The end of the first week of the government's 'social distancing' measures, colloquially known as lock-down. I've hardly been out but will need to go shopping soon, as many food supplies are running low. Food shopping, alongside going to work, and 'once-per-day' exercise, are the only permitted reasons for being outside. I went for a quick trip on Friday evening but it was too busy for me. I'll be ready next time. Things at supermarkets are unusual; queues outside with clearly marked 2M zones for each person. One let in only when one emerges, to limit customer numbers in the shop. This is safer overall but feels more intimidating due to the herding of people. These times must be awful for people with claustrophobia, and probably unexpectedly difficult for the retail staff.
For the first few days people seemed a bit more lax at the new rules, judging from online activity. Here, there have been very few people about anyway. By the end of this first week people seem to be complying and staying in. Dog walkers make up the majority of pedestrians although at times there seem to be as many cars as ever. I haven't seen Deb in over a week now and I miss her. I hope that I can see her soon.
Music continues. I've decided to try and tackle the most difficult tracks to see how those go: Termination and Refuge. Many of the tracks on the album follow the same course, creating drama by dropping from a drone of (almost always) A minor to F major. Termination has squillions of layers, I had layer-itis back then. I've got a bass, a filtered saw wave dancing about, high pitched strings that sound like an alert, a sweeping siren, a powerful filter-sweeping distorted guitar, a distorted bell that reminds me of the lead in Orbital's The Box. All of these are playing a different looping melody, and all over the top of each other, plus up to 5 extra tracks of drums. The contemporaneous Arcangel Soundtrack used a similar structure; looping layers, added and removed.
The trick with filter sweeps is to compress them to keep the volume consistent, or simply avoid too many melodies in them. That said, the massive echoing sweeps in Cellular Automaton on Animalia aren't compressed, yet work fine. That was one of the easiest tracks to mix despite sounding extremely complex. Nowadays I rarely use filter sweeps at all. I became more interested in melody and the fundamentals of music than pretty sound effects.
