new people, even if still under 5.

Yet, I know that the quality of my work, and my playing and performance skills, are still improving, and I know that the work of a solo artist is difficult. Roxy Music and Queen were great bands with outstanding personnel, but the Bryan Ferry and Freddie Mercury solo albums were unpopular in their day, and this is not a matter of the music quality; any group effort is naturally more popular.

This album is different than anything I've done before, truly art-rock, and a new artist was an ideal start. I must assess a few next options of how to get it out there and how to prove to the world that the music is good. My problem is that I do everything alone, from designing the software and instruments, to performing everything, to designing all of the artwork, the websites, programming the e-commerce system, filming and editing music videos, arranging performances, performing live, and all publicity; the list is endless and my skills are not universal, and the skills of socialising are my weakest. Well, we can but try; and try, push, charge, I will.

I'm completely certain that my artworks of all sorts will be priceless collectors items one day, that these are simple undiscovered rather than shunned, and perhaps it is this self-belief that stops me worrying about persuading others of this fact. I must use my creativity at its best while I have it. Too many great artists stop creating with silly disillusionments which I've never felt. I have a duty to humanity to create the best artwork I can. This is my life mission, my daily vow and prayer, and there is nothing more to it than that.

The album needs a bit more work. I will continue to list the jobs and tick off the list. I must get this easy step out of the way, then identify a harder step, and do that. Onward!

More Cover Art

More work on the album, over the past few days. I began by listening to the whole album so far in the dark with headphones, to listen to everything in order with a fresh perspective. This helped a lot. I made a comments list of possible improvements to every track. Nothing is perfect, so every possibility needs looking over, but in the end I didn't change much. The biggest change was a new, more powerful vocal for Looking for a Lover.

For the cover, I came down to three choices. I'm realising that I'm taking longer and longer at every creative act, all due to higher standards. In the past, a first choice will do, but now I work on a second, a third, explore many more possibilities in search of what I think is the best. Of course, this can continue for ever, so a time limit or second factor comes into play, and normally this is an unexpected leap that creates a sense of pleasant change, like a quantum leap. Leaving things for some time to look at work afresh helps too.

Each cover evolves from the former. I'm not completely sure but the second and third are both good enough for me; the second being more busy and unusual, yet I don't like green so much, the third being somehow more typical of an album cover. There is something magical about the third, I can imagine it clearly as a vinyl album sleeve.

Now for the inner pages. Lyrics need an embedded font, not a mere image. An image at 300dpi still creates jagged fonts, but I don't have software which will embed fonts in a CMYK PDF file (OpenOffice is generally better than Acrobat for making PDF files anyway, but OO won't save in CMYK format. I have Acrobat but, in a move typical of Adobe, my version doesn't support CMYK saving and is hugely overpriced for very little utility). Most lyrics in booklets are plain black on white or plain white on black, so perhaps big record companies have similar file format issues with CD replicators. I'm not even sure if replicator companies can even combine bitmap imagery with vector fonts. In my case, I can either use large enough fonts so that issue isn't important, as in Music of Poetic Objects, or not include lyrics.

My goal is to create a total artwork; image, music, poetry, character, narrative. Lyrics must be rendered or not as part of this whole.

Cover Art

Photography today and graphic work on the cover artwork for the album. This is always time consuming, a battle of balance, and complexity vs. simplicity. The cover to the 2018 version was the starting point, but that was very limited in options because of the few available photographs. I wanted to include a cityscape or a meaningful landscape in the background, and trees seemed ideal as these would contrast in colour and match the Trees of the song on the album.

Here are three evolutions. I like the third with its graphic, comic-book feeling which reminded me of other album covers, perhaps Discovery by E.L.O. or Stranded by Roxy Music. I like the lighter background of the second though.

More work on this tomorrow, plus ArtSwarm filming and editing.

Music Promotion

Generally more branding work over the last day. I've needed event images for Fall in Green performances several times, so have a template for these for Facebook, Eventbrite, and similar online event sites. I've also got an A4 (or bigger, smaller, as needed) image for a poster. I thought it would be a good idea to have templates of these for each of my music artists, so I've been making these up.

I've updated the Cornutopia Music website too, adding separate pages for Marius Fate and Oldfield 1, and a new Marius Fate mailing list. It made me think of the vast amounts of e-publicity that accompanies any new show or event, like a music release. Ideally I need digital events creating, email newsletters, social media tweets, snaps regularly too, then real-world events like taking part in fairs, signings, press releases and that sort of thing. I've tried all of that at one point or another, but rarely all of that for one event. Doing it for every event would be a full time job; I have an announcement or event worthy of that sort of publicity about every two weeks, and as such, do not have the time to do it. At RedShift, I needed to do the e-publicity stuff all day as one of my duties and I'm not sure if it had any impact at all; it felt like it had none. The few times I have gone all-out on that sort of publicity, like the Phenomenology of Love exhibition in London, and The Life and Death of Arazmax Kane exhibition in Chester, also seemed to have no effect at all.

I was reminded of Tubular Bells and Virgin Records; it seemed to be simply a hit, and didn't seem to need publicity, and their other releases at the time were flops despite a massive amount of effort. Perhaps this is a naive view, and perhaps Tubular Bells did have huge amounts of work on its publicity, perhaps because it was the first release of a new label, and perhaps all of that effort focused on one thing made that release popular, but I suspect not. I suspect that hits simply generate a sort of magic by themselves.

Yet this doesn't mean that great things don't go unnoticed. There needs to be a door open so that things have a chance of being discovered, holes in the box so that the liquid greatness can leak out, and in the modern age there is so much out there that being seen at all is very difficult. Many discoveries from the past decade seem to have been due to the newness of platforms with little content (like a needle in a tiny haystack) rather than good things found among the swarm.

I'll be performing some Marius Fate songs live at the All Saints' ArtsFest in Crewe on October 5th, 11am, and performing as part of Fall in Green at 2pm. I will need to develop the songs in a way that makes them better to play live, and ideally find musicians who would like to play along. The audience will consist of casual visitors to the gentle art exhibition and perhaps be as few as one or two, well certainly under 100.

Next task on this is to design the cover artwork for the music. I'm eager to get this stuff out of the way and work on new music for a change. Something new, groundbreaking, that can rival the best albums by Genesis, Kate Bush, Renaissance, Rush, Queen, Beethoven and the other musicians I admire.

Weekend

The week ends and I feel its been disappointing, like so often I seem to work non-stop and achieve very little. The Cromwell portrait was exhausting and I'm unhappy with it. I've worked on The Modern Game songs for endless hours, yet they feel hardly any better than a week ago. My best creative act was perhaps the simple New York music piece for ArtSwarm, and the Marius Fate branding is fine too, for what that might matter.

I suppose that there are always fragments of good things to find in the week, and trying the portrait, trying anything, has benefits, but progress on anything seems interminably slow. I had a sleepless night and woke after 10am. I feel more like a struggling music artist than an painter now, and more isolated than ever. Perhaps I need to listen to Beethoven again.

My main job for the month was to complete The Modern Game, so I might push on with the cover artwork. That, at least, needs completing, and most of the songs are in far better condition than in the old version, so that is a positive. Sometimes, the hour after hour after hour of work on something can improve it. Perhaps the instant, time limited, completion of something like my New York music makes it feel like a better artistic achievement. I remember that Life Beyond Mars, one of the Modern Game tracks, was originally improvised and sang in a few hours for ArtsLab and felt great at the time. Now, the recorded version which is undoubtedly considerably better in every way, doesn't seem so because I've worked on it for so many months.

Life is dripping away. I must keep hammering at the rock face of art in my solitude, whipped by my unstoppable will and drive to do my best with my thin energies and short time on earth.

Onward.

Marius Fate and New York City

Marius Fate is born! Took some photos yesterday for the various feeds and publicity etc. A fun occasion. It made me think that everyone has multiple personalities and persons inside them at all times, and that it can be more efficient to name and separate these than not. My music output is so wide ranging that my Spotify playlist, for example, is loaded with ancient electronic music that is nothing like the music I make now, and certainly not like these strange pop songs, so a new artist, and character is essential.

My main task for today was to make a video and music piece for ArtSwarm on the theme of New York. I thought that a Philip Glass homage would be ideal, and made a simple cyclic melody with some deep, descending bass strings, all very Koyaanisqatsi. I wanted a point of switch or drama, so added a pause with some radio fizz, and then the music breaks its pattern, moving away from serial minimalism and disintegrating into a series of random notes generated by the computer based on the probability of the previous notes; so this is a step beyond, a disintegration of order into chaos. The pause is, of course, 9/11.

For the video I found some P.D. stock footage of an old documentary about New York City and simply speeded it up, with a few simple edits to match the pause with an appropriate part of the film. It works remarkably well, even more like Koyaanisqatsi, yet made in a few hours.

Tomorrow, more work on the album. I'm still unhappy with a few tracks; more vocal takes to get the feeling as right as I can. The job seems endless and I'm anxious to get it finished; of course I still have all of the artwork, publicity, and so many other things to work on too. I rarely indulge in any publicity. I'm well aware of my obscurity. I don't want to waste too much valuable creative genius working as an ad man, a typist, a secretary, unless I absolutely have to.

My aim is that Marius will perform live at the ArtsFest in All Saints' Church this October, if not before then.

House of Glass

A good day yesterday, completed new vocals for House of Glass. The song needed something and was one of the tracks I was least happy with; I'm still not totally happy with it, but we can only work so much on something. All art is a balance. I can't end up like Sibelius and release nothing, trapped by perfectionism. Perfectionism is itself a form of egomania; all artists must at some point humble themselves and show their meagre works to a harsh world.

The hero of the video is a robot, and the narrator is inside the computer, like the radio voice in Video Killed the Radio Star, so I decided to filter the verse in a similar way. This adds more of a contrast between the verse and chorus too. The song remains rather busy and complex, but it is much better now.

I've spent today largely resting, or as good as I can, I've never really had a day off in my life. I prepared the artwork for the Art Fair Cheshire which is coming in late September. Then I began preparing for a small performance event in Nantwich. I thought I'd sing Looking for a Lover, so developed a new mix with a quiet part to play along to, and practiced some electric guitar for it. I can barely play guitar but I do love the instrument. I must find time to play it more. I've barely played piano this year, never mind a new instrument.

I rehearsed the song a bit, and used a neat little rechargeable portable speaker, which is smaller than a tennis ball but loud enough to mix my Microkorg and the backing recording. I've also cut a gold tube and made it into a portable mic stand with an appropriate bolt. It's a little like a gold monopod. The aim is to provide a performance tool for the mic itself.

In the afternoon I was hit with a feeling of immense weakness. Perhaps this is a result of slowing down a little. I must aim to finish this album this month, then next month, the new 'clown' poetry collection. So much to do while I can.

Here are the words to House of Glass:

I'm alone but I'm with my friends;
I type out a message and I pretend.
Follow me to a world of things that I like,
and click like.

You can count popularity,
you can see who I like and see who likes me.
It's a game, only this game never ends,

so come and play in the room in the screen of life,
with the friends you don't know,
and me in the house of glass.

I'm a clown with a painted smile
to show to a world that is in denial.
It's control and we all have bits of a string we can pull

I would like to request you as a friend...
as a friend...
friend...

You can leave,
but I must make clear,
that your work, love and friendships are all on here
you can pay to be famous if you want.

so come and play in the room in the screen of life,
with the friends you don't know,
and me in the house of glass

spend your time at the screen of life,
with your friends and pretend,
with me in the house,
with us in the house,
alone in the house,
of glass.

Cromwell Painting and Marius Fate

Really tired yesterday after an anxious two hours sleep, my limbs still recovering from the Saturday performance, but I thought it would a good day to paint the Cromwell painting. I really didn't feel like painting, I'm in the zone of music, but generally we can only get anywhere by doing things we don't want to do. Doing what we want can be a downward spiral of lacking in energy, momentum and information. Life is energy, work, and adding information. Relaxation is a winding down, a losing of information, a decay towards death and nothing; it's only by work and pushing that we are alive. To be an artist is to work, push, be busy, and so live brightly.

At some times though, rest is a good idea and it was a long and exhausting day painting the Cromwell painting. It was a very difficult task because I had few source images to copy from and nothing with any level of detail. This is an inherent factor of the concept because I'm painting a historical figure with only one accurate portrait from which all other copies have stemmed. I wanted to change the lighting so it's inevitable that a lot of imagination, that is extra information, is required.

The portrait results were lacking in refinement but the result is passable. In circumstances like this, a study or two is often needed, and what is a study but an attempt at painting, so this can be a study or a finished painting, depending on how I feel about it later. The lower surrealistic parts of the painting were finely painted but didn't work artisitcally, they looked odd and harsh. I was always unsure about this and I've taken too long to develop the painting because I was unsure. Perhaps this test was the only way to work it all out. At 23:30 last night I erased those parts and this morning painted over them in a relatively flat grey, so that the figure seems to be emerging from a mist.

The resulting painting is a flat and blurry. I prefer highly finished paintings with lots of detail, even in the underpainting stage, but for an image loaded with visual uncertainty, this result is perhaps inevitable and still of use; even as a test it would be useful. I'm unsure if I'm happy enough with it to continue. I used Michael Harding's fast drying white, and with colours like raw umber and mars black, the paint was so dry by last night that it was unerasable. The paint was drying too quickly as I used it, making wet in wet details impossible, but I used fast drying colours because time is short. I had hoped to have a painting ready for the R.W.A. submission deadline of next Friday, dependent of course on whether I think the painting is good enough.

Today I'm finally starting to ache less, and full of ideas for the next 'Fishing' themed performance event, and want to program some new audio effects for Prometheus. At 3am on the 8th I found myself listening to The Carpenters, music of great emotion, and was analytical of the production techniques and I had an idea for a chorus effect that might emulate the doubling of vocal tracks in a more naturalistic way than a standard chorus.

My new artist persona for these songs is Marius Fate, and I'll work on this identity over the coming days and weeks. My synth persona, rapidly developed for a photo shoot, was based on metallic red and black. A second, Barry Falcon, lead singer of Shock Falcon was based on red and gold. My piano playing persona is black, white and gold. Arazmax Kane, the artist I became for The Life and Death of Arazmax Kane, was white and gold, and Marius will be black and gold, with extra colours; generally similar but an opposite to Arazmax.

Back to music this week. Full of ideas for future work that must be great and groundbreaking, whether I perform in my personas often or not. I've secured a 30 minute slot in the ArtsFest in Crewe in October, so will develop something for that. I feel I'm making my best work at the moment and must make as much as I can while I have the time, fitness and energy.

ArtSwarm Travel

Aching today after an exhausting but exhilarating show last night at Wistaston Memorial Hall. This was the third live event and each one is different. My mum said later than the mood was a little subdued at first, perhaps this was true. Perhaps because of the light outside made the night feel early. Perhaps I needed some sort of engaging uplifting start to bring the night to life. The evening was complicated and disrupted a bit by the comings and goings of many people during the performances. This is always a potential problem. Of course, we want as many people to see the show as possible and locking the doors at 7pm wouldn't be a good idea, but people arriving or leaving in the middle of acts is always disruptive to flow. Perhaps the skill of the performer is to lead off these things. Part of the aim of ArtSwarm is to refine the skills of performance on a stage environment that is different and more challenging than that of an intimate venue made up from friends.

This night was broadly a mix of poetry, music, and the odd video and slideshow, with more music than previous events. Generally I tried to interleave poetry and music. I opened the show by singing Life Beyond Mars to a backing track that I designed with some spaces for live synth playing. I did that again with One Day at the end of the show, which went much better than I had expected - I've not sang the decade old song before and I had to learn the words in the day. Live bands work better than backing tracks because everyone can react with each other and the audience a bit, creating a dialogue, a teasing of emotion. Backing tracks can be designed to react with the singer though, if carefully made. Usually, karaoke style music is really badly and electronically sequenced to kill any feeling, but acts that create their own backing tracks can make these sound as good as those by any live band. Ideally some control over the playback itself is needed, and some live elements too. Of course, even a deejay playing records can be a performance, so all is not doomed.

For my parts I developed a few sections where I encouraged audience participation. I handed round a toy horse with wings and sang "Fly horsie fly... over the fields of Birmingham..." and other places, asking members of the audience to pass it around and suggest placed for the horse to fly to. This was one of the most interactive parts. It made me think that a performance has two levels of interaction: hard and soft.

Hard interaction is like my example, where the performer demands some response from the audience, from Bruce Forsyth (who I quoted on the night) saying "Nice to see you to see you..." and the audience must answer "Nice!", or a pantomime "He's behind you!" response, or an audience might even sing, such as in Vic Reeves' shows, or asked to pick a card in a magic act.

Soft interaction is perhaps even more powerful, but more difficult to master. It one that has an equal level of participation but it is silent and emotional. The performer must still ask, talk, and answer but in complex ways. This is perhaps the secret of any art.

The quality of the poems and concepts was as good as any previous event. The technical aspects; sound levels, changes between acts, were probably the best of the events so far. I'm still learning in leaps for this sort of thing, as I'm sure the other performers are. For the game-show segment, I connected my camera to Steven Goodwin's projector by HDMI cable to give a live feed.

Perhaps one important thing about these shows is that if they are to succeed, they will always need more audience members than performers, which sounds like an obvious statement, but for many poetry groups and communal music groups this is not the case. It is this challenge and this environment that makes these events different, more challenging, and more exciting to perform at. Performing to friends is easy. The skill, and elation comes from performing to strangers who will judge you.

I ended the night with a sing-along of Tony Christie's Amarillo song, which is more entertainment than 'high art' because it's known and popular and catchy. If it were rare, unknown, and a bit weird sounding, I'm sure it would be considered a masterpiece. Still, the aim of this show is to showcase our original work, and I included this mainly for the benefit of an honoured guest who had left by that time. It was great fun to sing though, and a superbly uplifting song to end the night with. It's the communal aspect that made the song art.

I slept with vivid dreams and strange nightmares and have spent today recovering physically while documenting last night's event, and preparing for the next one, inspired with ideas and new energy.

Fringes and Stockport Open Delivery

Last night I started to frame two new paintings, but one was annoyingly 5mm too small for the frame, the canvas being metric but the frame being in the crude and archaic units called inches. This wasn't too serious but it did make the fringes at the edge of the painting clearly visible, something I don't tend to get nowadays because I often paint up to the edge anyway. In this case, the visible part was at the very top where the easel normally covers the canvas.

So I began today by painting that fringe, then I set up some online things for my new music artist alter ego. This itself is a tiresome exercise that isn't always necessary from the outset. I've done it for a few acts that haven't gone anywhere, like disco duo 'The Space Beeps'. Each has a clear identity in my mind but I haven't as yet used many of them for anything.

Then the train to Stockport to deliver work for the Open Exhibition there. This is one of the few local open exhibitions with no prizes apart from a visitor's choice award, which are usually like a 'who has the most local friends award', and there are generally few protections to these and so anyone can vote for themselves an unlimited amount of times too, so the whole system for this sort of award is a bit silly and not an indication of the quality of the art. The prizes tend to be thankfully poor for this sort of award, so nobody really minds. There are no other awards in this show, and the painting must be a world premiere too. I've certainly seen paintings in this exhibition that break this rule, which as a diligent obeyer of rules annoys me. Unlike Dali, I value integrity and the rules based order of the world and would never consider cheating at any game to win. In fact, I want to make it harder for myself to win, not easier. All games are there to push us, and I play all computer games on the hardest difficulty level. For Stockport the entry fee is relatively low and it's a short trip and an attractive venue, so the main benefit is having ones work seen by the public.

My train arrived in Stockport station at 13:35, and my train back was at 14:04, so I ran to the gallery, delivered in 6 minutes, and was back at the station in time to catch the return train. Then I dashed home for a birthday meal with friends.

My current music work is coming to an end. I'm thinking of bold new art ideas. I think that painting and music must be my total artistic focus, but whenever I think that, I have a new, bold idea that is totally different. I even read a chapter of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death yesterday, now horrified at the lack of commas and other errors, but I'm still happy with the story. I'd love to revise it one day for a second edition, but I've had 150 copies printed, so that might be some time off. These 150 are sure to be super-valuable one day, like William Blake's first editions. The are available from my website and the Pentangel Books site only.

Tomorrow it's the ArtSwarm Travel event. I need 18 in the audience to break even in costs. I am expecting 20 to 30. We shall see.

ArtSwarm Preparation and Home Life

A slow day, preparing for the ArtSwarm performance night. I generally dread, fear and dislike organising a live performance. It's so much work, packing and lugging equipment, setting up, plugging and unplugging cables, liaising with performers, publicity and posters, sound checks, setting up tables with food and drinks, organising the set-list, keeping an eye on the clock, and endless more. The actual performance part is easy and happens in a flash, there's usually no time to rehearse and no time to put a good amount of through of effort into the artistic content because it makes up only about 2% of the work. Setting up a live art show is to do the job of a theatre manager, director, publicist and ticket seller, technician, road manager, tea-boy, dresser and make-up artist, and every other job, and generally paying money to do it all. Yet, at the end of the show I usually feel elated and immediately start planning the next event with gusto.

The last few years have been much more performance based, partly because it a least affords a way to get out, commune with other artists, and share one's work. I'm quite geographically and physically isolated and rarely communicate with people on a social basis. I barely spoke at all until my mid-thirties and had no social contact at all for at least 15 years, my principle friend, apart from my computer, was Andrew my pen-pal. At times, I think the terror of speaking or moving that my father inspired in me as a child made me completely afraid to communicate at all, and in this, my communications emit after first fermenting, and so everything is enriched to make art. This is perhaps the root of all surrealistic art. My tendency to avoid contacting others, and having no social desires, will always be a handicap to my art career, or any normal career, whatever normal means.

This theme introduces my latest painting, Home Life, which has elements of mist and distance like my old Coma painting. This organic style is something relatively new and appears to me in clear images, perhaps a feeling of being the landscape itself rather than an object in it. Most paintings have one protagonist but perhaps more clearly in the Taking of Excalibur painting, there were two, the cliffs and the lanced figure. In dreams, we are all of the characters. So it is in a surrealistic painting.

I'll be framing this soon. These sorts of paintings don't seem to get accepted into exhibitions, but I will try it in a few important shows. There is so much luck in what a jury might select.

Finalising Music, and ArtSwarm Travel

Music work continues. To finalise the mixing I placed my speakers, Samson Resolv 65 monitors, really good, flat, sound on my desk at ear height. I reworked the Looking For a Lover vocals, making the second half of the verses and the chorus an octave higher, which sounds much better, more at my natural pitch, but I made the first half spoken in a sort of spiv-like secretish sort of way.

The last track to be looked at again was House of Glass, which had a nice idea but I'm less keen on this track now. I think it was one I liked the most at first. It's strange how tastes evolve. Generally, the newest thing we do is the most liked, perhaps? It's a constant learning process how vocals are layered and used as instruments in songs. I must make what I do the best I can, but know that I'll improve and learn, as all things do, making each cell express itself like a voice, the body as an instrument.

That was yesterday. Today I've prepared to enter the Wirral Society of Artists Open for the first time, something I've thought about for years, but it is in a difficult place for me to get to. The excellent artist Barbara Barlow is helping and we'll take alternative trips to help each other with the delivery and collection duties. I've decided to enter my Self-Portrait with Black Hole, a painting as conceptual as any portrait could be, more like a Frida Kahlo than a Rembrandt I think, although, of course, in finish and style like neither. That, plus two others. These choices are always like gambles.

My main job today is finalising my plans for the 'Cirque du ArtSwarm: Travel' event on Saturday. I expect a reasonably big audience and the pressure is on to provide a good show. I would like to do something interactive somehow, but this isn't easy with a dark audience. I'll open with a short song from the new album, and probably perform another later. I want to be creative and artistic, but I'm often instinctively drawn to being entertaining and humorous. I've been watching the great artist Barry Humphries recently; a brilliant inventive art graduate himself, a true equal of the early surrealists in both acumen and early artistic achievements, yet he became famous for quick witted humour; keenly observed, but not art. Is Dame Edna Everage entertainment, or serious?

It's difficult to be entertaining and serious. Is the flaw of surrealism, particularly British surrealism, its lack of seriousness? Perhaps British snobbishness looks down on art naturally, and this critical, rubbishing, nonsensing, emotion is squeezed into a sort of humour that is laughed at, and the artist feels pressured into self-deprecating, in the way that the character of the Fool is pressured to in the memorable bar scene in The Seventh Seal.

For me, surrealist artist comedians like Vic Reeves (Jim Moir), and the Monty Python team, make serious art, but they don't appear to take it seriously, and self-deprecate. Or perhaps they do take their work seriously, and our laughter is the correct response? Can something be serious and make us laugh, the laughter of truth? Perhaps not. Perhaps what is serious and revelatory must be striking, perhaps amazing and wonderous, but sad, an epiphany of some root of truth, like a glimpse of the true soul of that anxiously laughing Fool.

Is making entertainment different from making art? All comedians have real lives, but entertainers rarely want us to see that, the aim of their act is explicitly avoid real life, and allow us to escape. Perhaps escapism is what entertainment is, and art should never be escapist, but the opposite, shining a light on what we are escaping from. Perhaps that light illuminates our fears to make them go away, and it is this vanishing that is the benefit and pleasure of art.

A strange ramble to end the day with! I've spent far far too many hours today thinking of performer/artist names for my music. It's been driving me really crazy for days, the pressure only growing, searching. It's not a lack of ideas but too many. I hope to finish performance plans tomorrow. I had hoped to finish them today, but progress has been a lot slower than hoped. I'm wasting valuable days of life working on this little thing! Perhaps I need to make it less important in my mind. Sometimes the best results flash up at us in an instant. The first, instant idea is the best and truest, but I've headed down a path of brainstorming, which is rarely helpful. I did this for The Minotaur competition years ago. After a few days (or weeks) the storm creates a flood, drowning and soaking everything with its grey water. I need to drain away ideas, delete, cull, limit, to leave a few grains.