Back to music this week. I have a few ideas in progress, not the least the second Fall in Green album, The Apocalypse of Clowns, which I paused in February, having completed 6 or 7 tracks.
I also want to make something for Plastic Superman and have outlined a few electronic sounding songs and ideas and other fragments. I must aim for new things and remind myself of the pointlessness of doing the same of stuff... things must push me in some way, always.
I've also had a second thought about Argus. Having made two films with it now, it seems silly to link Actors and Tracks so closely... at first I thought of Costumes as 'instruments' and aimed to be simple, but actually, I sometimes need one Actor to play over several tracks, and it's not efficient to use and edit several clones. The answer seems to be to create separate tracks... Actors are instruments, Costumes are more like samples; data used by Actors. A change like this is a lot of work, all sequencer events are now stored in the Actor structures. The Modulator pointers would be part of the Tracks, and it would mean the removal of the ability to change modulators via a command (or change costume) but that can be done simply by using a different actor anyway.
The changes would be so radical as to invalidate the file format. For only two films (thus far) it's more efficient to simply save a copy of the v1.00 exe file, in case I ever need to tweak or re-render those, rather than program a complicated importer.
Changes like this are perhaps inevitable. Only by using this experimental software do I know what parts work and how it all should work. It was the same with NoiseStation which became radically different in its second incarnation.
In other news, the Chinese translation of 21st Century Surrealism is now live, on sale as an eBook on Smashwords, a good site which happens to look rather old-fashioned and child-like.
Also, today, Since You Kicked Me Out had a world premiere on Chester community radio station, Circl8 Radio. The Dusty Mirror will be released in 8-days on the 28th. I've made lyric videos for the whole album, shared this 'single' and posted a few lyric fragments on social media; this is the limit of my promotion. If it takes of, it will take off, my main concern is new work, as always. The Dusty Mirror had many goals and purposes, most of which have been attained. I'm full of energy and ideas for more audio creations.
In guitar, I've been playing to the albums by Renaissance (still one of my all-time favourite bands) and the results sound amazing, perhaps because I know the music so well? So far I've played to almost all of the E.L.O. albums, about 20 David Bowie albums, one Roxy Music, one Queen, about two Beatles albums, and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Maybe I need to go back and re-cycle this secret concert series.
