The Flatspace covers have started to become live today. The Flatspace II anniversary sale was more popular than expected with over 30 sales of various Flatspacey things, which is excellent. 21st Century Surrealism has sold 10 this month too, which is about average, and I feel it can do more; I must reach further with this.
I spent the morning reading back my emails from 2001, to try and determine the date of the launch of Radioactive. How odd, how distant that time seems. I feel so different from the person I was then, when my entire social life was based on email. It was a sad time I'm happy to forget, yet like all memories its feels strangely pleasant to reminisce. I had lots of pen pals I'd forgotten about, but often only for a month or two. I didn't discover the Radioactive launch date. At the time I was strung along by two different software companies, both asking for changes and enticements so that they might publish the game - I got nothing from either in the end (and Crystal Interactive still owe me over $4000 for game box design work). It wasn't until 2002 when I had finally hit rock bottom and had enough of such people and decided to self-publish, and found IndieSFX and Bytten and many other things in this first 'renaissance' year.
Today I've tweaked the Arcangel cover again.
In particular, re-rendering the logo in Lightwave. The old logo was rendered in Imagine. Lightwave has much better anti-aliasing - still some of the best anti-aliasing in all of computer graphics, and the old logo was a bit jaggy. As you can see, the general look is more reserved than the earlier draft and was inspired by classical recordings.
The music has been compared to Philip Glass, and it does have something of a minimalist repetition to it, although very digital of course. Now, to me, it is the very analogue, hand repetition that makes that early minimalism rather nice. When electronic, it can easily sound too harsh, unless one is careful. For me, Sparks' Carnegie Hall song represents the best of the more recent digital minimalism - as good as any Glass' work. Actually, listening to his Mad Rush (which is not a mad rush, its more like a bubbling stream or fall of autumn leaves) it reminded me of my ArtsLab tunes like Murmuration and The Dark Cliffs, but my tunes had far more drama. Listening now, The Dark Cliffs is better than all of Glass' Solo Piano album. His violin concerto remains excellent, however.
I need to whip myself into creative action; it seems to take a day or more now to switch from one medium to another. Music will be my focus next because I can't make a Fall in Green video in this pandemicological climate. I have lots of ideas, generally based on sorting songs into categories to unify them. I have a few older songs that need an outing; The Invisible Man, Incomplete Version of the Writer. It's better to finish something half finished than start something new. If I do this, then the next album will be a bit like The Dusty Mirror, a collection of songs without a central theme, like a Beatles album. If I do this, I must be better than The Beatles. It seems easy to be better than McCartney's or Lennon's solo work - I feel they could have done so much better if they had forced themselves to do so, rather than sit on laurels, but ho, it's easy to say that; I have no laurels and would reject any for this very reason. Every creative act of worth must be difficult, full of doubt and back and forth analysis. Good art cannot come easy. Praise from others is no guide. Only the artist knows what is good.
Onward!
