More music work yesterday and today but the going is very slow. These songs are unusual, and all are more complex than I'm used to. Every one varies in tempo or time signature within the song, and sometimes breaks sharply in unusual ways, which I can feel as I'm writing them, yet sequencing them is proving to be complex and time consuming, slow due to uncertainties. Except For The Hatred is just about complete (without the vocals recorded, this will be fun and saved for last), however, but I've got three other songs in half stages, including a version of the Actor song (now called The Actor's Lament).
Most of the time yesterday and today was spent doing other things anyway; preparing a live chat event for Steam for Taskforce, using Discord, which I've never used, or heard of. A quick search for Taskforce: The Mutants of October Morgane resulted in the game being seemingly everywhere. I even found the 2004 version apparently on sale on Amazon (well, it had a page, listed as sold by me and unavailable, very odd). I've been contacted about a Chinese translation of 21st Century Surrealism too. Today I've been installing garden fences, which was some welcome exercise in the sun, after many days or weeks inside.
I'm delaying, unsure. In creative lulls like this, the trick is to break things into emotionless, logical steps and coldly calculate the problems and solutions, the resources needed, the time needed. All uncertainties need to be removed and rationalised into certainties. My songs are stuck somehow because of uncertainties.
In art, the result must be fully realised in the mind and soul before starting to construct. For my paintings, this happens at the instant of conception, and sometimes for songs too, although not usually. For these songs the words tend to come first, then music, then I make changes to words, then to music etc. in a complex dialogue. If I start with purely music (or both at once), mentally, the results can be repetitive and similar to other older work, too easy, not musically complex enough. This doesn't tend to be the case with words because of the meaning, the emotion. Perhaps this emotion is the key thing, this 'orb', as I describe in my book.
One song, Since You Kicked Me Out, is proving fun. It began, in my head, sounding very differently, with the main refrain sort of screamed, and certainly in 4/4 time. The song as I've sequenced is very much 3/4, a jig-like jaunt reminiscent of a folk song or children's song. It is acceptable, fun, but the finale needs to stop this somehow. It has two verses which are the same structure with a third which has parts of the other verses in different orders.
So, I need to work out if this needs new instrumentation. In this song, like the others in this project (codename 'Pyjama') the drums are key and I'm taking a lot of time on the percussion.
The key thing is emotional freedom, and this means timing, timing. Getting the timing to match the mood. Timing and volume, the two things that computers destroy by default, are the primary keys to emotion in music.
