A busy day of actual art yesterday. I'm reminded how much time I seem to spend on admin or procrastinating... yet this tends to be proactive procrastinating, that is, working on something that will help something else, while unconsciously working.
However, yesterday was was one of creative work. I made the preliminary music for Lost at the Fair and The Knife Thrower. I'm not happy with either. The knife thrower track has a gentle, romantic feeling, like Barefoot, or She Floats, or some of the other tracks we've done; gentle piano with strings. This suits the mood of the poem, although the pacing is wrong. With a song, the pace of the vocals is set by the melody, but with a poem, the pacing can be anything, but it needs to dialogue with the music. This interplay makes the whole recording and production process extra challenging, but fun; the possibilities are greater.
The pacing is easily fixed, but I'm a little bored by the sameness of the track to others that we have done. It's odd; I used to wonder why Genesis didn't make ten more albums like Foxtrot, as I liked Foxtrot and wanted more like that. They felt the need to move on though. Now I feel the need for newness too. However, mood is mood, so I'll tweak things a little and probably keep Knife Thrower as it is.
Lost at the Fair is more complex and difficult. It's one of my favourite poems with a double meaning about losing ones mother to dementia (or something else). It's subsumed with emotion and so one of the most difficult. The imagery of being in a blur of a fairground is easy to conjure, however. This one must be right.
Other jobs today:
First, emails. I'm part of three performances this year it seems and we'll probably do something at Crewe Library in March or April. I want to help with local arts as much as I can too, and will certainly take part in a major way in the Crewe Storyfest in July. I've also listed the Facebook event for the next live ArtSwarm event, and spent at least an hour fixing a long term hardware problem on my PC, getting it to re-detect my Lexicon Alpha after awakening the computer; this involves a DEVCON command (sounds like a nuclear war controller, it is, instead, a command line version of the Device Manager).
This afternoon I finally, tada, submitted Burn of God for publication. I made on last minute change to the music, some stark breaths after the Skeletons track; an awakening from the nightmare. This is one of the most arresting parts on the arresting album. I also tweaked the album artwork, after receiving the new War is Over discs, which look amazingly good, some of the best graphics I've worked on so far.
I've also spent a good 45 minutes today playing electric guitar along to Amarok, the Mike Oldfield album, and the classic Starfleet Project E.P., which is perfect for jamming to (if you want to jam with Brian May and Eddie van Halen).
