A very full day. I awoke late after not being able to sleep. I feel cold, weak, with palpitations. Perhaps I am short on exercise. My mum is so fit by comparison. I wouldn't be surprised if she outlived us all. She casually mentioned, at my parents wedding anniversary, that she was pregnant at the time of her wedding. This must mean I had a lost sibling before I was born, a lost brother perhaps with my name. This would be an astonishing, propitious coincidence, as my hero Beethoven had a brother, also named Ludwig, who died before he was born, and Vincent van Gogh also had a stillborn Vincent before his birth, and, if I recall, so did Ingmar Bergman.
Less dramatically, things went to plan today. It's the first of a month so I completed my regular computer backups (these take me several hours each month, I create so much data), then played the piano part for The Waltz of the Ghosts. This was sequenced very mechanically originally but I can easily play it now, so did so. I am unsure whether to add any backing music. I also completed a final listen and file conversion for the Animalia music, and began work on the Synaesthesia artwork. Here is the first draft of the new cover:
It's rather radically different from the older versions. It matters not. I like it. I wish, given the delight of this cover, that the music was better, but I reminded myself than no cover can be 'too good'. Ideally, everything is 'too good'. The music is good for its time. I looked back to discover when I first wrote it; the MED files are stamped 24 July 1999, which is about right. I'm getting tired of this now, feeling ready to move on to new work, new creations.
Visiting this old work will inspire me. I listened to Jean-Michel Jarre's Magnetic Fields the other day, and thought that it might be my favourite album of his (along with Oxygene). Both ground-breaking because of the way relatively simple instruments create a scene. Rendez-vous was his most commercially successful, I think, because there are lots of catchy melodies in there; it is less abstract and symphonic in the Sibelius sense. Magnetic Fields included real world recordings in a way that Jarre rarely did. Zoolook is full of samples, but Magnetic Fields seemed to integrate the music with the real world, not try to emulate it. At times, Jarre's music suffers because he tried to be too electronic, almost preferring cheap and unfeeling synthetic strings to a real orchestra, for example, and so the feeling in his music was not as deep as it could be.
It seems that a lot of electronic music in the 90s became dance or club related, and therefore cold, distant, though very melodic. I could say 'like Synaesthesia', but no; my album had those qualities but was perhaps a reaction to that cold alienation, an attempt at an emotional release, an escape from that very logical, mechanical, digital existence; a path in art which I have continued to tread. 21 years is a long time. Perhaps I could try something again purely instrumental. I feel, at last, more powerful and technically able than Jarre was in 1981.
