A good day yesterday, although it always seems that I get too little done. In the morning I noticed a large bee in the garden on the purple starry flowers (Campanula portenschlagiana, I think). It was about twice the size of the other bees, with an orange back and white tip. It seems it was a Tree Bumblebee which is apparently a newcomer to Britain.
It took a while to get music work done. I registered with Keymailer to promote my Steam games there in the morning and probably didn't start work on Fear Of The Thing Itself until 3pm or so. I recorded a new take of the verses and extra layering vocals for the 'with a touch of murderous' line. The timing of the layers isn't as matched as I'd like. For layered vocals the timing needs to match closely. For the chorus this isn't important, that is supposed to sound like many voices, but I'd prefer something more exact for the main layers (I think). I could cheat and play with it digitally, but I don't like doing that; that is easy, when this is a skill that should be mastered, but also I think the emotional quality would be affected. Things should be done in one take of the correct emotion, not toyed with afterwards. In all singing, the emotion is captured, and singing just one line separately tends to disrupt this. There are also physical factors of microphone height and distance when recording in a separate session, and these differences are generally audible, but this is a secondary issue.
It might help to have a click track or lead in for the start, as the timing at the start is often more difficult. In this song the timing is difficult to master anyway because the tempo varies starkly (this is not a dance track) and there is often no percussion as a guide anyway - gaps of silence then boom, the next verse appears. I think the results here are okay, it's certainly far better than the 2015 version; how far I have come in five years. Yes, that is a long time, only the last year has really been one of vocal focus. Better things are to come. I design everything to be a learning exercise.
At 5pm or so, while reading Wikipedia, my vision became strange and I noticed that I couldn't read easily, I had blind spots to the upper right of my vision, and I had a headache, like a lack-of-sleep headache, or eye strain. The blind spots continued for an hour or so, while I cooked tea, and I felt a little dizzy, then the periphery of my vision began to glow, become brightly lit and blurry, with the centre of my vision remaining clearer. It was like the visual experience when out-of-body, so perhaps it was a domination of the internal visual processing as it attempted to process insufficient sensory data.
It was probably a migraine. I experienced something like it once as a teenager, but not since. I had hardly slept yesterday, only two or three hours, and I felt tired and irritable all day, so that may have been a factor.
I've started taking Phosphatidyl Serine, 100mg, every other day, perhaps a month ago. There is evidence that this helps with memory, although it is expensive at about £15 for two months worth. Perhaps my brain is rewiring and I am gaining a form of super-vision.
I'm watching more David Lynch films and his work is on my mind still. I've also watch the first series of The IT Crowd which was repeated this week. Perhaps as a result, last night I dreamt of buying a 1991 Amstrad CPC 464 for £20 from a 'bargain bucket' of old computer bits. There was another machine there, a black box I thought of as a Spectrum, for £20 too, which I wrapped up and someone else then bought at my suggestion, so this persuaded me to buy the Amstrad. The Amstrad though, was a grey cuboid of the size and shape of a Chatwins box of 12 mince pies, although in its grey cube there was a cassette tape drive. I said to the checkout person that it was for historical/museum reasons rather than to use. I spent some time hunting for a video cable for it, which was a short VGA cable, but the device had many more video ports on it of an unusual shape and design, so I had hoped for a better, the ideal, cable in the box of equipment, but we couldn't find any (we, because the manager or man who ran the shop helped me search). I regretted buying the machine, thinking that I'd wasted my money, and that the other black device was a better buy.
Now I have nine songs complete, with vocals for Except For The Hatred to record. I need to write more. I have a few ideas; the guiding principle is for songs that are new and unique and marvelous and startling in subject or style. I feel enthused about the idea of surrealist music, in the hyperrealism sense; not the make-it-up automatic unconscious sense, not improvised jazz, but the fantastical like my paintings. I listened to much of Pawn Hearts by Van Der Graaf Generator last night (while migrained). It often sounds like a tuneless cacophony and it's no surprise that they were one of the least commercially successful of the progressive/psychedelic bands, but they are very inventive and complex and different, and so valuable.
