The Future Snooker Soundtrack

A slow couple of days. I had the idea for a new music piece for the album yesterday, and began the day working on it. I imagined a trail, like a caravan of gold and jangles, but the song itself, which I largely outlined at 4am after waking from a nightmare, felt a bit too comical and the unusual instrumentation proved difficult to get right.

Today has been an emotional struggle to get into things. The solution is to make rational goals. I decided to work on a new soundtrack for Future Snooker and have developed 12 tracks, all of which are edits of previous work. I chose about 20 originally, but my old music now seems so simplistic; so crude and loud and emotionless. The newer, more gentle and deep tracks really stood out, and they reflect my current music better. That's the sort of music I'd like people to hear, and it does go well with a game like snooker.

Listening to my music from The Infinite Forest now, it sounds so electronic, harsh and buzzy. The composition is fine, it would probably sound great played by an orchestra, of course. Nowadays I'm much more skilled at crafting more realistic, or at least evocative sound. I've used two tracks from that album in the Future Snooker soundtrack, and for The Talking Butterflies I reworked it with some of the new features of my software that makes it easier to add this human touch.

My software, originally called NoiseStation II, and now Prometheus, has grown bit by bit over many years and its features continue to improve. A lot of the craft of musicianship, or painting, or anything, is not in leaps, but in incremental tiny steps, each of which makes things a little bit better, tasks a bit faster. For this reason it's important to note these procedures, to hold on to what you have learned. In software we have to be aware of adding functionality without adding complexity. Each new feature can add more complexity; more menus, more to learn, more to complicate the super-fast excitement of wanting to get the idea down. Ideally, a feature can open up a new world without that. At its most basic, you should be able to do everything that is possible without the need for a special menu option for it.

How frustrating it feels to have a back-catalogue I can barely bring myself to listen to. The solution is to make more new music, to overwhelm the mere 20 albums or so with 40 or so new ones, so I'm pleased at least that the Future Snooker music will at least reflect my current musical direction and state.

This afternoon I've completed the programming side. Every new level (frame) will start with new music. The music isn't very long, about one or two minutes per track, and then leads to silence. For a game of strategy, silence is often preferred. There are twelve tracks in total, and many are relaxing, drifting music, so hopefully a few players will keep them on the playlist.

More Album Work

Working steadily away on the album today but I feel I've hardly done anything. There's a lot of correcting and refining, redrafting and refining that takes a lot of time, but is important. This time can be used to think over next steps. I've modified one old track called The Dark Night Watchman, slightly made the intro and ending less happy, to match a mood of being watched. The original title was inspired by the old narrative from a surrealist film, but now it magically matches a new idea of being watched by god; god as arbiter of morality, and guilt. Maybe guilt is worth exploring further. The rhythm of the Great Grandfather song, which has clock and bell elements reappears here with church bells and hammering at the door.

These old piano tracks are a little drifty and romantic, even when discordant or dark. I must keep things under enough control. I now have five tracks at the start (although the first is an intro of a few seconds), and seven in total, including the last 'epilogue' track. I'll try to find creative material in those to use earlier on to add more unity and structure to the entire album. Do I need movements and sections? Last night I decided that the album should be all set at night, in bed, with dawn at the end. It should create a Christmas Carol-type haunted feeling.

There is a lot I cam say about religion generally, I can ask and answer a million questions, as I did for The Modern Game, but I'd hope for something more unified and natural, authentic, somehow, rather than an arbitrary collection of ideas.

Great Grandfather

More work on the Burn of God album today, and a track currently called Great Grandfather. The mood begins slowly and gently, a bit like Kate Bush's Watching You Without Me perhaps. The chords in the explosive chorus are delightfully odd; FM, CM, G#M and C#M. This leads to a solo in A Major and D minor, which creates a strange mood, not joyous as I'd imagined, but more sleepy or reflective.

This will lead into the existing track Lost, which has musical links to the earlier track, so there is enough unity so far.

Now I have to work out where to go. Creating one unified structure is difficult when exploring a theme. Perhaps I need a definite narrative, perhaps like A Curious Feeling, but the more of a story and album has, the less chance it can have to address specific questions or issues. Perhaps I need to consider the musical climax, or a narrative climax.

Steady Progress

A sleepless night of stomach pain, and through it the music to The Great Conveyor went round and round my head, as will inevitably happen with a new tune. A poor way to spend the extra hour. It's made today tiring and frustrating for no other reason, but I've continued work as I could and made some achievements.

First; re-editing the Alice interview to set the audio in sync. It appears that FreeMake has a bug in the conversion which causes audio to slip out of sync. A direct extraction of the audio from my camera was slightly longer in time than the separate audio recording. Perhaps the hardware is at fault. It becomes a problem with any video over about four minutes in length, and at the maximum of 17 minutes it's rather serious. I managed to digitally shrink the separate audio recording to compensate, but the maths is irrational. The reduction isn't, for example, the equivalent of 30 to 29.97 F.P.S. (which I might have expected, even though I'm not actually converting frame rates at all). It appears to be about half-way between, but not exactly. Annoyingly, the video is perfectly in sync as an avi or avs in VirtualDub, but when converting in FreeMake, the results are out of sync. Well, I've done all I can.

After that, more work on The Great Conveyor today, which is just about finished apart from the vocals, which appear to be in an unsingable range. It's an amusing point that I included a middle section to match the music of another track called Lost, but this one seems to want something else to follow from it, and I might not include Lost at all. During a walk I had the idea of waking from the dream to a ticking clock, and the voice of a dead relative.

This song starts with a bell and clock tick rhythm, a drone-like song that inevitably leads to a dramatic chorus. More work to follow this week. I may attempt The Great Conveyor vocals. I normally like to conclude vocal work on the entire album at the end, rather than one track at a time, but things might sound better if I make an exception.

I added a feature to my software a few months ago to set the internal tuning up or down as much as an octave, so in an emergency, I could re-tune the entire song in a click to make it easier to sing, but this would upset the structure of the whole album. A lot of it is in D minor, and should remain there. It would be easier to modify the melody, and the ideal is to expand my vocal range.

One other small thing done today is doubling the texture resolution in Future Snooker, which is set for a release next month.

Genesis and The Great Conveyor

Worked until nearly midnight on the Infinity song last night. The problem was the overall structure. The intro, verse and chorus worked well, then led into a moment of doubt, a third section which uses melodic elements from another song. The second verse followed, but if this led into a chorus again things started to sounded a bit repetitive, an ABCAB sort of structure, but the third section ideally needs exploring too and ABCABC is a bit simple.

My first draft used ABCAC which worked in an interesting way, but the B (the chorus) is worth hearing twice, and is an important part of the glorious, heavenly feeling. The problem is that it doesn't follow naturally from the third part, so the solution was to add a third verse, which then changed into a half-verse. The song is rather long at nearly seven minutes, and I'm concerned that there isn't enough variety of volume and power, or variety of tempo, it all feels rather uniform, but we are at the early stages. There is a lot more to do. Music takes me a lot longer to write these days because of these extra, final sculptural changes; these tweaks to contrast and to every note and piece of emphasis.

Overall, the song is the most Genesis-like song I've written, perhaps because of the synth leads and the guitars. It has elements of something from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; The Grand Display of Lifeless Packaging, or Counting Out Time, something like a trawl or walk, a conveyor belt, and indeed the title is now The Great Conveyor. My tune has more melody than those Genesis tracks. I like the overall conceptual idea of The Lamb, but prefer the music of other general Genesis albums like Foxtrot or Selling England by the Pound.

Have spent much of today filming and editing an interview with Alice Smith for Ink Pantry. Have also received the foreword to my future poetry book, The Burning Circus, from John Lindley. I feel honoured to include such words from such a great poet. John is one of few poets who can master forms and structure as well as language, meaning, feeling, imagery. His poems are like crafted cakes or miniature sculptures built from words; many contemporary poems now are very unstructured and loose, which is often an easy option.

I, Infinity

Hammering away with difficulty on an early track for Burn of God called I, Infinity (which won't be the final title). I realised last night that most of my albums, those that have an overall theme or narrative as opposed to those that are compilations of tracks, take the form of an image-driven journey. Each track on Synaesthesia, or The Spiral Staircase or The Love Symphony conjures images which unfold, one to the next, to tell a story. Although I always knew this on some level, the realisation was something of a revelation because I use this method to create ideas when writing and haven't thought about an image-centred way of composing music.

This has, in some ways, already helped with Burn of God, but it's not easy because I suddenly have more forces to juggle; the message, the feeling, the image narrative, the musicality and the musical structures. All of these battle each other, there are no right answers. As such, the day, like the week, has been frustrating.

I, Infinity is a simple enough rock song, similar to Coming Back to Earth from The Modern Game but it is too simplistic for my tastes. Any song with two parts is too simple; I find music needs three that can interplay. More than three can sound too busy, and less is too little material. These structural problems are easily solved, but I need to map out the overall message for the album. It feels messy to have so much complete and so many fragments without even that basic start. I feel I'm working backwards and inefficiently. Perhaps it would be easier to throw it away and start with something new, and I've thought that so many times over the past year, then I re-listen to what is there and conclude that it is worth pursuing.

Creative problems always need rational solutions; lists of faults to correct and methods to correct them. I feel I'm overthinking some aspects. I merely need to assimilate a list of themes and ideas, a list of musical styles and moods, then let the full structure appear by itself from this magical fog.

Diabetes, Burn of God, Modern Game Launch Day

A full day. Many dreams last night, at one point I dreamed of meeting chef Jamie Oliver during a party on a boat. I said that he should write a book about low sugar and low fat food. I then found a small cut in my arm, on the soft skin of my inner elbow. It had a tiny, white, worm-like thread coming out of it. I pulled it and a small brown slug was (somewhat disgustingly) pulled from my vein, then a second slug, also with it's white worm-like tail.

I awoke from this and had the idea that diabetes and other nutrition related diseases was due to the lack of hunger, rather than an excess of sugar. People are in a situation where hunger is rarely, or necessarily, tolerated, when it probably has many health benefits. I'm not sure what this has to do with the dream or what the dream was about.

Most of the day was spent working on the start of some music for Burn of God. The intro from yesterday is so dramatic that its energy doesn't match the quiet and mystical other tracks, so I thought I'd try a rock/blues song, which feels like it should follow naturally, like a long meditative train. I image albums as a story and series of scenes, and we begin alone in bed at night, so I thought that a door in the protagonist's mind is the next step; something like the Acid Queen scenes from Tommy. I recorded a few notes about the structure in the middle of the night. I've been listening to King Crimson, Cream and other jazz and improvisational influences recently, so this will influence this song. I've also just about completed work on the cover.

It's also the official launch day for The Modern Game today. I've made some preliminary updates to my website to reflect this. The books have arrived exactly on time, so the full folio versions of the album can go on sale. I've moved on so quickly that I'll not have time or incentive to work much more on this, but I will sell these art future live events. The music is now online globally, so at least people can find it, although they would probably have to stumble across it, as my voice is a tiny one in the vast wind of the Spotify-YouTube cosmos.

I could easily spend weeks promoting this (and Future Snooker and Future Pool), but after a short time doing this, I'm filled with anguish and it seems pointless. It's good music, and there are people out there who would like it, but trying to find them will be so very difficult that my time is probably better and happier spent creating new, good work. I will make some more videos for Marius at some point.

Burn of God Work

A busy few days, having a really nice performance and time at Congleton Library on Monday evening, perhaps our most unified show and a good mix of lighting, speech, music, costume, and a receptive audience, which is half of any performance. Mike Drew is such an asset to the county.

Have spent today working on Burn of God, wrestling with it. I keep wanting to throw all of it away and start afresh, but there are some startling moments, so perhaps the solution is keep the good parts and discard everything else.

Today I've changed the music of the opening track to very approximately match the musical theme of a later track, and re-recorded the vocals which are choral and my most epic to date. This involved singing the same phrase 60 times for each line, and there are four lines, so that's 240 vocal recordings, which are layered in groups of 10 to make them suitably big. The music is in chords, so a lot of vocals to record and painstakingly cut and paste. Singing the same simple phrase over and over is very good vocal practice.

I also found time to start work on the cover art, which is a bit of a distraction while I think about the next steps for the music. I've changed so much since starting the album that every step of work on it has been frustrating. My plan is to complete it as soon as I can, hopefully by the end of next week, not even certain to share the results unless I'm completely happy with it. We will see what happens.

Predictability and Cause and Effect

Have spent most of the morning writing and thinking this. I'm not really sure if it makes any useful commentary but it roughly indicates my train of thought from the validity or testing of unprovable or unknowable laws of science to cause and effect in a backwards-time or timeless universe. So much more I could write, worthy of a book.

Predictability and Cause and Effect

The two most important words in science are arguably "prove it". What if, however, there were certain laws of nature that could not be proven? Would any example of this mean that scientific method is invalid and cannot be used to fully explain the universe?

There are certain aspects of quantum mechanics, for example, that cannot be proven or explained in local, specific terms, but can be proven in large-scale, probabilistic terms. It can be said that a radioactive particle will decay in a certain space of time, and that the probability of its decay can be predicted, but that the exact moment the decay occurs cannot. Scientists would like to know how that particle itself knows when to decay, and knows anything about the probability.

This unknowingness drives scientists mad, and has led to strange theories, such as multiple infinite parallel universe, where, in each universe, the radioactive particle emits at a different time, and it is only in our universe that we see it; thus there's no need to explain what happens and why, because everything happens.

This seems like a silly argument, as there is still one here and now; this universe here where we see the particle emitting at this specific point. We appear to be in one of the universes, not all of them (or indeed in any other). I don't believe that infinite anything could exist, or else infinite everything (and therefore nothing, in information terms) would be inevitable.

Perhaps, I thought, the whole the idea of multiple infinite parallel universe to explain unpredictable events like radioactive decay stems from a desire to know what is unknowable; the desire to invent almost anything to avoid the possibility of the unknown.

The radioactive particle decay is a famous unsolved problem in physics, so I thought I'd ride a train of thought with it and see what our particle might be thinking. Perhaps there is no problem at all. Perhaps that problem is that people, and scientific method as a philosophy, have a need to things to be predictable and certain, and perhaps the universe isn't necessarily predictable and certain in all circumstances.

Unknowability

If a law of the universe was unknowable, would we know it was unknowable? Firstly, there are elements of even very predictable behaviour that we accept are unpredictable. We can know all of the rules that govern the climate, wind and water flows, and measure these things very accurately yet still can't exactly predict the weather. The variables for such a prediction are too complex. Even a tiny motion somewhere, a falling stone from space, which couldn't be feasibly detected, could upset the balance.

With this analogy, perhaps our radioactive particle is like a soap bubble, waiting to pop. We can blow a bubble, watch it float and predict that it will pop in a few seconds. The bursting will occur due to a weakness in the film, a drying out. A dot of dust in the air might touch it, a glance of a sun-ray, a moth's sneeze. These things are real noise in the universe, and any one could burst our bubble, but we couldn't monitor or detect all of these forces, and so we can't predict when a soap bubble will burst, even if we knew every law of physics that might determine the cause of a burst. In this circumstance, our little particle is just this, and decays due to an unseen element (this is a so-named hidden-variable theory; experiments indicate these unseen elements do not exist; our dream-like mental bubble is burst).

Perhaps though, you might say, the stone from space, and every breath of every creature, could possibly be detected. There's a big difference between possible and impossible. If you had a large enough computer, a near-infinite computer, these measurements and detections are theoretically possible, and then the weather, or the time a soap-bubble would burst, would be detectable, although this is a little suspect. Perhaps our computer and measuring devices would need to be as large as the universe itself. The key factor is information quantity. A machine to measure and process half of the information in the universe would need to be larger than the other half, because of the extra work involved. So perhaps, what appears to be merely unfeasible, is impossible.

This might not affect our particle though. Our particle might genuinely have no knowable rule that causes it to decay. There are certainly mathematical equations that are, and can be shown to be, impossible to solve. Perhaps our particle lives in a zone where such equations exist?

There is a simple paradox: if we knew the future exactly, we could change it. This infinite conundrum must limit either our ability to change things or our ability to know things. Perhaps this simple idea is why the emission of a radioactive particle is necessarily unknowable.

This appears reflect the reality of quantum mechanics; that we can predict the probabilities accurately, but that the exact emission time of a radioactive particle is unknowable. This rule works on a practical level, but it is frustrating to us. On an individual particle level, how does it know when to decay? We don't and can't know, but it must know! Our ego can't accept that a particle can outwit us. There must be some mechanism that determines when one single radioactive particle decays, and when. It must have a clock or memory of a sort, at least, surely?

Perhaps the problem is our perception of time? Perhaps science has a problem with cause and effect?

Cause and Effect

We tend to think of cause and effect in relatively short and specific terms. A scientist pushes a snooker ball on a table, and can measure its angle, speed and other forces to learn something. By repeating this, a general rule can be discerned. In some ways, most of science is the art of observing one thing that comes after another, and using the data from the first thing to learn something about what causes the other. These events tend to be on simple and short-time terms, and we hope that these rules will also apply to other scales.

In the raw and real universe there are many types of cause and effect. I watched a film last night. What was the cause for that effect? Perhaps I wanted to relax, so the cause was a busy day. One could say that one big cause was the Lumiere brothers inventing cinema a century ago. Certainly, if you went back in time and didn't invent motion pictures then this effect wouldn't have occurred. Perhaps everything that happens could be considered an effect of a prior cause. Scientists don't want to (or can't) get involved with the complexities of everything possibly causing something else, even if, in a way, it is sort of obviously true that every event is influenced by the events that came before, even totally unrelated ones.

Perhaps this issue is getting confused. The aim of scientific experiments, like the snooker ball one, is to isolate a specific and controllable part of the universe, so that we can learn something specific that can be generally applied. Perhaps though, there are large-scale effects that have causes that do have general rules, but are too large scale and messy to ever experiment with. We can't really delete the invention of the film camera, and try to invent it again to see what might happen in cinema a century later, even if there might be a new law of science to be found there.

Science might be based on these isolated and simplistic cause and effect tests, but what if an effect has no obvious cause? There might be an exact and explicit cause for radioactive decay, but it's merely something we haven't seen. Perhaps the particle knows something about an unseen part of the universe which we do not.

Feelings of Effect

Free will gets in the way of objectivity, and perhaps the root of the idea of cause an effect is something that happens that we ourselves do. We feel that we have an influence on the world, and that we are the ones that cause things to happen. Perhaps all things feel this; we can't say that its a uniquely human attribute (may cat would agree that she knows what she wants). Perhaps even atoms feel that they are changing things, causing things. At the same time, we have certain moments or actions where we feel we are changing things and causing things to happen, and other times when we do not. Perhaps our friend the snooker ball feels that it is doing nothing when rolling along, but when it hits another ball, it feels it is causing something.

Perception of Time

Cause and effect are ultimately elements of time. If we were to view our snooker ball colliding with another in a timeless way, we might see a streak of ball (its path of motion) bend as it touches the tip of another streak (the deflection as it hits another ball). With no time here we might see the interesting bend; it's a bit more interesting than a plain straight line, but we can't see what caused what.

Let's look at our radioactive particle timelessly. We see a speck of radiation shooting out of our atomic nucleus like a line or shoot of newborn grass. Exactly when it happened and why is suddenly unimportant. The speck, as a piece of information, is what is interesting[*].

What if we ran time backwards with both events?

The snooker ball behaves pretty much in the same, predictable way, we can even calculate the energies involved and predict what might happen (is it an anti-prediction, now that we are predicting the past?!)

Our radioactive particle however, once unknowable and enigmatic, is absolutely knowable. We can calculate exactly when and where it will emit from its nucleus. We can see a particle of radiation moving towards a nucleus, and then, bam, hits it and is absorbed. Prediction here isn't a problem.

Perhaps all of the problems of prediction can be solved by either running time forwards or backwards as needed. If elements of the universe routinely ran backwards in time, would we detect these? Antimatter behaves like matter running backwards in time.

Perhaps future and past, or cause and effect, could be seen in dialogue terms, rather than one before, or superior to, the other.

[*] - The word interesting is perhaps the key word here. Interaction creates information, and perhaps prediction is the quest for new, generated knowledge, generated information. This knowledge from prediction could never be 100% accurate or complete. This is worthy of future examination.

Caligari and Unpredictability

A sleepless night, made lots of notes about predictability and science, how what must be unpredictable, such as some elements of quantum mechanics, would obviously drive scientists mad; scientists who are scientists exactly because they demand answers and reasons, even when some mathematical equations can be proven to be unprovable. A scientists could perhaps never accept that there is no answer, even if that is true, and many crazy theories, such as infinite parallel universes, stem from this grasp for an explanation to what might be, I think, necessarily unexplainable. I must type this up.

In art we've rehearsed of Fall in Green performance today, and I've made a short video for my Frankenstein piece.

Now I'm thinking about structure and melody, feeling, meaning, abstraction, for the 'god' album. For me, music can can have a clear meaning because emotions convey their unique information; art is about authoring using this information. My 'god' music is rather unstructured and unmelodic because of the way it was written, as a series of improvised vignettes that aimed to capture the exact feeling when playing. This is a new concept that I wanted to work on, but it's difficult to do that on a grand, symphonic, or album-level scale because these improvisations lack structure, and often lack melody too.

I'm inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a film which is tied to tomorrow's performance in Congleton, and to my Frankenstein video. This key work of Expressionist Cinema reminded me that sometimes an archetype is necessarily different and can even stand alone in a genre.

Back to Art

A first quiet day for art in weeks. Things to do are to prepare some music for the Fall in Green performance on Monday, so I've composed and played some piano music with a great fanfarish quality, and created some background sounds. I feel I'm slightly doing this to distract myself from working on the god album, but that will come, that work is fermenting. This piano music begins with great chords at first, which is good practice. For any of these live and relatively free pieces, I want to push some technique so that I can practice as I play.

Tonight I've played another, very loose, piano tune for the next ArtSwarm, with a Frankenstein theme. Perhaps, in piano terms, I need to focus up my accuracy and timing. Timing, timing, yes, but this Frankenstein piece is a coarse stab at the keys, an aim at something grand and Gothic. It fades into gentleness in the middle too. Everything needs drama and contrast, and unity.

In the sequencer I overlaid a few clank sounds, made by irregular loops of recordings of me hitting a metal can. I thought it needed something from an old film, so used a Bela Lugosi speech from an Ed Wood film. Suddenly, the feeling of the piece seemed to reflect my frustration at not achieving what I want, the eternal struggle of failing to achieve a potential. There are elements of night battles and frustration, the clanking monsters, then a peace or rest, that leads into the defiant speech.

The mood might be influenced by a documentary about the actress Hedy Lamarr which I saw yesterday, an intelligent woman who didn't, it appeared, want to be an actress and seemed somewhat unable to fulfil her dreams of being a scientist, despite many opportunities. She appeared like a melody trapped in the groove of a record.

I must push on with the god music or the images, or some, or all of it! I want to get it out of the way by the end of October. The problems all come from a lack of clear direction. Problems must be coldly identified, quantified, qualified and worked out. The solution is always hammering away at the problem. Evasion will not help.

Rainbow Arts and Game Updates

A good evening at the Rainbow Arts Evening last night, nice to see a relatively large crowd of 20 or 30 people. The evening was divided into three sections. Alice Smith opened the performances, followed by poetry by Carol Finch, Ian Parr and Steve, actor and magician, also known as Jax Dramagic. In part two, we saw some close-up magic from Jax, a poetry reading from a newcomer, Nicholas Ferenczy, and finally Alice Smith with an engaging personal poetic monologue and dance. Deborah Edgeley read two poems and a short story in the third part, all linked to war-time experiences by her mother in Germany. I ended the night with the only music of the night, a 15-minute performance of The Spiral Staircase as planned. This performance had more freedom than the previous three performances of my electronic music, as I now had some live control over the pre-recorded sections, so I could improvise live sections of the music and trigger those as needed. I included a few lights which dramatically improved the overall look.

Have spent today making changes to Future Snooker and Future Pool. I've added the aiming guide to Future Pool, which is more useful int the snooker game, yet I suspect people would want the same thing in both and it's not difficult to add. I've also fixed a couple of minor bugs in the menu system; pressing Esc from the Main menu will not quite the program now (it was a bit too easy to exit completely by accident), and an old bug in Future Snooker where pressing Esc during the tutorial windows would instantly escape to the Main Menu.

I've also tweaked the aiming angle control, accelerating this rather than moving it big steps, which gives a much finer and accurate control. The game needs, at least, this professional option, allowing the best precision possible during aiming. These games could truly be tournament sports.

More game testing, then to move on to music.

The Spiral Staircase

A sleepless night of stomach pain. Awoke late to rehearse a 15-minute segment of The Spiral Staircase which I've decided to perform at the Rainbow Arts Evening tonight. This is the 4th time I've played a segment of The Spiral Staircase live. The first was a full 45-minute performance with three synthesizers, backing track, full 45-minute video projection film by Sue Mascarenhas, smoke and two spinning lasers. This took place at The Electric Picture House in Congleton.

I, like everyone, there was freezing cold in a room that was below freezing, but the performance went well for something so big and complex. Tonight's will be a lot simpler, but still include two synths and lights, and in many way more expression as the backing parts will be triggered when needed, rather than being a fixed line to follow.

Perhaps one day I could stage this as a full event itself, adding another 45-minute set for a second half. I've often thought of composing a sequel, and actually ended the music of the album with a sequel in mind. I'm unhappy with my past work and want to move on. The 'god' album is causing me anxiety. I've changed too much artistically since starting it, and now feel that I have a mess of different ideas, words, and music that need to be pulled into something. It would be easiest to throw it away, it's not like anyone cares, except curators of the distant future, but I don't want to become like Sibelius and hide or destroy things that might be perfectly fine. Nothing is perfect. The solution is normally to work fast. I can't believe the year is nearly over. I feel I've done nothing in 2019.

More Games, and Korg Modifications

More Future Snooker and Future Pool work today. The stores pages have gone live, lots of admin updating links. Newsletter sent. More testing of the game and changes to the manual. Nice to meet up with Dr. Nicholas Mee to talk about books, software etc.

Also added a power port to my Korg Monotron, allowing it to be used in performances for a change. Normally it's battery only powered, which is ridiculous for a professional instrument.

Every professional instrument needs mains power and an AUX out. I'm surprised that there aren't many good cheap synthesizers when they should be easy to build. It seems that the designers haven't a clue what musicians need. The key element is a useful, that is responsive, control system. Ideally I'd want a big octave range with sensitive control over the output; an instrument is about emotional expression so as much movement as possible needs to be detected by the machine. It also needs the basic elements like shielding and reliability, ease of use, mains power, and an AUX out. It's odd that most toy synths don't have an AUX out, although many have a headphone socket. The Casio VL-1 was one of the few with an AUX, and it became a hit. Casio haven't made any popular or remotely professional level instrument since despite being quite capable of doing so. I'd love to design a synth.

I've been offered a 15 minute music performance slot tomorrow at the Queen's Park café event. I've decided to perform a substantial section from The Spiral Staircase using several synths and will develop this tomorrow.

More Game Work

Another busy day today, building the first Future Snooker and Future Pool games for Steam, and testing. All has worked well and have added lots more features to Future Pool including the Fast A.I. play option that was present in Future Snooker. I've also added French and German text to the stores, largely using Google Translate, darting the text to and from each language back and forth to check it. A check on the French Wikipedia revealed that 8 ball pool is called Blackball in France, and 8-Ball with a hyphen in Germany.

The most annoying aspect of programming nowadays, something that never happened 10 years ago when I used to develop games, is the eternal problem of my games being blocked by anti-virus software. Each new build is auto-deleted and locked away by my anti-virus software and I need to verify it and check it every time, which involves an hour wait. Apart from that, everything seems to have worked to plan and both games are very good to play.

I did think that perhaps my store graphics don't really do justice to the games. Is it apparent that these games are snooker or pool games at all, apart from the text? I recall the old Arkanoid box artwork and think that I should have done something like that instead. It's a bit late to change things now, as most of the work of the past week has been making these graphics, the 20-30 different images that are variations of them.

Testing underway. I'm keen to move on as, however proud I am of these games, they are ignored by the world like most of my creations and might be a waste of my time. The process also makes me sick and anxious. My stomach is locked like a vice, as though I've eaten concrete, and I've not felt hungry for days. I feel weak, have palpitations and prickly skin, dizzy spells, can barely sleep, and my skin is turning white and vampirish. This is the sickness of the programmer. I can only cope with a few days of this at once.

It is important that I do my best however, and make games of good quality, so on I must push at optimal speed.

Video Trailers

Working on the video trailers today for Future Snooker and Future Pool, and German translation, and the manuals. Here's an image from one of the video trailers:

If these games sell enough copies, only 20 or 30 should do, then it will be a signal to update my other games like Gunstorm 2, the first Flatspace game, or Taskforce.

Ah, Taskforce. I put 18 months work into that game and it sold less than 10 copies. It wasn't a bad game, although it could benefit from a few tweaks to the gameplay, which was slow and difficult for non-geniuses. What annoyed me most was the criticism of the graphics, which weren't that bad, but more importantly, irrelevant for a turn based strategy game. Do those people play chess and complain about the craftsmanship of the pieces? The relative failure of Taskforce compared to Flatspace confirmed with me that making money from games was a hopeless cause, perhaps because I made games more like I make art, for the joy of creation and puzzle solving, for personal expressive reasons, rather than thinking of what people might want from a commercial point of view. It's ironic that I would probably make far better games now that I'm an artist, compared to back then when I cared only about programming.

Pool and Anxiety

A frenetic day today. I decided that Future Pool could benefit from a lot of the gameplay updates that went into Future Snooker and have added a few new features.

First was to change the gameplay so that the bat starts in the place where the cue-ball ended up, as in Future Snooker. Players still take shots in turns, there is no break building, but this feature adds a lot more strategy to the game, as it's possible to limit your opponent's options. As in Future Snooker, not 'potting' any ball will make the bat free (able to move). Also, as in Future Snooker, all of these changes are optional, so you can play with movement all of the time, just as in the classic game.

One new option is a random bat option, so that each turn, the bat begins at a random location and can't be moved, adding a chance element to the game for the first time.

I've also added simple tutorials when playing. These are more useful in Future Snooker which has more complex rules, but do help explain why the bat can't or can move when needed. I've also removed some of the unused options, like visiting the game website, from both games, and updated the translations. Future Pool works in English, French and German. Future Snooker in English and French.

The game is much better now, on par with Future Snooker. These two games are among my best now. I've also prepared the Steam stores for each game and started work on the promotional videos. Future Snooker will be released first in mid-November.

I've also created the events and basic promotional work for the next Fall in Green performance at Congleton Library.

I've been working solidly with barely a break today for 10 hours, which is energising but at the limit of my regular sanity. A new Rode M2 mic arrived and I hurriedly defaced it with a scratch mark, eager to differentiate it from Deb's identical model. I hate this, the imperfection fills me with anguish. Why did I rush to mark it in this way?! I could have used any number of less permanent ways to mark it! I want to throw this £70 thing of beauty away and buy another with no scratch.

Also, a new gig bag for the Behringer Amp has arrived and it's even smaller than the already too small other one! Online size measurements never seem to be accurate. I feel I'm throwing money away on useless imperfect items. I now have two bags that don't fit, and must ultimately order a third, always in hope that it will be the right size.

From Music to Games

We had a good 2-hour music performance yesterday night at Tom's Tap. I had time to watch and comment on the new ArtSwarm: Perfume premiere while we waited to go on stage. A few friends came to support us, notably the poet Carol Finch who is such a supportive friend to us and the local poets. Carol is working on her new poetry collection at the moment.

Music aside, it is back to coding for me today and working on the graphical assets for Future Snooker and Future Pool. I've decided to release both to Steam. Steam has grown to be a saturated platform, and most games seem to sell nothing, or at least not recoup even the submission fee, but as I've said, these games would be unplayable any other way. Also, these two, along with the Gunstorm series, represent the paragon of my 20 years of game development. Steam is soon to trial a feature that allows two players to play games like this over the internet. This feature is perfect for these games (and Radioactive), and it is this new feature (which will enter beta on October 21st) that has persuaded me to finally list these games.

The coding is largely complete, but the graphical and promotional challenges are large. I might launch both games at once, or one every few months. Future Snooker is the better game so I will probably launch that first. Here are the logos:

Programming and Performance

Updates to the games today, adding controller support, added a the 'cancel shot' feature that was in Future Snooker to Future Pool. I'm wondering if I should hold if launching Future Snooker until next year's snooker championships. Future Snooker is a better game than Future Pool, the latter is very simple in its rules and less strategic, but then isn't pool itself?

Now, preparing for tonight's Fall in Green performance. I have written a new, very dark, poem on the theme of War is Over called Pastoral. We plan to produce a new Fall in Green E.P. of those war poems next; Deb wrote quite a few poems for Mike Drew's war commemoration events which we performed at Knutsford and Congleton Libraries.

Have also ordered a new equipment bag to pack the amp in. These things can be expensive but I like equipment to be stored, dust free, in bags that can transport them to performances. How to organise equipment, cables etc. the best way is always something I think about. I think it makes the most sense to keep the appropriate cables with each piece of kit, all tied with garden cable ties (which tend to be longer than normal cable ties). When unpacked and plugged in, I try to wrap the cable ties around the cables anyway, to keep them attached to their parent cable.

Music Filing and Future Snooker

A mid-work day, as most of tomorrow's performance is worked out. Everything feels positive and I'm ready to work on lots of new music, new performances, and books over the coming months. As I wrote to Tor this morning, music seems to be going back to the state of Beethoven's day, where artists make little from selling it, instead making money by performing. Beethoven was too deaf to perform; I contest that this was a secret of his success, forced him to compose more and more impressive works. Ludwig made money from commissions and pupils, as well as selling sheet music, typically in one-off deals. He was world famous but still generally impoverished for most of his life.

Beethoven's musical legacy is in his compositions, even if these didn't do him many favours of wealth or comfort in his lifetime. Liszt, Paganini, Mendelssohn, and many other musicians of the 19th century made fortunes by performing, as contemporary musicians do, but their recorded (composed) legacy didn't reach Beethoven's height. Perhaps the record era of the last 20th century was a blip. Perhaps recorded music will never again earn livings for music-stars, and we must again perform, have pupils and accept commissions for special occasions, like any artist.

I however love recorded music, and see the album as a valuable artwork in itself, like a film, an opportunity for unique drama. How wasted most albums are, even mine, on vague and ethereal music of shallow silliness. I feel again like I'm at a point o rebirth, a dawn of new work and want to sweep everything that came before aside to start on serious work.

I spent the morning on music paperwork; registering my Marius Fate album with various music authorities. There is so much paperwork in music, and so far I've been so unrewarded for it! I've been registered my music officially with PPL since 2007 and have, to date, received only 2p in royalties for the 200+ tracks thus filed, but, if I ever have a hit, this work will be necessary.

In the afternoon I started work on Future Pool and Future Snooker modifications, making improvements to these games in preparation for a possible future Steam release. This involves new art and a new logo for the games, changes to select the ideal screen mode, updating the game to the latest version of my Hector game engine, adding X-Box controller support, a new manual, new marketing artwork, a new promotional video for each game.

I despise computer programming, the act makes me ill, but the alternative is to have my games hidden and unplayed. Without my changes they are impossible to ever be played, so I feel that I have to do something with them. Most of my 30 or so games have sold less than 10 copies, so even if the games do function, the effort is close to being for nothing, but I feel a strange compulsion to keep working on them, they are almost like children. Every few years I seem to spend a few weeks updating my ancient back-catalogue, hating the process more and more with each visit, but like an obsessive Captain Ahab, a Fitzcarraldo, I must battle through the trees every so often to strive for an ethereal goal.

Perhaps I'm a little negative and dramatic here. Future Snooker is one of my late period games, and a new feature coming to Steam will allow people to play against each other online, so this is a good time for both of these games.

Onward we push.

Tom's Tap Rehearsal and Environmental Protests

Full rehearsal for the Tom's Tap performance today. This will involve piano, synth and sound player so for me, apart from remembering all of the music, it's a matter of working out what to activate when to smoothly flow form one sound and track to the next. A few solo piano piece will be there including only my second ever live performance of Cycles I. It amazes me that I recorded that in 2017 yet my piano playing is a lot better than back then, a whole two years ago. In anything, improvements are small and slow, growing bit by bit over time. The pressure of small consistent changes far outweighs any attempt to push hard.

This reminds me that my brother is in the newspapers for protesting in London as part of Extinction Rebellion. To me this seems to be a panic-driven, apocalyptic doom cult, of the sort that has appeared every so often since at least the mid 19th century. These protests might or might not influence climate policy (I expect they'll have some small effect, although the similar C.N.D. protests achieved nothing), but I think such Biblical organisations are primarily there to calm the nerves of the organisation members and will cause unnecessary distress and anxiety to vulnerable onlookers, or will annoy those who have no opinion with negative responses and consequences. All of this can easily harm the important environmental cause more than it helps.

Of course, I care about the environment. Many animals and valuable environments like rainforests are being hunted and destroyed without care or punishment, which is abysmal behaviour, and governments need to be held to account, and leaders need to remain pressured to do the best thing. I'm sure that moderate reason will be more effective at convincing governments than radical action, but perhaps more-so making personal choices ourselves to treat the world in the best way, and understanding the consequences of each of our own actions. It is clear that governments, always and necessarily slow, are reacting to change. 200 years ago, the world was considered an Eden that was ours to exploit. National Parks and reserves began 100 years ago. The environmental movement is only about 50 years old, yet has achieved a lot of good things in this mere blink of time.

Life is a self-sustaining, self-protective system that has existed for 4.5 billion years. Bad actions are not rewarded, and good actions are. Animals are no better for the environment than people; a planet of rats, or algae, would exploit their domain in the same way as humans. Capitalism, at its ideal, exactly reflects human behaviour, substituting wealth for emotional debt, so is the best economic system. I'm certain that life will still exist here in 4.5 billion years time (assuming no solar-systemic-level disasters occur), irrespective of Bible-inspired predictions of doom. Apocalypsism is one of the worst aspects of Christianity; has it helped any aspect of the last 2000 years?

A final quick point on extinction itself. I consider life to be a data storage and organisation system. All life takes chaos from the universe and orders it; birds build nests, bees build hives, bacteria builds mats. Computers do this too and our machines have replaced many animal functions, from obvious things like motorcycles replacing horses, to the internet replacing a community of knowledge. Humans have, therefore, created a lot of new 'species' recently. Perhaps the environment moving to one more suitable for machines is a natural symbiotic response, rather than anything unnatural or to be feared.

Machines will never surpass biology, or dominate humanity as in so many anti-machine sci-fi stories, because biology is so very complex. I doubt a robot could even simulate a single cell; one cell, complete with its ability to replicate and evolve. Expecting a robot to simulate the thousands of cells in a body is far fetched and probably impossible, or at least, the most efficient way to do this is to use real cells; bodies, after all operate on an atomic and molecular level.

All of this reminds me that I must make some sort of video to my song Two Kinds of Animals, which explores some of these issues. It is a warning about the need to take care of animals because we are, after all, animals too. If we had masters, how would we want them to react?

ArtSwarm Perfume and Amps

A steady day of regular jobs. First, ArtSwarm filming, editing and uploading. I had a guest today, Mick Masser. He's a singer, and I mentioned in my introduction that he also plays many instruments too. He said, actually, no, he avoids them. I felt the cringe of the chat show host. The hard part in this interview was keeping it short.

Then some initial promotion work on our Friday gig.

We've started work on the set list. I create a folder for every major event or trip or performance, and type up a diary of what was needed, any preparations and how it went. The folder contains images of the event, plus any publicity and materials needed for the show (like sound files). This is all extra paperwork but is an invaluable tool for learning and progression. I analyse each event, learning how to improve it, and monitor other basics like who was in the audience (if any) any sales or costs, timings for setting up and getting there, lots of things like that. Without this, it might be impossible to learn and improve at all, and it's a really useful thing to have if, after several months or years, a similar event is required.

A new 150W amp arrived today, a Behringer B207MP3, so we'll have two similar amps for this small venue, using one with reduced bass for microphones only, one for instruments. I have an 800W system and a mixer, for larger venues. All of this equipment has been built up over years. The 150W amp is good (and compact) but is mono, so ideally two are needed for a stereo electronic instrument. For electronic instruments, I'd prefer each to have its own personal amplifier, rather than feed lots of instruments through a mixer, so each has a sound and location, like an instrument in an orchestra. Perhaps orchestral instruments are all "monophonic" anyway, so having one monophonic amp per instrument might be just fine, but of course synths now usually feature some design over the stereo effect, and I'd like to use that if it were available; stereo makes such a huge difference to immersion.

Of course, big venues need a louder sound, but this set-up is loud enough for most occasions, louder than the loudest cello or piano, and will replace my ageing and beloved 40W Tandy hi-fi amplifier which I've used since the 90s for my synths, and has even been used in performances, including many of the Anatomy of Emotions shows, but is just too quiet for all but the most intimate of venues. I aim to use the piano without any amplification, just its built-in speakers, but I have a spare channel in our set-up if needed.

ArtsFest

Busy day yesterday but the show at the All Saints' ArtsFest went well. I wasn't happy with the audio balancing, it's always best to have a second person, a specific audio engineer for this. The backing music was far too quiet for the vocals, but little could be done about it at the time. Small and free events like this are idea for experimenting with new performances. The performance went well otherwise, the vocals and music were within acceptable parameters. Here is Marius in action.

The Fall in Green set at 2pm went well too, and we relaxed afterwards with a few fellow performers.

Later, we went to a local venue in our performance outfits, a cool pub called Tom's Tap, which a few friends have performed at. We'll be performing there on October 11th for a couple of hours, our longest performance in a long time. We have plenty of material but preparing and rehearsing for such a large show in just 6 days will be a lot of work.

Have ordered a new performance amplifier today and spent most of today filing the events of the weekend. I've also been working for hours on a new video for All The Broken Flowers, but it takes 45 minutes to preview due to the quantity of fades and effects in the film. As a result, it is still not quite finished. When it is, it will premiere on my music channel on October the 17th.

Macc and Marius

Collected the unsold work from Art Fair Cheshire today. I had two sales in a fair that was well attended and which many artists seemed to sell something, all good.

Have spent most of the day on music admin; updating Spotify details, listing things for Marius Fate, and preparing for tomorrow's show. I will sing and play the piano, with no more accompaniment, for Life Beyond Mars. I had thought of singing and playing over a backing track, but being tied to the rigid timing of the backing makes everything more difficult, and less expressive too. It also makes for a mixed show.

I'll perform Life Beyond Mars, Masculinity Two, Two Kinds of Animals, Love in a Hopeless World, Notes From Space and end with the climax that is Looking For a Lover. All songs will have a mix of vocals and keyboard work, including all of the vocoder parts for Two Kinds of Animals.

Ten poems are lined up for the Fall in Green performance at 2pm, which is a less taxing job for me. The hard part of the day, as always, is the logistics; the driving, lugging, costumes, setting up and taking down. The performance part is really a minuscule component of all of this.

ArtsFest Preparations

A full day yesterday rehearsing my performances for Saturday.

Fall in Green will perform at 2pm and we'll be including lots of new work from Deborah's new Rattenfanger collection. Most of the music side is quite straightforward but I've composed two new pieces of music; a main theme to open with and a pretty tune for Rest in Peace, Dear Chlorophyll, a poem about autumn leaves.

My big performance is earlier in the day. In first Marius Fate performance I'll sing 6 songs and at least play some instrument in each of them. I'll play the piano parts of Life Beyond Mars while singing; the first time I've done that, and most of the other songs will have some form of synth solo. More rehearsals today.

This will be the fourth time I've performed at All Saints' ArtsFest, a small festival in the local church. My first contribution there marked my first performances of any sort, when I made a gong from brass and played part of The Love Symphony, in single notes on their ancient piano. So much has changed since.

The Marius album went live on Amazon today too. Might not have time to update my website with this news for a few days.

ArtSwarm Perfume Videos

A full day here, after a planned 3-day trip was cancelled due to bad weather. I finalised Take This Rose, and created a video for it. I'm very pleased with the tune, and for the first time, decided it was worthy of some sort of full release rather than a mere ArtSwarm video, so have made a shorter edit of the music for the show instead.

The video is satisfactory for a few hours work. I wanted a Gothic-type look, and simply mimed and played along for a bit, adding a bit of a variety in the editing. This tune is my first to feature a live guitar solo; not very well played, I'm a sheer novice at the instrument, but we get better by doing, not by practicing in hidden rooms. I also made a second video and simple poem for ArtSwarm.

I've been making these videos and music pieces for some time now, two years for ArtSwarm, and a similar length for the radio show, ArtsLab, and this has certainly been excellent training for making new music and videos. Active monitoring, self-critique and effort is needed to improve, but ArtSwarm, being a social vehicle, forces regular work, regular training. The two years is coming to an end now, there are just three shows left. I'm looking forward to ending it, freeing up the time to make new 'proper' work, and will keep working on the live events; that is my next training focus. Of course, anyone else can join in too.

I heard today that I've sold a painting, Premonition of War, at the Art Fair Cheshire, which was nice news. I always loved that painting and am pleased that someone else does too, and it's also a relief that I've helped the hospice and the fair. One other thing I did today was add my illustrations for The Burning Circus to my website, as well as work out my monthly goals. I'm unsure whether to work on some computer game conversions for Steam or not. The last two small games haven't yet made money (but might) and the work is soul destroying too, but I like the feeling of completeness of having games that are at least available for the latest PCs.

Tomorrow, I'll work on the performance plans for Saturday; two shows at the ArtsFest in All Saints' Church. One for Marius Fate and one for Fall in Green.