Monday, June 15, 2020

Earache, Moments Of Terror

I can hear slightly better today, warm olive oil seems to help, although the earache/headache and jaw pain is now worse than the mere deafness, it feels like some sort of dislocation or muscle spasm. I used to have a lot of earache as a child which was awful and led to some hearing loss. I pray it does not return.

I've managed to work on some music though. I'm getting frustrated at the slow pace of things. David Bowie, apparently, wrote and recorded quickly, an album in a fortnight. I used to create things very quickly; I recall The Spiral Staircase took ten days to compose and produce which I considered an eternity at the time, although many of those early albums such as Animalia were compiled over a long period, perhaps a year, because they were secondary to my main work as a game developer. Now I consider the music of central importance.

Burn of God took a couple of months, and The Modern Game a year or so, and often many days per track. This one is going more quickly, so I am making progress in this learning process. I must remember that David Bowie had a team to help at every stage, I do everything alone including all of the performances all of the production process, the artwork, and even designing and programming the software, as well as the basics of the actual writing.

I've sequenced a little; a new song, almost in the style of The Prodigy, called Moments Of Terror When Falling Asleep, which is very mechanical in rhythm and style; I've broken many of my rules about digital composition, but will add more analogue 'chaos' to the essential order/chaos balance. The pain makes creating anything a struggle. I wonder if I could manage a vocal like The Pixies in Debaser; for me, that tune of theirs stands out for the aggression and energy.

It was very much in my mind while writing this song which is about the fear of social disconnection. I've noticed that when drifting off to sleep I experience moments of terror or extreme anxiety, and yet, when waking the next day forget all about it, as though it were a secret torture in another world; only to revisit the next night, and again remember it. Once, last week, I wrote this down and so remembered it. Sometimes, during sleep paralysis (which can be terrifying in itself, the emotions there are irrational and raw) I make notes next to my bed, only to wake and find that they were made in the dream dimension. It's quite understandable that people like John Whiteside Parsons believed that this space was a reality.