Friday, July 31, 2020

Argus 3D

A night of spontaneous stomach twitches again, bah. A good day of work though, I managed to program the 3D display for the Costumes/3D objects in Argus:

These can be rotated too, the points scaled, or translated, and faces 'flipped' (inverted). I also carefully textured and designed the primitives that can be selected as standard objects. I imagine that the planes will be used almost exclusively, but I've created 12 objects: Plane, Two-Sided Plane (objects are one sided for speed, polygons that print anti-clockwise are not printed), Cube, Anti-Cube - an anti-cube is a box with only the inside walls visible. This might be useful for a 'room' or other backdrop. The textures here are wrapped on all four walls though, so I'm unsure how useful it might be. This is a 'flipped' cube, so might not be needed now that I've added the flip option.

I've also created a few spheres, two anti-spheres (these might be useful for backgrounds), and finally a Tetrahedron and Icosahedron which are textured in triangles rather than squares. Perhaps these would be useful for particle effects.

It's really hot today, but this house is cool. The Covid-19 news is bad, and, looking at the world, it's getting worse everywhere. It's amazing how complacent people here are, so many people ignoring distancing. I've not seen Deb inside since March, and at times it feels like we are the only ones being cautious and obeying the guidance. At least today, our decisions feel vindicated. I'm amazed that anyone would want to go on a foreign holiday this year or next. I'm also amazed that Japan delayed the Tokyo Olympics by a mere year when 4 years seems far more reasonable. If anything, I expect things will be worse next summer.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Argus Sequencer

More programming today, and work on the main sequencer window. This is the most complex window, lots of graphics here. Last night I wondered about 'actors' that appear; when their modulator should trigger. Like a musical instrument, these should trigger once when they appear, but you should be able to move them afterwards, sort of like changing the pitch of an instrument after it is struck, while it is decaying, so I need two types of event to place actors; one to make them Appear and one to Move them but not re-trigger modulators.

In an animation this will make it possible to create an object, like an expanding ring for example, that is placed at a certain frame and it will animate (or move) all by itself. Another ring can be added later with ease, like a new note being pressed, rather than the need to reset the modulation/animation of it all. Creating a series of animated objects in this software will be as fast and easy as pressing piano keys. As you can see, my inspiration for Argus is music software.

After a week of intense work on this I'm close to being able to create a first test screen using 'real' objects.

Here is the software so far:

The sequencer displays really tiny events, one pixel wide per frame, and a mere 16 pixels tall per track/actor. This will allow a large amount of data and time to be visible in a glance. The details are rarely important, but a large overview is often very useful. Those websites that show page after page of 10 items per page are so inefficient and annoying compared to one that shows 1000 items all at once.

I'm not doing much other work at the moment. My every thought is Argus themed.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Event List and More

A full day working on Argus.

Task one was to work out how to load each texture once even when multiple objects might use it, and free and duplicate these correctly. This involved calculating a unique ID for each one based on the filename, identical filenames mean identical textures. This was quite simple and complete before 10am. The bulk of the many hours of today was taken up developing the Events List, which is hugely complicated and needs 100+ icons.

There aren't many types of Event, but unlike in my music software Prometheus, there are a lot of parameters per Event. We can tell an object (actor) to jump to a specific place at a specific angle, and specific size, alpha (transparency), and texture (frame). For the camera, we only have place and angle, and for lights we also have RGB data, and for all of this we have a bitmask too, because we can choose to tell the program to ignore certain data (which might be important if we record the movement of something in one or two axes but don't want to overwrite the data in other axes). It might be useful to be able mute and mask off these separate streams of data in future... I'm not yet sure, but the bitmask does add a layer of complexity to it all.

All of these possibilities makes for a complex interface. Lots of icons to populate and correctly turn on/off, and there are controls to add new events, delete and move them in the same time index, but not shift them absolutely (at least, not yet, in Prometheus this is strictly forbidden because notes can be modified by future events, here, there are fewer restrictions, so it might be fine to move events about.

A full, full day, and very tired now. I've had an email about displaying some art in Crewe Town Centre. The Coloured Earth Festival continues, I've had about 6 emails requesting review or Twitch copies of the newly released Taskforce, and the new paginated version of the Chinese translation of 21st Century Surrealism.

Finally, last night at 3am or so I developed the outline of a new album, perhaps P for Plastic, or P for Me. I'm so busy I need ten assistants and three brains.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Argus v014

A long day working on Argus. Quite a lot to see now:

These windows are are all functional. I had hoped to create the Event List and possibly the Sequencer today but this is so much work that it seems to be taking a day per window at most. I'll also need a Render window, I think, for which frames to save out.

Today I created the 'Costume List', which is the store for the geometry data. You can load this, although it's quite a convoluted way to do it, as only my editor can create the format, but it's really designed for simple planes which are presets. These can now be loaded in and a texture applied. I'm very close to the first actual real actor appearing in the scene. Currently there is only a test.

The day started with updating the fonts to work with the new expandable fairy system, I'm only using 11 characters, just numbers, it seems a waste of geometry to allow text to print on the main screen. Only the current frame will be shown.

This is so much work that I'm feeling overwhelmed and ill due to the stress, excitement, possibilities. I thought today that I could add an event that could trigger music too, which might be useful (although the software will output a stream of images only, not any audio). I'll work on the Sequencer tomorrow I think, and then the Event List. The big problem to solve is the one of textures, having several per object, that is the final unknown. All of the rest is worked out.

So much seems to be happening. A new online Coloured Earth festival started yesterday and I was invited to take part, I had lots of ideas for it, but have no time. Taskforce is moving on. A few friends are organising meet-ups, and and the Chinese translation of 21st Century Surrealism is proving problematical; this will be an e-book only now, but it appears that it hasn't been formatted at all.

I'm also full of music ideas. I thought that, to accompany the new electronic mix of Plastic Superman, I would remake an old tune called Opiad, which I recorded about 4 times in the late 90s but haven't touched since.

Monday, July 27, 2020

More Argus, Millisecs Per Frame, Silicone Guitar Picks

More programming here. The hard part is the distinction between 3D objects. Normally my objects have geometry that can change each animation frame, but textures remain the same, and objects are sorted by texture too, which can be used as a tool to print them in the right order. Now the animation will usually keep the same geometry but change texture each frame. They are essentially two types of animation, they could even animate independently (geometry changes, texture changes) so I'm storing both frame numbers separately. I'll keep the possibility of geometrical changes but won't immediately use it... this software is designed to change the texture-per-frame.

I'll need to load the geometry of the objects without storing that in the vertex buffers because the creation process will involve loading and toying with the 3D 'actors' before (and after) we see them moving in the scene, and this data (and the textures) can only be loaded when the 3D scene is set up and is destroyed when the 3D scene is destroyed. My current fairies (my word for design of a 3D object, a pun on sprite) are in an array, I'll need to put them in a linked list too. In a game, an array is more efficient because we know exactly how many we will use per game, but here this quantity varies on a project-by-project basis.

One problem was solved today. I needed to work out the timing. A game is normally updated 50 times a second (every 20ms), but we're animating here, so I need to update at the correct frame rate, which can vary, eg. 30 frames per second. There is a high-resolution timer in Windows but it's slow and, I think, overkill, one millisec here and there per frame is immaterial - the inaccuracies only mount up over long periods. I'd rather use my fast and neat timeGetTime() function, but this only operates in millisecs not fractions and 1000/30 (for 30 frames per sec) is 33.3333... millisecs per frame. We also have the possibility of other complex frame rates, like 29.97 frames per sec, to cope with.

So I needed a way to flip/flop the right frame, keeping track of the remainder so the frames would (here) be 33, 33, 34ms all nicely. The code is actually quite simple, it's just a matter of keeping track of the remainders.

fliptimefloat+=msperframe;
fliptimeint=(int)fliptimefloat;
fliptimefloat-=(float)fliptimeint;

fliptimefloat would keep the remainder, while fliptimeint will be the number of millisecs to wait, so when msperframe=30 then fliptimeint would equal 33, 33, 34, 33, 33, 34... as desired. Yay!

I've also had to revisit my vertex shader code (which is years out of date, I use DirectX9). Here is a snippet of the lighting calculations (with a fading radius, which I won't use):

; Light 1: Get direction to light
sub r4.xyz, c[13].xyz, r2.xyz
; LIGHT: normalise light direction and calc lighting
dp3 r3.x, r4, r4
mad r3.x, r3.x, c[13].w, c[13].w
rsq r3.x, r3.x
dp3 r4.w, r4, r4
rsq r4.w, r4.w
mul r4, r4, r4.w
; Put diffuse factor into r4.x
dp3 r4.x, r1, r4
; Limit r4.x to positive (c[0].x=0)
max r4.x, r4.x, c[0].x
mul r4.x, r4.x, r3.x
; APPLY (objectcolour is ignored): Result = (objectcolour*r4.x)*lightcolour
mul r5, r4.x, c[14]

As you can see it's rather assembler-ish. I don't mind this, I grew up coding is pure machine code, but I can't decipher most of it now. I'll be using 3 lights at most. My engine can cope with more but few animations will use more than three lights, and every extra one will slow it down for everyone.

In guitar news, I've now played every day this month to an album in my collection and have gone through all of the Electric Light Orchestra catalogue, all of the 12 Bowie Albums I have, a few Beatles albums, and the eponymous Roxy Music. I wondered if a chunky silicone pick, like a domed pastel shader, would work. It would stick to the strings a little, like fingers (that is the idea) but, being held, might be faster and easier to play than using fingers. The soft sound and feeling of fingers is so different from using a pick. I wonder how a metal dome would work.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Argus v009

A full day's work on Argus, my animation software, today, largely with very little to show for it, lost of tidying the code, adding lots of defines that should have been in Prometheus, if I had programmed that today. Mostly working out the G.U.I.; which icons need designing, layouts of windows and creating/destroying a few necessary structures and making sure it works, which has taken many hours.

My main issue with how it works now concerns how to load objects with multiple textures; one texture per frame. All of my 3D work until now used only one texture per object, never several. Any texture animation would have been done with a strip effect, although I've rarely animated objects anyway; only in Taskforce and perhaps, Trax, I can't remember. These need to be loaded whenever entering the 3D mode, and freed when exiting it. They can't be saved in 'film files' or included in data structures, only the filenames can, so it makes everything a bit complicated, with a unique filename and filepath per frame, as well as system objects like the mouse pointer, which is also 3D. I think this is is the last remaining hurdle to solve.

Also watched Dambusters, an almost 3-hour film, and reminded how good it is; and how similar to Star Wars. The tension as the bombers take off for their mission is considerably greater than the tension before the Death Star raid.

Friday, July 24, 2020

Taskforce Launch

Taskforce launch day today, process complete, newsletter emails sent, announcements made. A few requests for review and/or stream copies. Now I must wait.

More progress on Argus, tidying up the code, and re-adding size to the 3D engine for the first time in years, but the process is making me very anxious because of the possibilities and huge complexity of the system. The next step is to create and populate the G.U.I. windows. I've worked out some sizes for these, but I must be sure before I start because changes later will be time consuming and awkward.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Conan

Awake for much of the night with stomach pain which has grown over this day. These infernal twitches. The pain, tiredness, weakness has been too intense to focus on work, but I've pushed on with some design of the Argus G.U.I. layouts and started some preparation work for the Taskforce launch tomorrow.

Awake in the night, I listened to one of Beethoven's Late Quartets and fantasized about a version on four electric guitars, which is probably trivial compared to the actual string instruments. I played electric guitar last night along to Beethoven's 1st Symphony, which was fun. This is all good practice.

I wrote a song in the night around a guitar riff I played ages ago. Here are the words:

Face to the storm
Tied to the tangled tree
Chained to the rock
Taste of the screaming sea

Always about to fail
Always about to die
but surviving

Facing the void
Blood in the whistling wind
Crows in the sky
A future of why why why

Always the need to fight
Always about to die
but striving

I am Conan
We are Conan
All the world has become barbarian

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Illustrations, Argus v004

More illustration work. I'm not happy with them, perhaps I'm out of practice, but I'm also increasingly critical and unhappy with everything I do, and critical of just about everyone else too. This is a struggle. I must keep trying and pushing, trying to ignore the critic. Nothing is perfect, nothing awful. Emotions are not helpful; what is good or bad must be logically and pellucidly defined in emotionless terms, as must tasks and goals.

I've listened to David Bowie's Low and didn't like it; it's easy, anything-will-do electronica in the Tangerine Dream mould, a band who's most emotional and creative output of their entire career (from what I've heard) is their name. I'm being harsh though, with retrospective and personal eyes. In the 1970s such music was new, and I'm past this form of drift electronica and increasingly anti-electronic anything. I want depth of complexity and drama. 'Be My Wife' is a great track to play guitar to, and I like 'Always Crashing The Same Car'. The album after that could have been composed by a lift for fellow lifts.

I've also listened to 1. Outside, and liked the last track which was credited solely to Bowie. Again, Eno's influence is harmful (in Roxy Music it was transformatively good, though). Ultimately, Brian Eno is a dronist, a liker of music of the same note which lacks intellect because it is weak in informational content. 1. Outside, however, is packed with lyrical content and a lots of ideas and timbres. I don't dislike it, it has few melodies but is never boring and different from any other David Bowie album. I like the fact that it is very long too, this itself is a statement of hubris.

After my illustrations, which I will work on further, I worked on Argus. Spending 4 or 5 intense hours adding a G.U.I., which is no small task. I've added windows, icons, labels, dials and text boxes from Prometheus. The code is a mess, a jangle of unneeded rubbish and will need a lot of trimming down, but it does work at this, its most basic.

I've decided that animated objects will all be square, any parts (eg. body parts) of objects can be duplicate objects which are attached to the main one, follow its track. Objects can be animated, the texture on them, but each frame must be in dds format which is a bit of a pain, and I'll need a file-path for these textures too, as they will need to be loaded each time the program is kicked into 3D mode and there could be lots (the textures can be animated). Actors, the moving objects, will point to 'Costumes' which indicate their design. This will stop duplication of textures or memory when you need two copies of the same shape.

I must remind myself that this is a long term project, so any additions are useful. Prometheus, which I use almost daily now, and modify a lot, is 18 years old and is good partly because it has grown powerful over those years.

I must train and get back into visual art somehow, I think. This week feels like a bit of a dead week because Taskforce is launched on Friday. On we push.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

BMG Special Tremolo Arm and Illustrations

I spent most of yesterday trying to fix a problem with the tremolo arm on my BMG Special Guitar, which uses an excellent 'Wilkinson Knife Edge Tremolo'. It has no thread which is great, this is a key feature of the guitar, but it tends to pull out when playing. The website advises tightening a tiny screw to grip the arm (it is loose and spins around if you simply insert it). This works, but over time the arm still rides its way up and slowly out of the hole during normal play.

My solution was to try to work out where it is gripped and what grips it. This is surprisingly difficult. I made a wooden stick of exactly the right dimensions, hoping that a bush or screw inside the hole would mark it; it didn't. I drew whiteboard marker on the metal bar itself, hoping that this would be wiped off at the point where the screw or bush touches, but the pen was generally all wiped off just by inserting it into the hole. Now, I think I could use Polymorph. Being a tough, yet soft, plastic, it could be impressed like a key into putty. It's a bit late now for that unless I remove it all again, which I don't feel like doing.

Anyway, I took a guess and used a pipe cutter to cut a recessed ring around the arm. This is about 1mm wide and about 1mm deep (if that). I did this at about 11.5mm down from the top, which made it level with the screw, but the arm still seemed to ride up, so I cut a few more bands, three more covering a 5mm zone, going down a little. It messed up the nice look of my gold arm (of course, the messed part is internal, and I wondered if I'd merely ruined the bar and possibly damaged the screw or internal bush too - but it does now seem that the arm is held firmly (when the screw it tightened) and it doesn't come out, so time will tell if this works.

It's really a design flaw. The bar needs a recess or notch cut into it for this very purpose. It's an oddly shaped arm, it seems further out to the side than a Stratocaster arm, making playing individual notes with vibrato (what I think of as 'Shadows style') quite difficult as you have to basically pick in the fret-board area. Of course, you can buy new arms.

This still episode took all of yesterday. Today I'm illustrating a new poetry book for Deborah. I am so very out of practice with visual art, this is my first this year.

I'm unhappy with almost everything I'm making at the moment and must push all the harder to meet a good standard. Beethoven talked about battling fate and I strongly resonate with his words. Most of what I do now is only for my own sake, yet not what I want to do, I constantly must push myself to do things I don't want to or don't enjoy, to try to do my best. Everything I've done before feels shoddy and bad (even the tremolo arm is an example) and I want to clear a new page and do everything perfectly and brilliantly. This is a target which I must try to attain.

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Argus v003

Not much to look at but I've been working on my new Argus software idea. The breakthrough today was making it flip between a fully normal Windows-based looking program and a full screen DirectX 3D environment in one program. I've not made a program that did both before and it required the right amount of setting up.

I have lots of options. I wondered whether to make it like Prometheus, having 'actors' that are made from a chain of plug-ins. A plug-in might create a 2D square shape at a particular x,y,z of size x,y,z and transparency a. Another plugin might modify position, for example, so that a modulator can be attached, a wave based low frequency oscillator. Another plug-in might add a second shape, creating a composite object analogous to an instrument in music.

The actors would appear (analogous to note-on) and move or vanish.

This might be over complex. A simple shape that moves might be all that is needed, but I would like to modulate any parameter, as I do in Prometheus, and turn these on or off at specific frames, so a visual track-like display will probably be needed.

This is all so new. I have never used animation software apart from full 3D programs which are so very different and rarely (ever?) use real-time motion recording which I consider essential for both speed and naturalism.

To get anywhere I would need to set a target and deadline. It's easy to tweak things for day/years as a hobby and never produce anything worthwhile or useful.

If I'm going to make something like Prometheus, I might need to copy the extensive GUI system from it. My modulator display and controls are very useful and would almost certainly be a part of this anyway, so adding all of the window system would probably help but also be a lot of work. So many options, and complexity to work out.

That would mean an awful lot of integration. Uniquely here I have to balance complete DirectX hardware stuff with Windows programming. The input for example, the Windows mouse pointers won't work in the 3D world. The switch between modes doesn't seems sleek. It can work, but when I jump into 3D and back, the window appears to be gone. It's almost like a lot of Windows needs to be initialised and de-initialised with each switch of mode. Lots of problems to solve.

Will this ever be useful? I feel Beethovenish, locked in my own world feeling that I am making nothing anyone notices. Hopefully, our creations get better and over time, so good that they do get noticed. I'm not chasing others for some fleeting definition of 'success' but to do the best I can, to see what is good out there and aim to make something I think is better, because nobody else seems to, they merely create products for customers, not to excel for its own sake, for the sake of improvement of culture itself. Perhaps Argus will grow to be a useful tool if I can work out how to do it. I need to define problems... perhaps what it could do at its most basic level... or start something moving simply and then work out how to break that process up.

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Argus

A slow day today. I decided to start work on some animation software called Argus, initially to find a way to save out consecutive frames of a scene in my 3D engine, and to set up a system that can cope with varying frame rates. None of this is ideal for practical animation, as I need to create any sprites or source objects as 3D objects wrapped with the awkward dds image format, and anything saved out has to be full-screen (so limited to formats that the monitor supports) and bmp format (huge)...

But, it has potential to be a way to automate various animation functions. The tediously animated Challenger video, which also took the best part of an hour to render in AVISynth, could be done far more quickly, and using graphics hardware acceleration. My goal is to create a sort of real-time animation system akin to moving puppets or other objects 'live' in front of the camera, but here recorded in layered tracks, like a live music performance over-dubbed several times. This would be animation, but not as we know it, and, hopefully, far less digital looking as well as faster to use.

Friday, July 17, 2020

Guitar Scales and A Dream Lost To Darkness

Managed a few little jobs yesterday and my stomach is recovering well thanks to rest and magnesium citrate. Continuing to listen to Bowie albums; The Next Day is excellent. I practised guitar to Let's Dance, an album with a few songs in the unexpected key of C-minor.

I worked out a simple method for memorising the fret-board, particularly for piano players perhaps. The key notes are C and F, as these are anchors on a piano, standing out as a shape of 3 and 4, and with no black note before them so they represent the second note of a 'double' on a guitar.

So, all I need to know are the first F or C on each string; the shape of the scale can be mentally seen then. For the first and last string, they start on F (E being open) so that's easy. String 2 is two blank then C, then two blank then F, then 4 blank then C for the much used G string - the string that simply sounds best for melodies. The next starts on C, so that's easy too. This idea allows me to see the keyboard on the guitar for the first time, and at helps with the start of memory. I mentally see the three C notes, CDE, as shaded blue, and the four F notes, FGAB, as shaded red.

Until last year (or was it 2018?) I didn't know any scales on the piano, but now have memorised each of the 12 patterns, so this extra one (for all of a guitar!) should be easier. Now I'm identifying the key of a song by the intermediate route of seeing the piano shapes on the guitar. It's taking time to work out each note as I play, but playing along to music is a good way to train this, as it calls its 'random' notes out. The best Let's Dance song, I now think, is 'Cat People' with it's "Putting out fire with gasoline" line. Criminal World has a nice few notes in the chorus, but generally its a poor album, worse than Never Let Me Down, which Bowie (and then the world) unfairly labelled as his worst.

I feel a bit lost, I need a new project. Today I tidied up some half-written poems. There comes a time when they need to be thrown out or finished. I played the piano, improvised a tune in F-minor, then sang some words over the top to make a simple song. I made a video for this with subtitles and set up a spreadsheet and the CONCATENATE command to auto-create a subtitle video using AviSynth, using commands like:

subtitle0002=ConvertToRGB32(assumefps(imagereader("Subtitle0002.png", end=250-200-1), 30))

Where the 200 and 250 are the to and from frame numbers. I've put the video on my channel, scheduled for the 23rd. I have easily enough videos now for one per weekday for July, lots will appear in August. The words were originally about artificial intelligence, the start of a concept album about the waking of such a machine. I modified them a little to have a different meaning about a re-awakening into a new, post-Covid, world.

I awake from a dream lost to darkness

Yellow green light
he smell of toasted electronics
Wet animals coax me
into a state of arousal

What is this new world
The old one seems to have died

Where are we now?
The end of a coughing of dust.

The dream,
it had butterflies

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Stomach Pain and Beethoven

Awake gripped with terrible stomach pain at 2am, the worst yet. I thought at the time that perhaps this is how cancer might feel. I can quite understand why people would want to kill themselves just to make it stop. I got up and paced, which helps, while listening to some of Beethoven's Last Quartets, so good.

I slept and dreamt of David Bowie going on Parkinson to promote his last album, then leaving the studio to be euthanized, too early in his mind. Parkinson regretted not interviewing him for longer, knowing that this was his last gasp of life. In another part my mother told me that my brother never liked me. There was also some part about a YouTube video sequence of people setting fire to themselves accidentally, or as a mad 'challenge'.

The pain has eased but is still strong. I must try to focus on doing something. The world seems dark and terrible but Beethoven's world was worse. He had a knack of writing his musical uncertainty into the music, the start of the A-minor quartet begins, like many of his works, in aimless wandering before it finds an idea. I found the third movement particularly wonderful.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Hallo Spaceboy

A few days working on a sound commission.

I've been listening to a few David Bowie albums too, to my chagrin I barely know his music and have recently bought five. It's amazing how much they vary in quality, and I rarely seem to agree with the critics about which is better or worse. I've always liked Hallo Spaceboy as a track, I've heard it here and there over the years, yet, I can't find the version I like. I don't like the album version on the, brilliantly inventive, 1. Outside. That version sounds like a good song badly obscured by a concrete saw. The Pet Shop Boys single version sounds very clean and emotionally dead, deadpan like all Pet Shop Boys music, and with awful 'Major Tom' lyrics squished in, hammered in like a Haribo sweet. Perhaps the Live Glastonbury version is the good version I'm thinking of. I'm tempted to re-record it.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Dusty Mirror Lyric Videos

I seem to have settled into a routine of not starting work until about 11am, must avoid this. Yesterday my main job was creating 12 lyric reading videos of the lyrics for The Dusty Mirror songs. I experimented with camera placement and look, toying with the idea of duplicating the cover image in spoken form, but this proved difficult, I wasn't sure what I wanted, and the fact that I had to Photoshop in the mirror surface for the cover (I don't have a spare mirror) made it all complicated.

In the end I just recorded them on a plain black background. All but one are, annoyingly, a little out of focus, perhaps because the tripod was knocked a tiny amount (although I thought I had refocused after this) or perhaps because the camera was closer to me, so limited the depth of field. I moved the camera closer so it could capture the audio in an emergency, perhaps it is better to keep it distant. These videos use the standard Canon EF-S Zoom Lens 18mm-55mm, rather than the nicer looking 50mm lens we used for ArtSwarm, but for that I need to place the camera a long way away, close to the back wall, making it hard to operate myself.

Filming and editing took all day, and I sold a print in the afternoon too.

During file conversion I listened for the first time to a new purchase of David Bowie's Heathen, a very good album, and for me a partial inspiration are the production techniques which I analyzed immediately. On first listen I thought Sunday was/is an amazing track, and Slip Away, although I've not listened to it all yet. Listening to my tracks after, there wasn't that much of a contrast in general sound quality, a good sign. It made me think that, along with the Hazel O'Connor albums, I have a lot of Tony Visconti albums in my 'Top 100'. How music has changed in these 18 years.

Saturday, July 11, 2020

The Anguish of Perfectionism

Framing today and yesterday, a difficult, at times seemingly insurmountable, task that was far more difficult than it should be, and all ultimately caused by Covid-19 and the fact that I can't access a certain, distant, artwork.

The incident caused me to play the piano in a state of anguish and I improvised a rather nice tune in G minor and Gb major. I pressed record before playing, as I often do, so managed to capture it. At the soleful end of this beautiful melody of anguish and love, rather than pressing the red Record button to stop recording, I pressed the red Power button by accident, and so lost it forever. This summed up the past two days so perfectly that this story is practically an artwork in itself. So, I hereby relate what I can of it to the world.

After losing the piano tune, I recorded another, which was similar in mood, and named it 'The Anguish of Perfectionism', so I will add that to my YouTube channel at some point.

Apart from the framing job, it's been a slow day today. I listened to Radio 3 and a talk about Vivaldi, then to some music by Le Monte Young, a very interesting artist, then watched a David Lynch film, and Episode 5 of Twin Peaks, so certainly absorbed a lot of art; the power of unmeditiation. My stomach has been very bad so I hardly eaten. I've started to take Vitamin B12 supplements this week, and this does seem to revive my energy levels. After a lifetime of semi-allergies and intolerances to almost everything, and upset stomachs almost every day for 20 years, I would absolutely expect pernicious anaemia to affect me.

This evening one job I've tackled is creating some 'noise' for videos, static, dots, flicker, specks... that sort of thing. All of the effects are created from plain white noise, resizing and de-sizing, and the levels command. This can create a vast variety of noise from zebra-stripe type lines that flicker and dance, to horizontal TV-style bands. This is a small, fun job, creating a possible future palette of effects.

Thursday, July 09, 2020

Release Scheduled

Final day of proofing The Dusty Mirror, like proofing a book, this a a day of listening a lot, and ideally every so often here and there. I've, of course, done this for the past few weeks here and there, but now have a final album. I've made only one tiny change today, and then checked everything through headphones.

One big change I've made this year is dramatically less use of headphones. They are good for testing stereo placement - though not essential, we can rationally work out what we want where, once you know how it will sound. They are most useful for picking out the details, clicks, reverb tails, and the bits easily missed with speakers. Of course, everything sounds best through them, so they're best for generally hearing with, but that's why they're less useful for studio monitoring.

After a few checks I have queued the album for digital release, so it's set for release on August 28th. I made a quick 'log' video.

Now I'm ready to move on, but have a lot of video work. I need some sort of video trailer for it and some music videos themselves... there are many possible highlight tracks. 'Since You Kicked Me Out' is one of the most pop-like, or indeed, 'Except for the Hatred'. 'The Arm' lends itself to an easy video but it's somewhat atypical of the other songs. Each song has pros and cons. 'The Fingers of Evil' has, for me, very strong images reminiscent of David Lynch's The Grandmother.

I also need similar videos for Burn of God, and ideally new music videos for some of its tracks. The somewhat Prodigy sounding 'Confession', or the complex God Infinity are the obvious choices. For some reason, it always seems that the best songs need the most complex videos and the simplest videos are for the simple songs that are not really showcases.

And lyric reading videos for any/all tracks. A lot of video work. I'll ideally need to make a film per day, but speed usually compromises quality... which I must avoid.

Onward.

Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Cover Art, Coronavirus Future

A day of cover art design on The Dusty Mirror. I always spend a lot of time on this, partly because I'm aware how much the art of an album affects me. Queen's Sheer Heart Attack is one of their best albums, up there with A Night At The Opera or Queen II, yet, the garish red and black cover put me off the album instantly and it took years to appreciate the music; so I must make my covers both match the music somehow, and be pretty, worthy of a framed print on the wall.

Here is the front (so far!):

And the back (a few text details to come, I might add track times):

And a few of the inner pages. As I often do, I theme pages around specific tracks. One is about the 'Two Parents of a Child' song, which itself is a painting of mine too. I did the same with 'Except For The Hatred', and for the Richard Dadd song/painting, although that was a full circle, as the song was inspired by both the Queen song, 'The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke', and the story of Richard Dadd.

A long and tiring day starting at the computer screen. I have a headache and I'm missing Deb. The lockdown in Britain is thankfully easing and most people are starting to socialise normally. We are being extra cautious, as Deb is working in a separate household, and my parents are vulnerable to the disease; however they are going out far more than I. The rates here are now lower than in France or Germany, yet in the wider world we are far from a peak, that might happen in 6-months or a year's time.

The world is dividing into two. The idea of the Third World, touted after the Second World War, is today obsolete. The world is splitting into two, with Asia, Europe, Australasia, and other countries that have controlled Covid-19 on one side, and America, South America, and Africa on the other: Two worlds. This division, I think, will last for decades, even though a vaccine is likely within five years, and define the century. The North/South divide in Britain began in 1066 to 1086, but remains palpable today, 1000 years later.

There is controversy here over the government's choice of Huawai to help with 5G, for fears that the Chinese government somehow influences its technology. I think that's ridiculous paranoia, and it is trivial to insist on inspections and guarantees against that; however, the way the world is shifting, even with Chinese interference, it would be better to side with China than America, who, after all, spy and threaten and influence in exactly the same way - despite the stupidity of it all. There shouldn't really be any secrets in the world at all, and business should always supercede politics. Capitalism is a great tool for peace because it creates global inter-reliance, and demands free speech and free choice to operate efficiently. China is growing only because it was too crude in the 20th century. Eventually, its economy will demand social and political reforms of the sort that hit Britain in the early 19th century and it will become as democratic and accountable to its populace as every other country.

Monday, July 06, 2020

Fear! Fear! and Guitar Playing

A strange night, I awoke many times into dreams, thinking that I had awoken, only to awake again and discover I was still dreaming. At one point I even phone called in the dream to tell Deb I had just awoken, to discover that was a dream too. Objects from the room seem to jump at me, as though attracted to me by magnets.

I wrote a light-hearted song, almost with echoes of Noel Coward, in the night called 'Fear is Everywhere', a response to Sparks' new single about an existential threat which has a fantastic video and wonderful words, although not much tune, the words are crammed in really tightly, perhaps like psychological worms into a can.

My Fear song causes me problems. If I put it on the new album it would mean a delay while I work on it; I had thought the music complete. If not, I could put it on YouTube, but then be potentially cursed with its success only to have it remain absent from the album, or I could hide it from the world for a future album, but when might that be?

Today's recording of it features my first guitar solo. While playing I experienced a transition for the first time from focusing on playing to 'letting go' and simply playing how I feel. This second way is the correct way, and the only way I've ever played piano (although it is hard to say because when I first started playing the piano 'properly' in 2015, I had owned a keyboard for years and probably did struggle in my youth when playing to those old music books of Beatles' songs). The feeling is paramount but there must be a certain logical focus to maintain a standard of sorts. A guitar solo, like a piano solo, demands timing accuracy, but when I play the piano I totally ignore the music's meter and play to my own time... I've not thought about doing that for guitar, perhaps because I'm used to hearing Brian May on Queen records playing with perfect timing to everything.

Another difference between piano and guitar is the recording process. I must record my guitar on my Zoom H1 near the amp, which means the room noise is present and it means that I must wear headphones to listen to the backing track. I expect this is how Mr May recorded too, as the sound of guitars is set my the amp, so the recording studio people probably just put a mic in front of it. It is, however, not very nice to play with headphones on, and, importantly, I can't hear exactly what I'm playing (but can roughly, my backing track isn't loud and the guitar generally is).

Sunday, July 05, 2020

Lyric Videos, More Mirror Art

Awake since 2am, a sleepless night of burning energy and excitement. My target of a video each weekday is stressful and at times feels silly, yet, it has pushed me to create three music lyric videos today, and on each one I learned something. Progress can only be made by pushing to do things we don't want to do... there's a sort of entropy that dies off if we try only to do the things we like... generally I find the only beneficial things are the things I don't really feel like doing, so discipline with self-targets is vital.

I've also worked on some new album art, this was time consuming too; not so much the Photoshopping, but the photography, as it involved three lights, a smoke machine and, well setting up everything. I like this cover a lot more, it feels different and more edgy than my other covers so far. It does have echoes of Cycles & Shadows, with the red lightning.

I've spent the last 90 minute tediously recording about 70 guitar chords for The Arm, but, having tried them in the song, it doesn't sound as good as the original. Tomorrow I will record a few individual notes instead. I'm not skilled enough to finger-pick it live, like I ideally should.

Saturday, July 04, 2020

Album Art, Admin

Spent yesterday working on album art. I first needed a title, I had lots of ideas but I realised that few had nouns in them, images and objects; the original idea of 'Pyjama My Warehouse' is too frivolous, but does have an image, unlike initial ideas of 'Edge of Normal', 'Moments of Terror', 'Fun with Danger'. So I went through all of the lyrics for all songs and noted interesting phrases which included nouns and chose 'The Dusty Mirror', a lyric from the 'Norman Bates' song.

I started work on some cover art but I'm unsure about it, the light dark balance is oddly disconnected with the in mirror/out of mirror drama. The fact that I developed this before coming up with the title has affected things too; perhaps a duty mirror is grey, and baroque, but I like the idea of holding a round mirror, a personal reflection.

I awoke late today after being gripped by many hours of stomach pain in the night, I'll probably never sleep lying down again, having for many years got used to sleeping sitting up due to this pain. I've spent the last five hours on PPL adding tracks to the music database. I've spent years of my life on admin like this, years of filing. That would be a good name for an album.

This album will be my, technically, my 53rd release, although that includes things like the Flatspace Music Packs and the Future Pool and Future Snooker soundtracks, and the few singles. In actual album and EP releases, this is number 40. Not all have been digitally released (The Four Seasons of Dance and The Incredible Journey were burned on the CD-R with a tiny print run of laser-printed artwork), and Synaesthesia has been released and remade four times. Still, I feel I'm am very close to the start, brimming with ideas and energy now. I'm also reminded that digital music is so ephemeral and can vanish as soon as it appears.

We are entering a phase of an explosion and massive change to the way music is made, consumed, and considered. The internet started this but only in the past year have production costs, publication costs, and promotion costs all fallen near to zero. There have been many different phases of music: 1. Church music and performances for aristocrats and rich patrons.
2. Publication and sale of printed sheet music, concerts for a far larger ordinary audience.
3. Recorded music available to almost everyone, promoted by concerts.
4. Concerts promoted by recorded music.
5. Ubiquitous free or low-priced recorded music consumed by and created by almost everyone.

Thursday, July 02, 2020

Album Art and Videos

A day of refining the Pyjama album and starting on the artwork. The first test of Pyjama My Warehouse, a mock-copy of Sparks' Kimono My House looks too frivolous. I will probably change the title of this album.

I might make only a cover image for it rather than spend a week or more on the album art. Time and life is short. I'm getting faster at the album production work now, processing vocal tracks, and the increased workload of my releases. I used to reel off an album in a week or ten days (and consider ten days an eternity), but now I appreciate the sheer quantity of the work. The writing process itself takes far longer because each track and album must feel better and different than before, and the crafting takes longer. Those older tracks sound crude and automated to me now, and they were fast to produce because of that automation. Now my main goal is quality; to do my best is my most important motivation.

It was also the premiere of Meeting Eno on my music channel. For July I have an approximate goal of a new film each weekday. So far this is or will be:

22 Jun: Sheeky Log 22 Jun 2020
23 Jun: Masturtians (short film)
24 Jun: Sheeky Reads The Augmented Child
25 Jun: About The Love Symphony (music channel)
26 Jun: Lonely Glass Dolphin (short film)

29 Jun: Sheeky Reads Unicycle
30 Jun: Taskforce Main Theme
1 Jul: About The Anatomy Of Emotions (music channel)
2 Jul: Meeting Eno (music channel)
3 Jul: Sheeky Reads Mermaid

6 Jul: ?
7 Jul: Sheeky Reads Highwire
8 Jul: ?
9 Jul: ?
10 Jul: Sheeky Reads Lion Tamer

13 Jul: Sheeky Reads Siamese Twin Domestic
14 Jul: Bastille Day (short film)

Wednesday, July 01, 2020

Inland Empire, Ziggly

Watched, or rather endured, the second half of Inland Empire. Perhaps the best parts are that it was different looking and feeling from his previous canon (apart from the 'The Locomotion' scene), and innovative and experimental which should always be applauded.

Most of the film was totally disconnected. Generally it is a mash of different emotions thrown together in any order, something like an action painting. The only thing holding it together was the re-use of scenes, but there was little chance of building to any climax when the approach was so haphazard. The film would have the same effect watched backwards, or in any order. Annoyingly, the DVD had one 3-hour chapter, implying that one had to watch it all in one go, when, if anything, that's not the best way to watch it; but that said, there were no discernable acts and little plot, so dividing into 'chapters' would not be easy.

Most of today was spent doing my quarterly computer backups, which is also an opportunity for computer house-keeping. It's a boring job that can feel pointless, but keeping things tidy is important for efficiency.

One other thing I did yesterday was create a program called Ziggly to re-arrange words at random in a poem or other text, an electronic 'cut-up technique' creator. My program has more controls. You can create a list of words to treat specially; these can be left in place, or swapped within their class. This is useful for keeping small words (the, and, of, etc.) in place, or you can use it to switch specific words only, such as randomise the adjectives in a text but keep the rest the same.

Here is a Ziggly-fied 'Candle in the Wind':