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.
