Lucifers

A funeral today so not much time for music, but tweaked Janus Never Blinks and extended Asylum Flowers. So pleased with these tracks now. The hard one is last, Struck Lucifers. A poem about the end of the World War 2, the clean up, British soldiers in Egypt and many other things. Difficult musically, as the imagery in this one here doesn't suggest the sort of music I can easily play. In all of these, as with Burn of God, I'm reminded that the imagery is crucial; that images are the root of music (especially instrumental music) and literature. Images (location!) form the item to describe in these media.

Janus and Mandalino

A difficult night, more disturbing dreams; one involving a sad Kate Bush who was instantly made to laugh by being given some Chambord, but this seemed to be a short term, and incorrect, fix. She then decided to make a curry with her bass-player partner, I thought the food an inappropriate choice. Then an Irish actor (from a Harold Pinter play I've seen) asked me about my life and was concerned about my dependency on my family. A white dove flew by, into the open window of wooden shed, something like a windmill, where a butcher was catching and chopping the wings off doves, hanging the wings on a line, but skinning the birds. He, upset by the act, repeats to himself that it's only a job. At another point I was inside a windmill which was quaking and shaking due to frightening external forces. Perhaps this memory is related to the climax of the old Frankenstein film, which I watched a few months ago.

I rose with a headache which remained all day and appeared to be psychological in nature, yet unfathomable. I ignored it and achieved my daily goals. Worked on Janus Never Blinks and Mandalino, two of the best tracks so far. The production method seems to involve starting with the plain vocals, sequencing those with optional background sound effects, then playing the music live to that as a dub track, then augmenting that (and generally adding parts).

I'm so used to composing and sequencing everything that this method of playing live seems to be too easy, too simplistic and avoiding melody and compositional complexity, structure, refinement, and so quality. This is good training for playing, however. These pieces have been and will be played live, so the sound can't be too different from a live performance. Recorded and Live are very different experiences; ideally both will be as good as each other and both spectacular, but there are always choices to make. The simpler I make the recording, the easier and more accurate a live performance can be, but the recording will be losing something, not as good as possible. Similarly, if the recording is superb and layered and complex then reproducing that in a live setting is all the more difficult.

Asylum Flowers and ArtSwarm

A slow day, I've found it hard to get motivated to work on music, so I distracted myself constructively by creating a new Facebook Group to share ArtSwarm videos and images with the wider world, and adding the ArtSwarm Live (Cirque du ArtSwarm) line-ups to the ArtSwarm Blog. These are important because performance art is the most ephemeral art of all, even more than digital music! So, recording these events is a very important part of the process. This job took until 2pm or so and is now complete.

Then I proceeded to record the piano parts for Asylum Flowers. I made 7 takes, which is unusually high, but this four-verse poem is complex in mood. The fast, 6-time melody does match the pace and feeling the city, and the final 'broken' part is easy too, but the intermediate sections have an indeterminate mood, and so are more difficult musically. I've had fun with the production, adding a distant call, moans, and echoes that gradually fade in to evoke drifting into memory.

These complex effects are easy in Prometheus. From the outset I wanted to make sure that any parameter for any instrument, track, or global effect, can be set in the sequence at any point, faded towards any value (most useful to gently slow down the tempo), or modulated with a waveform modulator; I can attach or detach a modulator waveform to any parameter as part of the sequence. My waveforms are plain wav files, so easy to create.

I had hoped to do more but am sleeping strangely and feeling odd. Last night I had a nightmare about being chased through dark streets by a black hooded figure with odd, hook-like, angular hands, the shape of the stumpy metal arms of the T1000 in Terminator 2, yet black. The date of 'The 30th day of Christmas' was specifically present, and the image of a calendar which, actually, showed about yesterday, a Tuesday in the last week of January. The actual 30th day of Christmas would be 23rd of January if the 5th of January is Twelfth Night, although part of me expected it would be at the start of February.

I've also been aware that there are degrees of rest during a break, and that breaks of doing nothing; no internet (I don't have and will resist ever having a smart phone, blessed be this fact for my happiness and productivity!), no television, no radio... these are the most valuable.

Fall in Green Vocal Recording

Most of the vocal recordings were made today for War is Over and The Apocalypse of Clowns. I had the idea of feeding the piano through the left channel of the sound card, the mic through the right, so that both could be monitored by Deb during recording, and listening to the piano myself through a second set of headphones, so we could perform live together without each other's recordings being contaminated by the other. A separate guide track could be played to the vocalist too, if needed.

This was mostly successful, but the complexity of the system made a good performance difficult for me, as I had to dash from one place to another and immediately start playing. Also, the key depression sound from the piano was audible (just). It did help guide the pacing of the speech to music a little though, there was better live interaction. Overall however, it wasn't much more efficient than starting with a separate vocal recording, which I could chop up as needed before adding music at my own pace.

So far, Asylum Flowers is the most challenging because I've developed a complex 6-time pre-recorded section for the fast parts of the poem, but the slower parts need the live piano parts. It's not too difficult, a matter of timing. A few of the other tracks, Lost at the Fair, Mister and Mrs Knife Thrower, for example, have only been performed live once, over a year ago, and are bound to be different (and hopefully better) on the album. I ache to push the limits more and do more, further than with Testing the Delicates.

We had thought that these releases will be EPs but it seems that they will be full albums instead, as we will probably easily use more than the 6-track maximum, even if under 30 minutes (most of these are under 2 minutes). The only difference this makes is pricing; EPs generally cost £5.99 now and albums £7.99.

More work on these tomorrow and for the rest of the month.

More War and Clowns

More work on War is Over and the Apocalypse of Clowns albums today, including recording the piano music for Skin. Now four tracks are complete for War is Over: The main (short) piano intro, the two Valhalla pieces and a third piano track called Desolation, which is a left over track from the old Erik Satie project but fits this perfectly. On the clowns side of things, Fairytale and Grim by Day are complete. Grim was recorded a few months ago, along with the Fairytale vocals, I added the music to that yesterday and tweaked it today.

That's all I can do for now until we find time for the vocal recordings. This means I have a free week in which to start new art. I must think what; I might revisit my idea of a book of short stories. I've written 20 or so and many are unpublished.

Envy and To Valhalla We Must Go

A strange day. I felt irrationally upset at the implied rejection of a friend who was always somewhat bullying and jealous towards me. I've never really felt envy. I believe that anyone can do anything if they really want to, it's just a matter of trying and repeated practice. There are some limits to what we can master (at 169cm, I'm too short to become a tennis champion) but there are very few exceptions. Maybe the world isn't as fair as I optimistically believe, but if so, then everything is more random or out of our control, and again there is no point in being envious. Envy is so irrational; if we like and appreciate someone, they can be an inspiration, if not, then why worry?

Romantic jealousy is slightly different I think, perhaps more biological and inherent, but then, I've hardly felt that either. Fate draws like people together and if they stay alike, they are inseparable. These paths are mapped by the fates.

These ideas inspired me and I began to explore the concept of envy and jealousy and drew an idea sketch for a future painting, my first in a few months. At times like this I miss painting, but then, I spend each day working on art. Every day is a balance and every day is precious. Every hour should be loved and appreciated!

My mood was still sour. I took a walk, and realised that my attitudes towards this person were pointless and irrational. To be envied is a compliment, and we are free to make, break, renew any relationship at any time, and all relationships are ultimately based on utility and need.

I returned home and started work on the new War is Over recordings for Fall in Green. The idea behind the poems was as an alternative war commemoration, marking the centenary of the end of the First World War, a series we were asked to compose and perform in November 2018 in Knutsford and Congleton libraries.

The first two poems, unusually by me (Deborah normally writes the words, I the music), are about old warriors. I wanted to avoid clichés. It seems silly, inauthentic, to write faux-sad poems about long dead soldiers that I have no connection to. Faux-sad war poems! The worst art!

Instead, I thought of the dead warriors themselves and about warrior's glory, a rare view, out of fashion; this is the exact opposite of Great War poetry. I thought that those dead warriors might feel insulted or patronised to be thought of as victims rather than fighters. This emotion was the basis of my two poems.

There is no music to these. In the live performance, I read the words while Deborah tolled a bell. I've broadly preserved this for the recording, although I did toy with adding rock guitars, I rather liked that but Deb thought that it was a bit too much like stadium rock and out of character, and I thought yes, perhaps so. I've added some flames and roars. Here are the words to the first poem, To Valhalla We Must Go:

Smash the sunset with Mjolnir's weeping fury!
Let crows explode from their castled cones
over the graves of gritted-teeth skulls.
Let their fists burst the blood soil
and banshee at the bad night.
The fight must never die, though we are home.

In august robes, the masters of entropy sleep
limp over thrones of marble decay
letters there to avoid memory
as blind as the dead,
the calcined trees of yesterday.

As trumpets herald midnight and silent guns
let wolves moan their savage flutes,
let moon rockets shoot at the moribund stars
and scream "no!"

Crucify nostalgia.
Set a new red flower to burn.
Set a new clock to wheel
and char the snow.

To Valhalla we must go.

Agony, Ecstasy and Gaming Admin

A rubbish night of constant, grinding stomach pain; as always with me, not so much burning like acid indigestion but a bruised feeling and constant ache. After an initial hour of sleep I awoke in pain to pace (and even jog) for a few hours while watching a film - even sitting in such circumstances is unpleasant and I seem to need my system to move. After much drinking of water I could tolerate lying down enough to rest, although not sleep. So, I rose groggy and with a sore head.

This bad night led to a good day however. I took the bus to Macclesfield and invigilated in the Macc Art Lounge for a few hours, and was happy to sell Tower of Bees hit by Forces Beyond Their Control to a friend and collector, and spend a lovely few hours talking with him.

I am reminded to keep pushing for new limits and to quell the tedious normality of art, especially the commercial decorative art filled with landscapes and pretty colours to match the curtains. There is more art than ever, true, and more creativity than ever, true, but it seems, more bad art than ever, and too much laziness and lack of focus and solitary, driven passion. Today's Battle of Nantwich reminded me to wear my cavalier hat more often too. Creativity must stem from ones being in all forms. I must push!

My stomach still weeps but, so far, it is less achey than last night. These things take days for me to recover from. I think this malady is due to efficiency; my body can't digest too much at once, only what is needed. If I absorb too many calories, my body reacts to preserve itself. Self psychomorphology, imagining oneself into an ideal shape or being, has perhaps resulted in too much efficiency, and I've accidentally eaten too much as a result.

This evening I've set up the first stages of selling the Flatspace and Flatspace II soundtrack albums on Steam. Lots of admin work. I'm unsure whether to do this as there is a difference between this and the other music platforms; different standards on album names, pricing, and other things. An Amazon album now costs $9.49, £7.99, or €9.99 for the US, UK, and France, which is somewhat odd given the currency rates; but this is probably in keeping with these general music markets and the associated regulations, which Steam lacks awareness of. The Flatspace launch yesterday went to plan and about 170 copies have been installed in these initial 36 hours.

Tonight it is a game night, so I'm away with my computer gaming friends for one of our regular play times. I'm less and less interested in games and in the television and film and music culture that they know about and I don't; I'm rarely part of such conversations, but these are my oldest friends and it's invariably a nice break to simply be there.

War and Clowns

A slow day yesterday, I awoke with a desire to just lie there and rest, which is most unusual. I didn't for long, my main jobs now are to work on War is Over and the Apocalypse of Clowns, the next two Fall in Green releases. A Crewe town performance has been roughly pencilled in for May but this is to be confirmed. I think it's connected to Creative Crewe, who I used to be part of, producing their On Track bulletin of local events for a year or two. Like many voluntary jobs, the workload tends to grow until it all becomes too much work for too little reward and in this case the antagonism from a certain member of the organisation made working with them too unpleasant. Generally though, it was a great team to work with, and I always got on well with Carol Wilkinson, the driving force behind Creative Crewe who has been a massive contributor to local arts in Crewe for decades, often working in obscurity and for little reward. Her shop, The Cubby Hole, was quite an arts hub and it was a sad day when she had to close it.

I managed to start the production work on Asylum Flowers, and later attended an inspiring meeting of local art related organisations and politicians. It was a very positive meeting, I felt that the group was capable and enthusiastic of any number of arts related activities. Carol was there, but I didn't get a chance to say hello.

Last night I woke at 3am with shivers and a throbbing pain in my right side, it appears to be a nerve or muscle pain originating in my back. A tension energy knot, like a bioquantum event. I feel it's the result of recent pressure.

Today, it's Flatspace launch day and I released the game, tested it, sent out my Cornutopia Software newsletter email, announced the game on Twitter and Facebook, and on the Steam community pages. I've also ordered the proof of my next poetry book, The Burning Circus, and I thought that it would be an interesting target to have a launch of something each month this year; this could include Burn of God, The Burning Circus, the two Fall in Green albums, a second Marius Fate album, or other books and games.

Onward.

Second Burn of God Draft Complete

I've had a listen to the full album and made a few tweaks. I decided to extend the short tracks and merge them into each previous track. The many short tracks does affect the pace or feeling a little too, and it feels better with only 16 rather than 20 tracks. In sound terms, the album is nearly identical. The tiny bit of segue at the start of these short tracks has improved things though.

The art is also complete. I had a few iterations between dark or light for the rear art. The background could have been a strong red with light writing. A plain white one, mirroring some of the internal art, looked nice too, but I eventually settled on this:

I've burned a full test CD and will set it aside for a week or more, then listen again with fresher ears. This end stage can often make me feel like there's no point to any of it, the time to ask why I've bothered, but this self-critique will be forgotten when the next idea comes along.

I'm broadly happy with it but I can see a lot of scope for more, to build upon it, to push further in this new type of art, an album symphony. In structural terms this album reminds me of The Wall or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a collection of songs and instrumental music with an overall idea, and some cross links between them. I've divided Burn of God into four separate sections, but these also cross-link so each part isn't like a symphonic movement. There are lots of options for future work. I want this to be one of many, each building on the last. Now, at this stage, it is the flaws I can see most clearly. This powers the energy to move on.

I've had a bit of a fraught night due to a throat problem, an annoying blood blister. One dream involved a tiny bird, about 5cm tall with a long neck like a peacock (although it was brown like a peahen), who flew down from a light above a dinner table to sing to me. It was then pounced on and eaten by a predator (I think it was a squirrel or pine marten or something like that). Thinking now, perhaps there were visual links with Jan Weenix's art here.

Another dream involved a shoot-out with five green-clad Germans (exactly the green of green wellingtons). I had an arsenal of weapons available (also made from green wellington rubber) but I needed a sniper rifle, which I lacked. I merely waited for the attack, rather than firing with one of the inadequate weapons (some machine guns, grenades, a knife).

On with the day. I will begin on the War is Over album for Fall in Green.

Short Tracks and Digital Music

More music tweaks today. I re-recorded the vocals for Lullaby From Your Cells To Your Mind; this time relaxed and gently, as though singing a lullaby itself, which really improved the song. I panned the vocals quite hard right, which I'm unsure about. It is unusual (which is a positive), and perhaps emulates being sung a lullaby, but can be a little distracting and uncomfortable when listening with headphones.

I've also completed the internal tray art, and CD disc art. I probably will print some CDs, although none of my albums have sold more than five copies, in recent memory. I think it's important to have a physical entity of music though, this is the art, and it is a way to share the music and the art in an engaging and attractive way.

One issue concerns me. Some tracks are very short, a few seconds, by way of an introduction to the different sections, like chapter headings. This can work on a CD, but for a download album might not be permitted or cause other problems (can someone buy one of these 9 second tracks?). I don't know what to do about this. I could merge adjoining tracks, but it feels artificial because these headings are different in tone to the tracks either side. I don't want separate track lists for the CD and digital versions of the album (that would be an administration nightmare).

All of this reminded me how unusual this album is. I'm making highly polished recorded music at a time when musicians are caring more about live performance and hardly recording at all. When they do record, it's short, simple tracks (not months in the studio, this has taken me four months) that can catch on, or music developed to support a live show, like merchandise rather than the product itself. Big label acts must make music, as ever, then spend a year or two touring to promote it, which I have no interest in doing.

This album isn't like that at all, it's more like the complex rock and pop music of the 1970s by bands like Queen, Kate Bush, Genesis, Electric Light Orchestra.

My music is also designed to be listened as an album rather than individual tracks, and is rather long. This is in complete opposition to current trends, where Kanye West releases albums of under 30 minutes. My best single-candidate track is nearly 7 minutes long, and several tracks are under 20 seconds.

Well, this, if anything proves that I'm pushing at some boundary. I'm very pleased with everything so far and will certainly create more albums in the same style, but I will have to think about the track length problem.

Peterloo Poetry and Tweaks

More tweaks and work on Burn of God over the weekend. My idea for the 8-page booklet is to represent the ideas and tracks visually, so I've removed lots of text. Here's an image, that is connected to The Tree, a track about the connections of energy between things:

Deb and I also went to Manchester yesterday to join a few poets for the launch of the Peterloo poetry book. Nice to meet a few friends and fellow poets there. Performers included Bridie Breen, Janey Colbourne, Margaret Holbrook, Randy Horton, Nicole Hulme, Jess Hulme, Judy Morris, Peter Branson, Greg Nowell, Gordon Zola, Andy N, Anthony J. Parker, as well as host Paul Morris. Deb performed Janus Never Blinks, which is part of Fall in Green's War is Over set. Here's a photo by playwright and arts journalist Claire Faulkner:

The publisher spent some time announcing two forthcoming collections of similar, protest-centered poetry; one on the theme of the Newport Massacre, one on Women's Suffrage. I'm unsure how entertaining poems about such dour and sad subjects are to read. Political poems often remind me, in a bad way, of the mock student-poems of Rick from The Young Ones. I have read and heard a few moving poems about tragic events, John Lindley's poem about the Grenfell fire is excellent, but protest poems often make me feel uncomfortable, as though hearing the rant of a bully, or helplessly witnessing a beating; perhaps because the words are telling rather than showing, simply bad writing because there is no dialogue. Good art is half talk, half listen.

I will write something for these two collections, and perhaps try a drawing or two as before.

Polishing Burn of God

A full two days working on Burn of God, making small change after change, refining album art, refining the album, listening, tweaking. Still changing almost every track with each listen. Recorded several lyrics for The Great Conveyor today. This stage can take a long time but I want to get it finished as soon as I can.

When to stop? There comes a point when you're not sure if a change is better or worse, and when that happens, either is fine.

I'm off to Manchester tomorrow to perform my absurdist Saxon Blood poem/sketch for the official launch event of the Peterloo poetry book by Seven Arches Press. I've made my props and have practiced remembering the words.

Garden of Love

Here are the words to the penultimate song on Burn of God, Garden of Love. The album is in four sections with a one-track epilogue. This is from the final section, which is about a positive spin on an atheist universe, and this song is about my beliefs that we live on in the minds of the people we knew, and in the difference we make to the universe.

A damp day
dark and bleak.
A crow sends a note
to the winter's sky,
for I am dead today.
See there the weeping few.

In their minds I am alive
and in their hearts I will forever be,
and everything I've done
is part of the universe.

Do you think I've missed out by not being in paradise
when the living think of me so well?
Would you be disappointed not to live in a garden of spring,
or sad that the bad aren't in hell?

In you
I will live forever.
Take care of my soul
and my memory, for you are my heaven.

Do not cry,
for your friends will be your garden of love
for you,
when you die.

Burn of God Booklet Art

Awake from 7am after a nightmare about children stealing 'our' front car wheels, specifically the front right one. I caught them later and they became sort of tiny balloon people for me to squeeze and punish but they were sneering at my puny attempts at revenge.

A long day, all spent working on the internal CD art for Burn of God. I will aim for an 8-page booklet, but can't include detailed lyrics as the image for this scale of printing are images, sp excluding cursive text. I've made images for each page. I was happy with both Cycles & Shadows and even more, the Music of Poetic Objects art. Like many of my albums, I try to find a visual motif or theme or icon to repeat and use.

Until Music of Poetic Objects, my art rarely included any references to the tracks, and were generally backgrounds for credits or liner notes, but 8-pages gives more room and possibilities. Most CD booklets are broadly blank, with lyrics on top. I'll have no lyrics (or few) so the booklet must be art, perhaps like Snakes & Arrows by Rush; a band always inventive and surrealistic with their cover artwork, reminiscent of the Hypgnosis covers used by Pink Floyd, Genesis etc. These suit my style of music, but I want each cover to be different and creative in its own way. In some ways, the other artists like Marius Fate, are good ways to experiment with this.

Burn of God First Draft

I thought that today was a slow day, yet I seem to have got more done than expected. I sang the vocals to Garden of Love, and the song called Organon (although I'll probably change the title). I think I'm improving at singing, but who can say, perhaps I'm merely more used to hearing and toying with my own voice.

There are many aspects to singing. Each cell should express itself when your body is an instrument. Generally I think of my body like bagpipes; some air in the chest like a bag of potential energy, and a tense stomach like the grip on the bag, used to squeeze the sound, with control, through relaxed upper parts which target the note and timbre.

I took four takes to record Garden of Love. Each was generally ok, the music isn't complex or demanding, but the feeling is crucial for such a personal song, the song of a ghost to his mourners. I remembered that the important part is to speak to, to sing to the listener as though talking intimately to one person. The accuracy of everything else; timing, pitch, is secondary to this. We are speaking directly into a loved one's ear. It's not a performance or show for mass, but an intimate act of communication, this is the key difference between live and recorded music.

The first draft of the album is now complete. Many of the early vocals need to be recorded and finished, and the artwork.

I'm very proud of this album, but know that the world won't care (but I hope, and remain assured, that it will one day). After I've been making videos for my early electronic music I'm reminded that this music is nothing like that (although Riding Pi has definite Jean-Michel Jarre influences), but a massive complex mix of every influence, from Beethoven to Pink Floyd to Scott Walker to Kate Bush, a logical step on from the good second half of Cycles & Shadows, and yet also a commentary on God in the way that Ingmar Bergman commented on subjects.

It feels unique and special. I hope that this will be my first of many such works. Painting, without an outlet for me to exhibit or sell, is secondary and I have few plans for paintings this year, only perhaps one or two for my solo (well, hopefully local community) exhibition in Nantwich Museum in December. This is no bad think. My existing works suddenly become more rare and more expensive!

Poetry Filing and Garden of Love Music

Spent today re-cataloguing my songs and poems. Years ago, when I started cataloguing my work, perhaps in 2002, I filed Songs (song lyrics) and Poems separately with unique codes. This is largely fine, I file music, the actual notes, separately too. The problem is that recently I've been singing poems, beginning with the music on ArtsLab, and therefore Tree of Keys. Some poems, like I, Spider, were also songs. This led to a bit of duplication, but it was also a bit irrational; why is a poem different from song lyrics?

Yesterday I decided to merge song lyrics and poems and elimination the few duplicates. This could have been a huge task, I have 1200 or so poems, and 500 or so songs, and all are in text files named with their title and unique number, plus my website lists them all too, each with a unique web page. And there is a separate written index to keep track of everything, with additional information.

In the end, the brilliant Irfanview was used to mass rename the files. I had to be sure that I had them all, and in the exact order, and could then mass rename and renumber them all correctly. I applied the same principle to renaming the web pages. For the index, I copied it into a spreadsheet, then exported it again in text format, and also used the CONCATENATE function to automatically create the HTML for the web links. Over all, the job took only a couple of hours.

After that, my task of the day was to write the music for the Garden of Love song. This was difficult. I wanted a simple, piano arrangement, something gentle and soulful, but the words are so powerful that I felt that something more was and is needed. I began in a key of D-minor, and moved up a little for the brighter parts. Generally, the music was difficult to fit into the rather loosely structured lyrics.

More Pi and Cover

Awake from 4am to 6am or so due to noise disturbances. I used the time constructively. These hours are unique, when the brain is open, like relaxed sponge; I think this is one of the purposes of sleep, to open the brain like a flower, to allow tiny spider-like creatures to clean and order it, the librarians of the brain. In this state we can access deeper parts of the brain not normally accessible (try it! You will be able to recall memories and knowledge at this time far more easily than in the day!), so what we think and how we feel is very important at this time, far more important than our thoughts and attitudes in our waking life. This time is perfect for meditation, self-guidance, and learning.

As a consequence of this, I sometimes use this time to work, and did so last night. I played a singing training recording and so practised singing for 30 minutes or so, in silence of course. I sometimes mentally practice piano or guitar in this way too, this night-focused rehearsal is very effective, and the training and thoughts we have at this time are easy to shape yet stick well.

I've spent most of the day finalising the production on Riding Pi. It's a fast, race along only a few notes, with a sort of mock-fugue in there too. There are lots of slow fades and a gradual glow of instruments in and out; this type of music is very feeling based and so takes a lot of listens from the start to get the mood right, there are no compositional shortcuts. In the end, I shortened the song by one minute, but I've retained the longer edit in case I need it. There are some vocoded lyrics that are hard to discern. There are a few unspoken rules in music, one is that words should be centre panned and be clear to hear (and have no bass), but sometimes we can break these (I jokingly think the Def Leppard producer agrees, based on Hysteria, but I feel in that case the singer was not confident in his vocals and wanted to blur them out). Kate Bush and Queen use vocals in fabulously inventive ways.

In Riding Pi, the voice barely matters, it's literally part of the flow of space.

I now have about half of the main vocals to record, and the final track, Garden of Love, to compose. I've also worked a lot on the art. Here is the latest cover:

The jarring between the clean, digital elements and the painterly background caused me problems because the upper and lower halves of the artwork are too different stylistically and made a fake division, so I've added the constraining lines on the left and right to add focus. These are the exact angle of an equilateral triangle centred at the top, so can (and will) be used for other design elements. I associate this triangle with god; pointing up for masculine, confidence, power, and pointing down for submission, and prayer, like arms wide.

Onwards! I'm really proud of this album, but there is so much more I can and want to make. Every piece of work I do here is stealing time from a future work of art.

Riding Pi

A slower day. I know that I'm near the end of the album and must decide on the flow of mood. I've extended Organon to a second verse, a second wave, which feels like it should work. I thought a faster mood would help in this final section too, I didn't want it too short compared to the rest of the album, and in an improvised piano track called The Dream, I had a melodic line which I could re-use, so have sketched out a fast track about riding the edge of the number pi using that melody. This will be the last track to create.

This album has been hard work but I'm pleased with it so far, it hangs together as one and feels like a complete album in my 'symphonic' progressive style, like The Spiral Staircase, like The Love Symphony. Cycles & Shadows was a mix of half existing performance work and half of more interesting experimental songs, and Music of Poetic Objects was a similar album of two halves rather than a whole work. Tree of Keys was a compilation, like many of my recent albums. Bites of Greatness, Anatomy of Emotions, Testing the Delicates; these were conventional albums, unified in feeling but not internally structured with repeating motifs or an overall idea, but The Modern Games has a unity to the album as a whole. This should always be my aim; it was even back with my first opus Synaesthesia. Perhaps I've not focused on music, that is why. Many of the other albums were spontaneous collections of music made for other reasons rather than albums made intentionally from the start as audio artworks. Perhaps yes, The Love Symphony was my last for that (or Finnegans Judgement)! Enough introspection. On with art!

Lots of time tends to be taken with tweaks, re-recording, final listening. I must try to keep this to a minimum. I'd like to finish this by the end of January, then start on some Fall in Green or Marius Fate music. The next Marius album will certainly be mostly a collection of existing songs made for other reasons! But I will try to unify it... and the album will be themed. The whole Marius project is about rock/pop anyway.

Organon and Clouds

A great couple of days after a couple of stuck ones, the key is to keep trying, learning to fit into the new groove of a new skill, from video to music. I hardly slept yesterday due to stomach pain, irritable bowel, the general illness of stopping when I'm used to running. This was an almost unimportant aspect of the day, which, feelings aside was extremely productive and positive.

The rock-like song from the previous post is too light and silly for the album. I started on a new, slower tune which evolved into something of a drone. I have a list of things to say in the finalé of the album, and rather than stick to the order, fitted the music to the idea.

The music is about growth, and it began with a nice sound combination in the sequencer more than anything (some strings combined with a sound of boiling bolognese sauce, an old sample from my hand-made sound effect collection called, unsurprisingly, Bolognese Boil). The music naturally evolved to reflect the two key chords of the intro. For this finale, I want to use the music in the rest of the album; this both adds unity and simplifies, it reduces options yet reveals new things to the listener. My chords which were D-minor and a rather ambiguous, dissonant chord (could be C-major, could be F-major) which I moved into C-major. The song grew, with echoes of the end of Kate Bush's Aerial; D to D/C then more complex chords. The song grows to a climax at about two minutes, but it would nicely fall back to the quiet D-minor (oddly, I find myself reminded of the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush song Don't Give Up, too, it has that quiet, bass-like feeling).

The theme and meaning of the song is about discovery, so might not work as well if it goes back to the simple background again. The climax might work better as a climax, but then what options do we have? Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd fades away in inverse fashion, but that seems odd, like a discovery, revelation, then wandering away again.

The basics there are done. At night I wrote some lyrics to a second song, a quiet song about death and heaven. I will wait for the right mood and record this live.

Today started with taking a time-lapse film of the sunrise, which looked amazing, some great clouds in the sky today because it rained last night. Here is a still:

Then I re-recorded the vocal parts to The Great Grandfather's Song verses, and added vocoded parts to The Great Conveyor. Generally speaking, the album is coming together well. I have a big to-do list; more videos, and starting work on two Fall in Green albums or EPs.

Rock and Roll

Awake most of the night with stomach pain, and consequently up late. Came up with various ideas for a song in the night, something vaguely Elvis-like, and have spent today sequencing a basic outline of it.

It's rather light and comedic in tone and probably not suitable. So far I've made about double the amount of music for Burn of God compared to the amount I've actually selected. These days feel like failures because I have little to show for the day. I've done a some admin work though, and my albums should be on Google Play and YouTube soon. I've resisted this before because I'd prefer high quality videos only on YouTube, rather than all of the songs on there with simplistic 'stills' videos. I will keep pushing on with this album. It's about 75% complete so far, although about half of the vocals on this 75% need re-recording. Onward we roll our rock, like Sisyphus.

Time Lapse

A bit of a slow day today. I'm getting tired of video work and want to complete Burn of God but the task seems difficult. Why? The solution is to calculate the steps needed and divide them into smaller steps. Any job, even putting man on the moon, can be accomplished by one man if the steps are small enough and there is enough time.

First I added a year's worth of sales to the sound effects I sell on the Scirra website. I created a spreadsheet to help with this, but it did involve typing 71 sales' worth of discounts, dates, durations. This took over an hour, but the monotony and memory training was good.

Then my ordered time-lapse intervalometer arrived (a weird word!) - it's simply a camera shutter button with a clock built in, so I set up the camera to take a series of photos of the sunset at one frame per second. We've had some great skies here recently (sadly, this might be due to the Australian fires which are raging at the moment, particulates in the atmosphere causing beauty; echoes of the Tambora eruption). The results were excellent, far better than with my Brinno camera. Here's a still:

Of course, with all of these things, the scene itself is key. The nice clouds today were all north, this is a south view, and there's always a bit of luck in the way clouds move. There are so many birds that the scene flickers with their black pepper. This was a good test, and helped gauge the file sizes. My camera can photograph at 1920x1280, which is a good size for film. Any bigger would take up too much space. This film of 01:25 takes up about 1Gb of space for its frames, which is a lot. Converting the images to HD (1280x720) but png makes the file sizes about 25% bigger. It might even reduce quality, as a later jpg which is shrunk for the film might look better than a png at that size (I guess that it won't though, as the reduction to a lossless format should preserve quality better than a reduction to the final format, but I would imagine the differences would be so negligible to be as good as none existent).

I've also edited the guitars on my Skeletons song. I need to get working on the album now. I can't call myself an artist unless I'm making art. Sometime art is about working on procedures, slow learning, practice, but the goal of art is creation, not research. Nobody remembers Mozart for his research days... yet, even he had to practice.

The creative war is one of patience vs. impatience.

New Life

I started to write this thought a few weeks (or months) ago, but the start of the year is a good time for finishing. So here it is, a thought about the overlooked life that is being created while many other forms are life are in peril.

Life on Earth appears to be in a unique position in its five billion year history. Species seem to be becoming extinct at a huge rate, which has happened on a few occasions before (even so, perhaps not as quickly), but also for the first time, new and different forms of life are being developed at a high rate too. Perhaps, I thought, plants and animals are being replaced, rather than destroyed by human activity. If this is the case, are humans being replaced too?

My definition of life is: a system of organising and ordering information. Consider the complex structures of trees, ant colonies, bee-hives, the structures of cells that make up the human body, the social and political structures of humanity. These form ordered patterns. Consider the look of planets without life; they have no order, their forms are essentially random and haphazard, messy. If life does anything, it is to sort and order. Tidying up is the ultimate activity for living things; and all living things, down to cellular level, collect, sort and organise things.

The inverse token is death, the liberation of ordered information into chaos, a messy collapse.

Earth appears to be unique in the universe by being filled with life, and life has been symbiotic with its environment since almost the foundation of the planet, 4.5 billion years ago. I believe in fate, that if we were to go back to any point in time, the same outcome would occur (although, at the same time, I think that existence is relative to each observer; if time is relative, then each iota of thing must experience things differently - this complex discussion can wait for another time). I wondered if the complex changes that are taking place on Earth are a result of some natural evolution or balance, something that was always destined to occur and something which would naturally evolve on any civilised planet anywhere. It appears that the atmosphere itself is become more conducive to machines, and less so for animals. Perhaps technology is simply replacing biology in some natural way.

By my definition of life, computers are alive. They do not posses 'intelligence'. What might intelligence, or free-will (its more grand relative) mean? We know what intelligence means on an instinctive level, but different people have defined it differently over time. If life orders information, then perhaps we can define intelligence as the ability to locate disorder to order it. Perhaps hunting for food, perhaps all avarice, is the manifestation of this universal drive. All animals do this, perhaps even objects like stars do, in a way, the way that they order dust clouds into spheres of energy; stable for millions of years, that are born and die, like living things.

Perhaps free will is exactly this ability, and if so, computers lack intelligence because they are not free to locate disorderly information by themselves; we operators ultimately still need to supply the data to machines for them to order, and perhaps the measure of intelligence in a machine is its ability to hunt for disorder for it to order.

The functions of animal life have gradually been replaced by machines, as is obvious, from oxen to plough fields and cars instead of horses, to just about every other utility, and the functions of humans are replaced even moreso. I wondered if this loss of organising power, the loss of animal life in the Earth was being offset by a founding of new life by machines. Every new computer program, even the internet itself, is a new form of life, as is every device that processes and orders information. Perhaps intelligence is the key missing factor in those, but people do that job for the machines at the moment. Perhaps the level of order processing of a system, a measure of the 'life quotient' can be calculated and, when applied to the earth as a whole, we can measure the true nature of the health of our world.

In many ways, 'work' is organising, tidying, filing, classifying. We need food, shelter. Perhaps we could say that the work of people is for this, but the vast majority of humanity have these things, yet we still work, and more than ever. This work is ordering. The work animals do is organisational and a quest for subsistence; which comes first? Do we organise to subsist, so perhaps food and shelter, love and happiness becomes nature's reward for organising. Disordered people do not thrive, not do disordered space clouds. It appears that order is the key measure of success in the universe itself.

The Battle of Angels

I've had a slower couple of days. Spent Friday finalising the Rhino video, which only took a few tweaks, but these take time and were important.

I'd like to finish another video before moving back to music, primarily because good (although old) albums like The Spiral Staircase could do with at least one video, but the music is so abstract at time, or with complex imagery of dragons, castles, stairs, monsters, fire, wizards etc. that a video seems to be a difficult task. I've spent more than a day trying to work on The Battle of Angels and Cxthys but have hardly made progress. The key is generally to bash out anything and that, eventually, magic will happen, but it's difficult here because I have a few certain images in mind that I don't want to betray. There are moon-like elements, but I've used a lot of NASA footage before, and the album feels organic and not technological. At the same time, I have only limited access to ares to film, although, more footage is always the answer in these circumstances!

Perhaps a break would be better, back to music, I feel I started to videos because I had hit a wall with the Burn of God music. Perhaps it's time to hit back, or work on an easier video; two projects at once often helps. It's the 5th day of the year and I don't feel as productive as I should be.

Rhino

Exhausted today after a full day working on a new video for Rhino. I had initially thought of making Oceanic from Animalia, along with Mice and Eagle Interceptor, I will limit myself to three videos per album, but with Rhino I always had clear images to accompany the music: flickery images of a rhinoceros at different angles, with the energy of a Len Lye animation, and I dedicate this video to him.

I also had a toy rhino (it looks rather realistic on my lawn, above). I've managed to edit a first draft of the video today, which included two segments of filming myself, one with lots of make-up and an outfit, although that hasn't made it into the final draft.

I'm full of energy and anxiety about these videos, excited, but exhausted when I have time to rest. In the past twelve days I've made music videos for Pioneer, The Lost Princess, The Crystal Garden, Eagle Interceptor, Snow, and Flat Space. Some very easy, some complex and taking several days. I've also made a felted mouse for Mice.

I feel on edge, that I need videos for The Spiral Staircase and Bites of Greatness in particular, and perhaps Cycles III too, but everything is hard work. I must move quickly so that I can make more music too, push, push. I must produce as much as I can while I can.