Spent yesterday organising and ordering the new Spiral Staircase CDs. The music is identical (although this version will include CD Text, track names etc.) but the artwork is new for this addition, the first commercially replicated version of this album. The cover has a very tiny movement of the title text but the 8-page booklet artwork, and the back and CD surface, consists of new digital images.
I feel listless and directionless. My hearing problems threw off my music work. I want to be sure that my older music like The Spiral Staircase, The Love Symphony etc. is as valued and good as anything new. I probably mention this often, the job or updating and curating older work, but it is important... I've encountered so many artists who pile up older work and ignore it, but for me it should be as good quality in presentation as anything new, and, at the time, I rarely paid much attention to these older albums. All creative work takes more 'promotion' of it (I hate this and the idea of it) than the creation of it, but in music is might be 50 times more! An album might take 14 days to write and record and 2 years of touring to promote it.
I'd like to record some videos about my albums. I've done a few before but now they seem to simple and samey, somehow, when these can be an opportunity for art too; also, I should do this for new albums as part of the general release process. Steam forces me to do this for games, so I should do the same for these major artworks. Of course, this takes away from time to create new work. It is a balance.
I've spent the first 5 hours of today fixing an audio synchronisation problem. It's something to do with either my Canon EOS 1100D camera or my Zoom H1 (I am surprised it could be either) or my video conversion software, or audio formats, but when I save out the audio from a film it is longer than the identical audio recorded on the Zoom H1. It's like time is somehow shorter on one device. It's not a matter of frame rate; this is the raw audio saved out at the original frame rate. The film is recorded at 29.97fps. There are frame rate issues if I assume the video is 30fps, this will effectively change the audio length to 99.90% of normal (29.97/30.00 = 0.999) - but this problem involves a smaller difference and has been a problem for some time.
I've taken a 15 minute film and sound recording and noted that the difference is about 99.6% so all I can do is shrink the audio by this first. This isn't perfect (and this annoys me) because SoundForge won't handle or work with fractions of a percent, and for some reason 99.6% and 99.7% produce identical results (bugs - I seem to be the only programmer concerned with accuracy! If I create a song at 60 beats per minute in my software, Prometheus, and make it exactly 60 beats long, be assured that the resulting file is exactly 264600 samples long. It is these details that draw the line between average and the best software).
Now, to consider and charge at new art. All indecision, distress, depression, lacklustre-ness is due to uncertainty: the existence of intangibles which must be rationally and emotionlessly calculated, broken into specific problems, and logical step-by-step solutions. We need passion and energy to create art, but the activity of making requires rational and emotionless thought; not happiness, not sadness, not calmness, not excitement, but incessant, robotic, mechanical work.
So, I must decide; to make these videos about music. And if so; what to include, what they should look like. Script. Film. Edit. And, deadline. It is the 20th of June, solstice day - there is an annular eclipse today - I can't find out when the last eclipse on solstice day was. There are 10 days left of the month. Ideally I'll finish all of the album videos and finish Pyjama Ny Warehouse in these 10 days. The clock is ticking.
