Busy working on music still. I'm toying with the idea of re-recording Synaesthesia, my first album. I've already recorded this three times in total. The first version in 1999 was sequenced using Octamed (possibly on Amiga, though this may be unlikely) and used only my Yamaha SY-85 synth in one take, so had a few technical restrictions. I made about 10 of these on CD-R with laser printing and a few were sold by a tiny record company called Rev Records.
A couple of years later I decided to re-record it using NoiseStation, the first version of my music software. Musically this second version was generally similar, but far from identical. The sweeping wail of loneliness from the 1999 opening track became a single sine-wave beep. I also used some of the 1999 tracks on the 2001 version: Refuge and The Waltz of the Ghosts were simple enough and worked better on the synth than in the crude NoiseStation. NoiseStation game me more power and more tracks, but it didn't have reverbs and generally had a harsh, electronic sound. I recorded only three albums using it: Synaesthesia, The Incredible Journey (which has never been released, I didn't consider it worthy, partly for reasons of sound quality), and the first version of The Spiral Staircase, which I subsequently re-recorded to greater effect.
So for years, the second Synaesthesia album was the only album of my ouvre that used this technology. In 2015, I decided to remaster it, mainly because it was about to be released digitally across the modern music platforms. My priority was polishing what I had rather than remaking the album. I re-recorded two tracks: The Runner and Resurrection, but used the older 2001 tracks for the others, and even some of the original 1999 versions. This made Synaesthesia 2015 a hybrid of everything before, and not a clean beginning. Listening to it now, I'm not that happy with it.
This is my only album from that era with these, for me, quality issues in the mixing consistency, and overall album unity. The, even older, Arcangel Soundtrack, has a nice warmness, partly because of the simplicity of the music. NoiseStation 1 was always very 'harsh' in its sound.
Now I feel it's a good time to make Synaesthesia for a fourth time for a few reasons. I have good tools and abilities now, and the recent remaster of Animalia has inspired me. Like that album, Synaesthesia is very much a Jean-Michel Jarre inspired album, and it would be nice to have a standard set of these in consistent quality of music and art. Perhaps I could even work on a sequel (I have so many sequel ideas! One for this, for The Spiral Staircase, for Animalia). Additionally there is no 600dpi artwork for Synaesthesia, and I might consider having a few physical CDs made; and finally, the country is in Coronavirus lockdown. Making music indoors is an efficient use of time for these weeks.
This, my first opus, should at least please me in quality.
I've spent today reprogramming Prometheus to make it import NoiseStation files (well, only the notes, not the instruments). This should alleviate some of the tedium of converting some of the more complex tracks. I will see how things go over the next week.
