Zeitraum Debugging, Suicide & Invisible Vocals

Listened to the New Music Show on Radio 3 last night. The piece that inspired me most was a piece for two snare drums and ensemble which involved playing the drums as though reading out phone numbers. While listening to the two hour show I worked on my Zeitraum programming, programming at an unusually late hour. It's an effect of four waves so I thought it might be fun to make each of those settable separately with individual tuning and speed... but in practice it was complex and slow to do that.

So today I merely added four independent tunings to the 'tuned' version of the effect. I've created a demo of it on my SoundCloud account but it's probably out of date and deleted by the time you read this (beyond the year 2100, I expect, how are your robot butlers performing these days?). Comparing the wave from the tuned and untuned version I saw a slight difference when they should have been identical (at a reference pitch). I spent over an hour comparing the effects, checking that everything was in tune and that even my basic sample processing algorithms were in tune, comparing the wave to a reference sine wave.

I tracked the error down to adding 99 twice. My effects are based on cents (100ths of a semitone) so my look-up tables are in 100s and that makes indices 49, 149, 249 etc. in tune. So notes tend to end in 9. I added 9 twice so it ended in 8, and so was one cent flat. I fixed that then found a few other silly bugs based on typing errors. This took me up to lunch or so. I then started to work on the music.

I recorded the vocals to The Problem of Suicide and The Invisible Man, both in one take and with ease. What a joy this is! For the first time today I feel I am starting to sing and know what my natural and relaxed voice should sound like, confident in an instant instrumental performance in the way I am with piano and guitar. I know I could go back now I re-record my older songs and improve them - but I also know that such feelings are part of any creation process. Oddly, I rarely feel like going back and 'improving' my old paintings. The trick is to look to the future. It's better to create new things than rework old things. An artist should really only be doing new things. The lustful ache for the new must always be stronger than the angst to tidy up and perfect the past.

The Problem of Suicide is fun because it starts quietly then explodes into a distant cry of long notes, like a soaring eagle. It then ends with the third verse back in quiet vocals and in the same melody. This was something I decided on and improvised today. The older version has this vocoded in one note, borrowing from the Flatspace theme, but real vocals sound much better.

January is complete and in the month I've made the Jabberwocky video, re-recorded and released The Infinite Forest, queued up Apocalypse of Clowns, largely completed The Myth of Sisyphus, but also substantially upgraded my music software and capabilities. I must push on and make the most of February. I feel like the door to a new renaissance is starting to open, but must take care to create the best work... structural unity... beauty and newness... everything must be startling and be the best it can.

Point Break, Zeitraum

I wanted to rest my voice today so avoided singing and had rather a quiet day. I watched Point Break, perhaps Keanu Reeves' best film, though he remains awful in it (perhaps Bill and Ted suited him better). The rest of the cast inc. Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty were excellent.

Then, a nice and cold walk in the park with Deb. How long will it be before we can meet indoors? The W.H.O. recommended today that countries vaccinate the 'vulnerable' and ignore the under 50s which is somewhat alarming. A bad time to be nearly 50. I don't relish the idea of staying isolated indoors for two more years. The many years of breathing in secondary cigarette smoke from my chain-smoking parents have given me poor lungs. If, when I'm vaccinated it will be my first contact with any medical personnel in 10 years.

I had an idea to improve my Zeitraum effects. These allow the pitch and speed of a sample to be changed independently and the operate like the old 'hard-sync' oscillator synchronisation effect. A sample will 'reset' every so often so the pointer marches along the sample in small windows rather than smoothly, this is how the effect works. Until today I used two overlapping pointers, one attenuated with half a sine wave (a 'dome') and the second with a full sine wave, a 'peak'. This was efficient but I wondered if lots of overlapping waves would give better results, so today I modified the effect to overlap 4 'peak' waves, each offset by 25% of phase so they should sound relatively smooth. When playing at normal pitch everything is smooth anyway, but playing an octave or more away will result in strange effects. Most pitch or time shifters really sound bad beyond an octave (or double or half speed). Zeitraum excels at these ranges.

I experimented with 10 overlapping waves but this didn't sound any different from four.

I use three Zeitraum effects; one tuned (actually, this changes the speed by the note, not the pitch, depending on the note being played. This sounds counter-intuitive but it allows the hard-sync effect on instruments), one untuned, and one untuned stereo. Each has normal and anti-aliased wave players. The stereo anti-aliased version then needs 16 wave players alone (4 waves left, 4 waves right, and both again anti-aliased). Each of these similar and big chunks of code uses a large array of variables so the possibility of typos and mistakes is huge. Well, it's taken all day to code these. The results do sound better, for what it's worth. I've only ever used the effect once, in the forthcoming Nick Drake song to add some weird 'clowny' echoes to the main vocals.

Now it's past 9pm and the day is gone.

I was notified today that Apocalypse of Clowns is now scheduled, so this will be released on March 21st.

Apocalypse Listed, Vocals

An interesting day. I slept badly with internal twitches and knots and trapped wind that did nothing but moan and hurt, like imprisoned orgone energy - inspired by reading about Wilhelm Reich (who apparently made a cuboid orgone focuser from plywood and loft insulation; anyone knows that a pyramid would be a better shape, or better still, a tetrahedron or dodecahedron). I slept, but had a nightmare of giant wasps or bees, dead in honey-coloured glass containers. One awoke and seemed to attack my neck from behind. I wonder if bees or these wasps represent work energy?

In the morning I thought of the joy of the colour orange, and orange and white. The curtains in our front room when I was a child were orange. The amber and white page of the Music of Poetic Objects album was always one of my favourites. The best part of Bowie's Low album is its colour, so I listened to bits of Low just after waking. The whole album still sounds half-finished.

Last night, inspired by the success of Jabberwocky, I thought it would be a good idea to release Apocalypse of Clowns soon. I remembered that World Poetry Day was in March so thought of that date. Deb agreed, so I previewed the tracks fully, listening afresh for the first time in weeks. I found two uncomfortable notes in the only instrumental, Life of Pierrot, so I made a last minute change to that track and re-recorded it. Then I set the album for release. I'm reminded that I have a lot of music admin to do, for this, for The Infinite Forest.

This took me up to 12:30, normally lunchtime, but I found myself alone and able to sing freely so eagerly and hurriedly grabbed this chance, but I felt rushed and annoyed, without time to prepare mentally or physically, and after recording a few scant notes, fell into a dark sadness. I spent the rest of the day trying to turn the lens of my energies back to the Sisyphus music.

I recorded some new vocal parts for The Exploratory Farmer. Some parts are in higher notes. The 'Bone' is in a high E, which is normally the note of transition between low and high voice, so it can be either. In my lunchtime rushed singing I sang some lower (and thus much richer) notes, but yesterday, some 'bones' were higher, in falsetto. Starting higher and moving down tends to stick with the high voice (and, indeed, vice versa, it takes a bit of actual thought to switch). The entry into the climax at the end of the chorus is a high G, which I sang in falsetto in the day, yet the line up to it, a mere F, was in low voice (or sometimes called 'mixed voice', it sounds thick enough, like a higher chest voice, really). Oddly, I sang this high G in this voice tonight automatically, which was unexpected. Of course, this is a richer voice and usually better (we might want to sound falsetto and pure sometimes). I was surprised to sing a G like this. Perhaps this is simply the bonus more more than a few minutes training each day.

Several tracks are complete. I'm using this album as much as a sparring course as anything, which is good; I like to make everything some sort of training, to push a bit further with every artistic act. Until now I didn't appreciate the sheer workload of vocal training, greater than the triviality of learning to play a guitar (after all, you can fall on a guitar and it will produce a valid sound - listen to the up-and-coming Siamese Twin Domestic for an example!). Singing is much more rewarding as a result.

After Sisyphus (and after painting etc.), I'll start on an EP which will at least include the old Plastic Superman song and the even older (1990s) Burnout theme. I need to link these two. Plastic Superman is lightweight pop, it's mood is uplifiting, designed as a 'workout' song, and Burnout is a sort of run too, a run or glide to freedom. What can I do to both unify these and broaden the range of what the three tracks are 'about'? Art is about mood, knowing and crafting feelings...

The Exploratory Farmer

Stayed up late to watch Justice League, a truly bad superhero film, worse even than the abysmal Batman and Robin. Zack Snyder is, simply, a terrible director, and after making each awful and badly critiqued film it seems that DC Comics hit their heads with tin trays and decide to re-employ the idiot. Joss Whedon, another director I abhore, is equally as bad. I won't waste time on dissecting the failures of this.

I had a slow start. I'm unable to sing much due to various constraints here but made a good start on The Exploratory Farmer, a strange song... but for me not experimental. It is about painting a scene with words and sound. Musically it has a melody based on a minor triad and staggered timing and as a result sounds rather atonal and bleak, which is the effect I was aiming for. My original tune gave me too little time to actually sing the words. The timing goes:

I rake
the mud
with fingers fro-zen
into fork pull back
to reveal
bone
bone
bone
un-der
the soil

There isn't quite time to sing 'fork' so I moved it up a little. All of it sounds odd, earthy, like van Gogh's "Potato Eater's soil", which is exactly what I was aiming for (the opera Written on Skin also came to mind). The chorus, by contrast, is warm and full of light and hope - it's actually taken from The Invisible Man later and works so well. This track, odd though it is, is a highlight.

Some of the higher vocal parts have a different timbre due to my voice. I can't sing these loudly here, but they need it. I will wait for the right moment.

I also worked on the production of Nick Drake, another song I'm happy with. About half of this album is finished. It's taken at least 5 months so far, but this is due to the huge amount of technical learning and experimentation. The writing was the easy part. I've learned to play guitar, re-recorded all of the guitar parts with new equipment and started the much longer process of proper vocal training. At the moment I'm enthused and happy with this project about isolation and alienation. As I get over its hill I will start to want to get it over with and look to new hills and ideas.

On we roll our rock!

Next are the easier tracks, I Care, The Invisible Man, The Problem of Suicide.

In other news our Jabberwocky video has gained over 100 views in under 24-hours, an excellent start. I expect this trend to continue for several reasons. I don't feel ready to promote my music or get it viewed or heard en-masse yet. I feel like I'm in training for the special things that are destined to come. At some point something will explode with popularity and I must then be ready, not before. My existing work is not yet ready, not nearly proving what I know I am capable of.

Jabberwocky, Sisyphus, New Paths

I went to bed late after making some last minute changes to Prometheus, reducing the max delay for samples from 500ms to 200ms (my samples can have a random delay before starting). Until today I didn't appreciate that audio effect buffers in instruments take up a lot more memory than the same effect in tracks, because instruments can be played on any track, so all tracks reserve memory based on the largest instrument for that 'slot' so a song with 10 tracks might use 10 times the memory for an effect in an instrument, compared to the same effect in a track. Fortunately, delays in instruments are rare... delays and reverbs tend to be a track-level effects. Anyway, at 11pm I found myself programming.

I slept well and dreamt of a monastery or ancient college which I and two colleagues, academics of some sort, were visiting. My colleagues went ahead and I was taken to a side room by a rather chubby red-haired nun who seduced me. I became suspicious at her actions and she revealed herself to be witch. Later on I found myself talking about salt crystals and how they are uniquely cubical, and observed a growth of salt on the walls of the room. Still later I was playing a calypso on some sort of small keyboard in a shopping centre or other public space. The dreams made a lot of sense in their entirety but I can't recall everything now.

It was Jabberwocky release day today, the day that our Fall in Green single went live. Much of the day was some form of online work about this, sharing links on Twitter, likes and follows of related accounts, an email newsletter, some posts and shares on Facebook etc. The video premiered this evening at 7pm. I'm pleased with it and all of the Fall in Green films.

I also managed 30 minutes or more of singing training and recording. How I love this rare and special activity now. Already about 25% of the album vocals are recorded.

I will get this done carefully but as best as I can. I feel like I am at the start of something special, like Beethoven in 1802. Blessed be the forces of unity and J. G. Sulzer!

I've been thinking, once again, about music structures. In the 20th century, music was structured around the medium primarily; the 7-inch single was about 3 or 4 minutes (Hey Jude aside) and the L.P. two sides of 20. These defined a format until CDs in the mid 1980s made an album up to a comfortable hour but most CD releases until the 21st century were designed to fit vinyl too. Radio also favoured short tracks, but still, the grand artform was (is) considered the album; a performance of 45 minutes or so and 12 tracks or so - but mainly due to the media format, not any fundamental philosophy. Mike Oldfield might have made a 2-track album but this was an exception and even he had a 'single' release, sort of, due to the catchy opening appearing in The Exorcist.

We're now in the digital era where the format can be anything. In a concert, one might expect a couple of hours of entertainment with a gap in the middle. Classical concerts in the 19th century evolved towards this too, as public performance vs. performing for princes became the norm. For private, non-live, music, what is best?

I've been inspired by Beethoven's piano sonatas. Most sonatas were/are three movements of 5-10 minutes and often a fast one, a slow thoughtful one, and a fast one again. They are long enough to have some depth in there but short enough to be unified. I like the idea of three (or indeed four, but 12 seems like a lot). My Walk in the Countryside was an E.P. of two sets of three, and for me it always felt like two 'concertos' or 'sonatas' of a sort ('sonata' means for one solo instrument, but I associate the word with a unified feeling more than this definition, something more tight and intimate than a concerto which, although also often in three parts, involve an orchestra and so a large expense and degree of grandness).

So I hope to explore some of these sets of three. The digital release systems are a bit odd in their links to concepts like 'singles' (now 1 to 3 tracks that are each less than 10 minutes), 'E.P.s' (4 to 6 tracks with a total running time of 30-minutes or less, OR 1 to 3 tracks, with one track at least 10-minutes long, and a total running time of 30-minutes or less) and 'albums' (anything really). This doesn't concern me. I want to make something unified and neat, like those sonatas (or indeed trios or quartets, also similarly intimate and neat packages) but of course with vocals and a full gamut of modern instruments... these are song cycles; rock songs, spoken words, instrumentals, everything. There are no limits.

These will come after Sisyphus. Oh, and after a painting or two. How short life is.

Sisyphean Programming

The world seems buggy at the moment. Blogger is slow and unreliable since the last Windows update.

I was awake for too long last night thinking about this annoying bug in my music software. I thought that it might be down to a memory infringement by a plug-in, so I started (at 11pm) to think of how to test this. Lots of plug-ins use effect buffers; a classic example is a delay, which stores the current output in a sort of loop, so a one second delay needs a second's worth of data (so 44100 samples, at 'CD quality'). I came up with a solution to test for a memory infringement; I'd reserve 4 extra bytes (not 1 because even numbers are more efficient) and fill those with an unusual number, say 99. After using the plug-in I will see if those 99s are all still there. If so then all is well. If not then the buffer has been accidentally exceeded.

It worked, I made a test plug-in that was deliberately buggy and this was detected. Unfortunately, none of the actual plug-ins were though, they were fine. In practice, there aren't many of the 100 or so effects that use buffers. They are delays, delay related effects (chorus, flange), reverbs, and a few other special ones that all use little delays inside. The reverbs are the most complex because they contain a LOT of little delays inside, up to 20 per channel, but even so, it looks like I calculated everything well enough.

Sigh, so at least it's not this.

Then I revisited my code again and sought out lots of possible bugs. Trying to find this rare crash became an obsession and I hardly took more than a few minutes from my computer screen all day. I found one bug in the memory reporting code - but that was a miscalculation, hardly a bug. I noted that some songs, like the Nick Drake one, take up about 500Mb of memory (mostly samples).

I then found a feature called Code Analysis which asks the compiler what it thinks. This spotted a few possible errors, null pointers and possible memory infringements. In practice though, none of those should have been serious... except one. One definite null pointer bug was there in the Event List display code. This is odd; it should have, could have, caused a crash at any time, but is unlikely to be my problem as the event list isn't really updated at the time when the crash occurs, and if it did crash, it would have been easy to spot because it would have happened at a specific and predictable time. Still, I fixed this and tidied up about 10 smaller issues.

This took me to the evening. I decided to record the vocals to the Nick Drake song, which sounds rather nice. Most of these vocals are very simple, no complex effects. The two songs I've recorded so far are the simplest vocally.

I read about Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament before sleeping and remembered my own contemplation of suicide at a similar age.

I have many musical ideas. I must try to focus now on the music and stop obsessing about this bug.

First Sisyphus Vocals

Today I created a new plug-in for Prometheus to replace the ancient (as old as the program itself) white noise generator. The old one just created a random sample each time, so very limited in functionality. In the new one I can specify the gap (in millisecs) between each new sample and have a smoothing parameter too. There are also two versions: one stereo (well, hexio) and a mono version which creates the same noise in all channels. In practice, the latter is more useful; mono instruments are better and can be panned later, but too much stereo can stop any of the nicer spatial effects. The old white noise (which was stereo only) was used a lot, perhaps in half of all of my 1000 or so sequences to date, so I'll have to regularly update them when loading the old ones (the update process is automated, thankfully, this makes it easy to create a supersessional plug-in).

I can't say I really 'needed' the new one, but I might make use of it in future and it's future music that's always more valuable than past music.

I've recorded two of the first vocals for the Sisyphus album since my pause in November. The quality is far better, so my almost daily training has helped; in particular these two tracks have a high register and were nearly impossible for me to sing at all in November.

Sadly, Prometheus crashed again today with the 'Stop' bug, so my recent bug fix has not worked. My best guess now is some sort of corruption due to a plug-in, which is a nightmarish conclusion because there are over 100 of them and many are very complex. It's odd that the corruption only happens when playing rather than during live playback, and also odd that the corruption is so subtle that it only affects a specific area of the playback code. If it were more common (it's about 1 in 100 plays) then I would stand a better chance of making it happen and tracking it down.

Generally it's been a slow and restful sort of day due to the change between the end of The Infinite Forest and moving towards the vocal work for Sisyphus. The Covid lockdown is also sapping physical energy, it's difficult to exercise. The programming is a saddening distraction. I don't like the idea of faulty tools, even if the bug may have been there for a decade or more (did I notice it before and simply ignore it, or is this somehow new? When working on music I may ignore a crash as the music is the priority, not programming). How I wish I could fix this. Still, Sisyphus and vocal work must now get my attention, though I don't have the freedom or space to practice as I would like. I must do my best with limitations.

Prometheus v2.65 Bug Hunting

A rather tedious and anxious day of programming. I was, am, determined to fix this very rare and long term bug in Prometheus. There are only 5 known bugs and two are really due to experimental or rarely used code that I can easily fix if needed, they don't count. The other three are all exremely rare and intermittant crash bugs. All are probably as old as the program itself, over 10 years and sufficiently rare that they're not a vital problem. One didn't happen at all for an entire year of use, only to come back and reveal that it was still there.

The one I focused on last night and today is an occasional crash when I click stop during playback. I've put a series of traces in the code, a text file saves out where the program is at various points, so that by seeing the last entry I can focus in on the cause, hopefully. Last night I had pinned it down to a single line, playing=0. Now the program is multithreaded and this will tell the player thread to end, so the error must be in there. So today I set lots of traps in there... but the results were strange and inconsistent.

See this:

PS. Blogger won't let me use the 'code' or 'pre' HTML so it's an image.

Logic will tell you that [things] will never be called if 'playing' is not set but if it is set, then [things] will be called 10 times. But this is a multithreaded operation and 'playing' is a global, so it can be set to zero in the middle of [things] and this, apparently, is what causes my bug. The thing is, it seems to crash at the end of [things] but before [afterthings]... I find this mystifying.

The only causes are that [things] itself causes the problem - this is possible, that constitutes the player code, but if so, it's by coincidence the last thing in the list; but it also only seems to occur at the instant playing is set to zero, which is odd. It seems that the 'for' loop itself is the problem... my guess is that the compiler or some fancy logic in the internal workings of the computer (a multi-core processor?) is doing something strange in that 'for' loop... it might see the 'while' and make some other sort of intervention.

For now, I've deleted the second playing check altogether. It would have been faster, a micro bit faster, to drop out rather than do those 10 chunks, but in practice the timing is of no consequence.

I hate these rare crashes, they make me anxious. I work hard to make sure that every game and program I design has zero bugs. None. The whole idea of 'updates' to fix errors is a sign of failure. My updates generally add new functionality and I never really update games. Like the boxed games (and tapes!) of old, my games are finished and bug-free with the first public version. Updates or changes are not up for debate, but I'll make them grudgingly if necessary. This is probably why I'm not a super-successful game developer; those people generally release popular bug-filled rubbish and add every change that every idiot suggests, and release new versions every week which become things to announce and publicise and desire.

So, this has taken all day. This week I hope to get back to the Sisyphus music. I have great music ideas, a 'new path'. I'd like to make some new structural units in new music... something like the three or four movements in a piano sonata... but more on this later.

The other two bugs are being watched.

I'll leave the program in a test phase for a week or so and if its stable, file this version.

Infinite Forest 2021 Artwork

Mostly working on the album artwork today. I generally design 8 pages of 600dpi artwork. Here are some of the pages so far:

Infinite Forest 2021 Poetry

I toyed with the idea of writing some words and including lyrics, spoken or sung, for the new Infinite Forest. In the end words didn't fit and I wrote only unfinished fragments of ideas. However raw and fragmentory, I like to file and keep these notes. I thought I'd put them here.

Ronnie (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

He is dying in silence.
Sparks fly from his mouth
and nobody can see him,
on the concrete floor as he leaks black ink and weeps.
The cars cough by and shoes tread,
and he is dying in silence,
on a stupid street.

Ghost Cows (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

All the cows are ghosts.
The cows are asleep, and transparent blue.
They love me with the love of angels.
They look at me with love;
they awaken and look.

A Henge Of Giant Fingers (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

The trees are climbing in on me,
a henge of giant fingers.
He screams and I run in panic
through warm's flesh, through the forest,
to the hill,
and the circle of stone,
where she left her symbol for me,
crystal blue, and alive.

The Mome Raths Weep (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

I am above the maze, laid out like a mind,
and she is beyond it.
The bronze sun dips low
in autumn's blood.
There are friends here, but they cannot help.
The mome raths weep, I must go alone
and with solemn soul.
I step into the corridors.

The Sad Butterfly Collector (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

He collects butterflies, sad,
dried things made from copper's dust and child's wings.
He was never loved, he has never loved.

The shadows dance in the grazing yellow light,
and are happy, as if alive.

The moon floats.

The Wood Crumbles In Rust Flakes (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

The wood crumbles in rust flakes, like her memory
beneath his hard fingers;
the memory of the moon;
its yellow ball warms the forest,
the lakes of love,
tendrils of the mind
and broken time
to be ran along
when young;
young like the fox.

What Is There, Inside (fragment for The Infinite Forest)

What is there, inside?
Along the flakes of run.
What is there, inside?
Under the bark,
rust of leaf
station
electric
brokengold
the infinite forest
the infinite expanse
of self.

Final Checks on Infinite Forest

I slept badly, awake with an interminable cough and bad chest which feels like asthma or an allergy, and a nightmare about being chased through the woods by robot dogs, first K-9 from Dr Who, then anthropomorphic cyborg bulldogs, perhaps inspired by the 'Cyberdog' in the Wallace and Gromit animation. I think this dream, and my general weakness is related to stress and isolation.

A very slow but steady day, stoic and productive at the best pace I could manage. These last few check on the album, 'quality control', take a lot of time and produce few results. I made some small tweaks to The Knight, checking it about five or six times. There was the tiniest of clicks at one point, this was down to some drums which were times in beats (rather than seconds) being squished by my fancy timing changes. I also needed to add unique plug-in called simple 'Anticlick Fade' which fades out every note and fades in the next one, this can smooth out tiny, tiny digital 'pops' which might happen at the start of some notes depending on the type of instrument.

I listened to the whole album again, then tweaked Lost Friends again. Each of these changes affects the whole album timing because it's all inter-linked so every change means moving all of the other tracks about; and I have two versions of this album, 'CD' and 'Stream' versions, so even a tiny change to the length of one track seems to create a lot of work. At 4pm or so, I made a final change to Victory, removing lots of the dramatic start, bells, church-bells and all sorts of things. Those weren't in the first version of the album anyway and didn't seem to work here.

I also created a lot of artwork for it. A good way to do this is to create lots of speculative art; lots of pages not worrying about quality so much, then evolving the best looking ones. Here's an example:

I also filed my recent Prometheus plug-ins. I wish this super-rare bug would appear so that I can trap it. I expect I'm the only full time musician/artist in the world who makes music entirely using software they designed.

As the computer worked on its music I read bits of The Annotated Alice (in Wonderland), a fascinating book. Curiously, Carroll noted initial chess pieces and characters for Through the Looking-Glass but, despite many manufacturers making 'Alice' chess sets, it doesn't look like any use Carroll's actual designations.

Generally, a day obsessing over tiny details and listening to the same music over and over again to check and re-check it. These are the final finishes that my other work didn't used to have. I'm starting to want to move on now, the first amorous glances at a future project and away from this one.

The Covid-19 news is bleak and worrysome and I feel anxious about the situation; yet I remain generally positive. We're doing the best we can, and are, after all, guided by the immovable river of fate, and fate is a force I consider to be a friend. My initial prediction of things not feeling like 'normal' until 2024 or so still seems reasonable. It still amazes me that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were delayed by one year rather than four.

Enough of such wastes of thought! Next immediate project is getting back to Sisyphus, then something new... it's most efficient to work on many things at once.

Monotone Derez, Album Tweaks

First job of fun today was designing another plug-in, Monotone Derez. This simply destroys the resolution of a sample at a fixed intensity (fixed, meaning irrespective of the pitch of the note, hence 'Monotone'). An ancient (over 10 years old) version of this effect simply used an integer amount to duplicate a sample, so if the number was '4' it would repeat the same sample 4 times in a row, then grab the next. Simple, crude, and harsh sounding. The new version adds optional noise, a smoothing parameter, and works on fractional basis (in millisecs) so is better in every way, yet can emulate the old one exactly for any old songs that used it. This effect is useful for grunging down sounds that are too clean. I haven't used it that much; I recall I did apply it to a voice sample to give it the effect of being spoken over a distorted military radio.

Then some work on the album art. At 4pm, some focused listening to the entire album, in the dark with headphones, to work on the final tweaks which can take a lot of time. In this case I only had a few changes. Lost Friends needed some very subtle changes to tempo to enhance the sad parts. One environment sample needed some tiny changes to the looping.

The biggest changes were to the first track, The Knight, the most complex and most epic track. I've doubled up the woodwind sounds which helps a lot. One other change is a slight tempo change. It's a 5/4 tune but sounded a little flat. It needed some 'punch' so I shorted the last beat, just a fraction, so the first beat comes in a little early each time. This gives the tune more drive. Timing like this is very subtle yet really affects the mood a lot. You only need to listen to a song by Free to feel the importance of these slight timing changes.

Hypernoise

A long day spent doing a small and simple thing. I wanted to make a new sound for the opening of The Infinite Forest and wanted something gritty and organic and noisy, something deep and mysterious with a technologcal edge. I started with some of the noise effects I've programmed but realised that I could combine three of these effects into one, so I've created a new audio effect called Hypernoise:

This generates random noise, not every sample (that would be simple white noise) but every so-many samples, initially at the same rate as one wavelength (eg. 261.63hz when the note is middle C). This noise is created in solid blocks of this length. The 'Input' parameter also allows you to use data from the existing sound, so the effect can be used to quantise a sample, destroy its resolution. With this noise you can either play it (Add) or use it to modulate (Multiply) the current sound, and you can fade away the current sound (with Dry) to keep only the modulated or raw noise. Of course, it's pitched so you can play a tune with it. The 'Fq. Ratio' parameter is tuning; you can set it to 2 or 4 or 8 to turn it up an octave or three. You get some really interesting effects with very low numbers (it will actually go to zero, which means it generates one initial sample of 'noise' and keeps it at that level).

The 'Smooth' parameter interpolates between these harsh castellations of sound, so smoothing everything along.

I couldn't decide if mono or stereo (well, mono or hexio, Prometheus uses six channels natively) would be better, I expect mono will be most useful, but I've made two versions.

Once that was made I created my sound. In the end I didn't use the white noise I'd anticipated, but used a reversed diesel train and some wind chimes, both heavilty distorted and filtered and slowed down (and noised). The result sounds like a war torn post-apocalyptic landscape.

Prometheus crashed again with an old bug. It's so rare that for a year it didn't crash at all, a perhaps 1 in 1000 chance. I've coded in a few traps for it. I'm feeling very anxious and stressed. My body feels like knots of high pressure which I must try to dissipate. Have just been for a nice walk in the heavy rain of Storm Christoph and did some outdoor singing practice while doing so. When I returned, my gloves were so soaked that I rang out about a cup or water from them before entering the house. No other romantic geniuses were walking in the storm.

The Infinite Forest 2021

Draft 1 of the album is complete! A dangerous time because it can lead to a slow down, there is still so much to do on it. I made 4 A4 sides of lyrics and story notes, exploring lots of possibilities. To some extent the album is about a knight questing for love (or an angel, the holy grail) because the track names and moods of the music overtly suggest this. I decided against words, however, and painted pictures for each scene.

We start in a strange, alien, technological, wind, then running or on horseback, the pace and pounding rhythm of the music suggests this. This heroic theme quietens to gentle flowing water, so we rest by a lake or river. The Angel theme appears, then this breaks into harsh wind and rain. This is a raw recording of the weather which is quite unusual. Usually 'wind' recordings are made fake and high pitch like a winding whistle. Putting a real mic to the wind results in a massive and normally unwelcome boom, but I've stuck with it, filtering out only the most bassy and troublesome frequencies. The stereo recording has rain in the left ear, but even that is so realistic is sounds like a Geiger counter, a pitter-patter of strange dots, not liquid, and something like the sound of being stuck in the rain when wearing a cagoule. This gives this whole sound an unusual environmental realism.

The next track, Dark Forces, keeps this wind flowing throughout and introduces the antagonist theme. It's somewhat mechanical, as the 'iron animals' name (later) indicates, and was originally inspired (back in 2008 when I composed it) by the evil forces in Princess Mononoke.

The next track explodes into a bright rainforest filled with life. It's called Lost Friends and there is a strong mood of reminiscence. This lights a narrative of remembering nature. I can't help but think of the end scenes of Soylent Green, the death of Sol Roth, when listening to this. Of all tributes to that wonderful film, the most unwelcome is probably 'prophetic'.

Next we re-visit the Iron Animals again and this ends in suburban garden with car and aircraft noise. The next track seems to shift indoors and the album narrative switches here. I had the idea of the listener transforming into a moth or butterfly, then captured by a Victorian naturalist, man's classification of nature, though considered more like an exploitation or mechanisation of it. Orb Of Prophesy ends with a moth fluttering.

Then we waltz a happy tune, the free butterfly perhaps, but we end fluttering in a jar, trapped. The next track starts with the moth sound robotized and we enter the Victorian collection room. There's not much audio to suggest this scene, I might think of something and yet add more. After this, the waltz melody reappears as a happy polka-like tune. The butterfly is captured and pinned in a glass box, trapped, awaiting death. The Iron Graveyard, next, is a tune full of doubt and worry, the march of fate, and at the end a great church bell rings, and a flame stutters into life, then the glass of the box is smashed dramatically and we are freed.

The flying 'knight' theme from the start reappears, and dawn appears with beautiful birds to accompany the beautiful angel theme, the happy ending. A dawn chorus of birds end the album.

I felt somewhat sad at the end. The dawn chorus sample was recorded in July 2003 from my bedroom window, here, as I type, to my left. Of course the birds are all dead now (probably, some may have been long lived, perhaps) but almost all of the species and mix of birds here are gone too. The dawn chorus is still here today, but different. It also made me think of the birds who sing for their song to be lost forever. In some ways the live recordings of nature on here are, then, a memorial, and do evoke something like that suicide scene in Soylent Green. The old Infinite Forest was a mix of themes of heroes, friends, and villains, arranged in a pretty pattern, but the new album contains a lot of nature vs. mankind, and this is, ultimately, what the album is about.

The old album will be deleted today from the internet and its fickle shop-window. No CD copies, or digital downloads, were ever sold. The new album contains almost everything the old one did and more. For the record, almost all of the actual music is the same - I don't think I added or deleted any patterns or structural elements, although I've added more variation to the more repetitive sub-melodies. The harpsichords on The Photograph, for example, were all simply ascending chords in the original album; now they mimic the melody a little, and I made similar changes to most of the other tracks. The tempo (and volume of each note) was rigidly fixed in the old version, so the new one is a lot more expressive; the instruments now at least try to swell, grow, attack, etc. with the mood.

Here is the new cover.

The Forest, Butterflies

Back to The Infinite Forest these two days. Little done yesterday, I slept so badly and awoke late, tired and unmotivated, but managed to complete the stereo panning and balancing of all tracks, and start on the process of adding scenes, a journey narrative to it all. Awake again for most of last night, from 2am to almost 7am, but woke today with enthused, partly due to reading my beloved Beethoven book in the night. It's no exaggeration to say that the gift of this book in Christmas 2014 changed my life; I read and refer to it so often for pleasure.

Good progress on the music, though these things always take more time nowadays. Even if the music was instantly finished it will take a week or so just to check everything, divide and prepare the tracks, file everything, develop the artwork etcetera.

One challenge of the day was creating the sound of a moth or butterfly flapping in the air, and in a jar. This involved heavily filtered white noise with a triangle wave wah-effect with only a tiny range of modulation and very fast, then a mix of panning. The first half of the album is about nature and scenes from the forest itself, but then the listener/protagonist is transformed into a butterfly and captured by a Victorian scientist, before finding freedom at the end.

Prometheus Update, Jabberwock Dream

Updated my music software Prometheus today, to version 2.65, that's 65 updates since the first release. I tend to accumulate possible improvements or changes, and when I encounter a bug or need an essential new feature, I go through the list. Most of these changes were bug fixes.

It's possible to change, say, the tempo programmatically in a song, so that a song that starts at 120 B.P.M. might switch to 60 halfway through. It used to, for some reason, switch itself to 60 and forget that it was initially 120 at the start. I finally worked out why, so this was one bug to fix. Another was the time calculation. That tempo can be manipulated and modulated in any way - modulators are actually wav files, so can be very complex. I have a feature to calculate the exact timing (and exact sample) of the song at any point, which is useful sometimes. This had a little bug in it so that's fixed too.

It also felt good to switch jobs. My music seemed to have ground to a halt so I needed to pause and reflect. A walk at 3pm was hugely energising too although the park was packed with dog walkers, generally getting in the way. Almost nobody wore masks, perhaps 10%.

Last nights dreams were vivid. I had something like a virtual reality headset that allowed me to peer into a parallel universe; a sunny, spring-like vision of Crewe. It was deserted and I found myself peering into the empty British Home Stores shop. Somehow I stepped though this aperture, like the windows in His Dark Materials. Outside the shop, in the bright sun, was a huge red Jabberwock, its head the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It sidled its head from side to side, seeking prey, and occasionally breathing fire. A second Jabberwock was there too. I darted outside and round a corner, then exited that world.

In a second dream, I found myself chatting to Queen Elizabeth II on Instagram, she was bored with palace life and has set up a new secret account. She sent a photo of her feet, then deleted it as inappropriate to share. I told Deb about our chat and she doubted it was really the queen, but I showed her that it was. The queen gave me a gift for my friendship, I think a bar or club or something like it, to be designed how I like, and she supplied a designer and lots of workmen. I spent some time wandering around the huge construction site, which was something like a Doom level.

Generally I found both dreams positive.

Hammering at the Forest

Listened to Scott Walker's Tilt again last night, which is musically drone-like and monotonous and dominated by the vocal lead. It's dark, metallic tones will sink into my mind for later use... I'm unsure if it will be useful for The Infinite Forest because the tone is so different and dark; but it is an inspiration for the voice as instrument.

A very slow day. I sang for 30 minutes or so, and had another hour or so of mental work and debriefing concerning singing. For most of the day this tiny bite of training was my only activity and contribution to the universe. I felt stuck on the Infinite Forest... I kept, keep, feeling that words or some sort of live guitar might help somehow, but I'm unsure. I played some guitar along to a few tracks and the sound was adequate, but I'm unsure if it's too jarring with the rigidly sequenced and perfect tones of the existing music.

I need to define clearly what is wanted, this is the rub of art. First: I need to join the separate tracks together. One key difference between now and 2008 is that now I master with Sony CD Architect which is great software for whole album design, it's a symphonic tool in itself and has certainly impacted the way I create albums because it makes flowing tracks together, and seeing the whole album in one glance, easy.

At last, this evening at 8pm, I improvised on the Reface DX (the sounds are so wonderful on it - blessed be FM synthesis!) while the end of The Knight played and it led to a gentle intro into the second track. I don't want the joins to sound or be too musically independent.

One other thing I did last night was to list the different scenes between tracks.

I don't think I'll include words, and very little guitar, if any. Perhaps I will begin by joining the tracks with these scenes.

It feels like I've only done about an hour or two of work all of this difficult day, yet I've hammered away at the invisible walls constantly, clawing at direction and motivation. Before there can be answers there need to be clearly defined questions, but sometimes experiments are needed too, to know what works and what doesn't. Each step seems to take make false steps.

I had hoped to finish this album in a week, and the basic re-mastering is largely finished, but that's not enough, it must be a certain degree better now, so I expect it will take another week. I feel I'm working like a miner in the mines of the mind, hammering and struggling every day to produce so very little, or nothing at all for anyone to see or hear or notice, but this is a very common feeling for me. I'll never be satisfied, everything must be a struggle to feel worthwhile. Satisfaction is an enemy that results in laziness and laurel resting.

Results will come. Yes.

Music of Destiny

A slow day, slept at 11pm, woke at 5am or so for a few hours, then drifted to sleep again, waking at 10:30 and feeling somewhat dopey. Yesterday was very busy and productive, and I was reminded that I've not had a few hours off all year yet. Before bed I relistened to the new Infinite Forest re-masters and they sound far better than before; rather good when compared to the wonderfully produced Ocellus Suite by Martin Kiszko and the Munich Symphony Orchestra, which has some great timbres of both depth and power and gentleness.

I started to day by watching the end of Barenboim on Beethoven, a programme from 1970 made for Beethoven's 200th anniversary year, then started some general digital housekeeping, while listening to Barenboim playing Beethoven's last piano sonata. Daniel was exactly right on all of his points. I can also see similarities in rawness and the contrasts between late Beethoven and the late works of Scott Walker, such as Tilt. To me today Tilt, and the late Beethoven works are in my mind.

I didn't start on music until about 3pm, but have reworked all of the tracks, boosting the reverb and redesigning the cor anglais parts. This is my most 'orchestral' sounding music but I don't care how 'realistic' the instruments are. The timbres are nice, wide, useful, but my aim is emotional expression, I'm not trying to imitate real instruments for the sake of imitation. For Cycles & Shadows I used saw waves deliberately to underscore this, but in retrospect, I think my faux-strings would have sounded nicer. Perhaps I can design a new type of string that has the depth of a real violin-viola-cello-contrabass.

Anyway.

I need a narrative and structure for all of this next.

I have a great and positive feeling of destiny tonight, perhaps helped by the brisk walk in the mild winter night, but the ebb of emotions aside, artistic problems need logical calculation. My music here is fixed... I can add extra music here and there and each new piece must complement what is there. If I use melodies, they must be melodies that are here already. I don't want to change the existing order of the tracks but I must also prove my abilities. I'd like to use words to increase the gamut and I'm itching to use guitar. As in all of my music, I also need a journey of images, a visual narrative. The emotional narrative is there already; it's a quest, facing dark forces then finding love (or an angel) at the end. The images were always quite clear for me, a blue-white-light in a forest, silver-blue armour, a white horse.

Infinite Foresting

Day 3 of work on the Infinite Forest music. A good and full day. Have gone through every track and every note, updating and revising instruments. There is a lot of commonality across all of the tracks so one change often meant going back and changing the same instrument in all of the others, so it's a slow process. I've also transformed all of the reverbs into my new versions; Oxyverb II and Nitroverb II. These cut out the low frequencies from the tail which often causes problems in the mix, almost all mixing problems are too much boom.

I've also changed some of the composition in The Photograph, which has the same melody as The Angel.

So, everything is sort of ready, yet the mixing still sounds crude and unrealistic. However better it is than the first version, it's not so much better that it sounds substantially more realistic. The next step is to work on this, then I can tweak the composition, and then come up with some sort of overall framework, which it never really had. There is a ghost of a narrative, nothing more.

It's been a good solid day of work, avoiding as best I could the terrors of social media and news. I've also updated the Fall in Green YouTube artwork, and set the Jabberwock to premiere. I spread the word a little but we still only have 10 subscribers. At times I feel like a voice in the wilderness, yet it is my nature to shy away from others, so I reciprocation will perform its natural task. No situation is perfect. If I was unhappy with something, I wouldn't want it to be noticed or acclaimed, and would be annoyed if it was.

I've never been encouraged or discouraged by others' opinions, I grew up being ignored and disliked by my parents and this gave me an inner motivation and nature of not caring what anyone thinks, which are two crucial important of an artist. Mendelssohn worked to please his father, my stage and canvas is for all of humanity.

All things grow, and Jabberwocky is certian to make its mark in history irrespective of its launch.

It's strange that in society popularity matters more than ability. Angel Planells will attest to this. A surrealist painter from Cadaqués, Dali's home, his work is very similar to Dali's 1930s work, yet Angel lived and died relatively unknown. He stopped painting surrealism when times became hard - no true artist can do this. I know 'artist' friends who paint pets or pretty houses for pitiful sums. I could never do such a thing, no part of such horror exists in my being!

The key is to keep pushing all the harder during hard times. I love hard times. There is very little motivation to work when times are good. To get motivated, destroy your comforts.

Like Beethoven I prefer to grab fate and charge into action - an odd philosophy for an absolute determinist. This clash of opposite ideas gives me my concept of will. If our will can do anything; control our arms, or one cell of our bodies, or even one single thought; then it can command any part of the universe. Will, I suspect, is simply applied by our ego to always-destined events after they occur. This gives us the power to will anything and make it so. Why is the big movement of an arm willed AND the tiny movement of a thought? Is our desire to vote one way or another willed also - a huge collapse of many tiny events and movements. Didn't Kennedy will man to the moon? Will is limitless.

So ends this strange discourse. This ramble is probably due in part to the rarely imbibed beverage of ginger wine. Onwards!

Orchestral Musings, Reface DX Thoughts

A slow day but I'm gradually turning the ship of creation towards The Infinite Forest. I've started by converting all 12 exsiting tracks to new (better) instruments, then going note by note to tailor the mood.

I'm also adding more variety to the music. It's shameful how boring some of the backing parts are; up down up down all for all of the music. In many way the art of art is can be very simply summed up: Don't be boring. The more exciting and unboring the better. Each instrument's melody can either be independent, or it can dialogue with the other instruments a bit. This is the joy of orchestral music which is largely absent in pop: the bass hardly ever plays the lead melody; the chords and generally fixed and melodies or improvisations are based on those, not reflections of the melodies elsewhere. I imagine a poor soul having to play each instrument. I want him/her to be happy to play it and boast to other players that he/she has a good bit.

Still, I can't stray too far; this is a reworking of something that exists.

I need to keep doing this technical refinement for all of the tracks, but need a unifying idea, a story of images. For inspiration I'm thinking of Jean-Claude Vannier, the artist behind the Histoire de Melody Nelson strings, and his great Child Assassin album, this is very surrealistic and fun. Also, some of those Pola X tracks by Mr Engels.

I'm struggling to focus, and work is too slow for my liking. My Yamaha Reface DX arrived today so I spent an hour or two playing with it. The sounds are really nice, and I'm pleased I bought this Reface rather than any other; the others have no presets at all - I had hoped (ney, expected) to a program that allows me to create or save these; the fantastic THR30II amp (a product so good that its transformation of my musical abilities persuaded me to buy the Reface) has a really good program for editing - yet, NO, there isn't one for the Reface. Yamaha demand that you join a really slow and badly made social-media type website to 'share' your sounds. This won't work on gig night... I would rather save and load a present bank. Yamaha should stick to making instruments, not SoundCloud-clones.

Fortunately the DX is the only Reface that allows you to save some presets, even if a mere 32. It's an odd instrument, almost like a powerful toy because of the lack of these features, yet it has almost every other feature: good connections, battery or mains power, good touch sensitive keyboard, and very powerful programming to make great sounds easily. Will I use it? Who knows. I probably won't sample it for sequencing its sounds (...but I might). It would work well for live playing of solos; iI'm more inclined to record myself doing that now, the guitar has cured and liberated me from careful sequencer-based recording.

It would be most useful, I suspect, as a live instrument to supplement the Microkorg. I've often thought of getting a second Microkorg because it's one sound at a time can be limiting when playing live and its tiny size would make two easy to set up. I can really see the Microkorg playing a backing loop or sound effect (or using the vocoder) with a synth lead or digital piano on the Reface. I also like it because it's a DX (FM) synth, and I don't have one, so in timbral gamut, it is a good addition to my instruments.

I'm buying too much. No more instruments now. I have enough!

Bacon Meringue, Infinite Forestry

A strange night of nightmares, often of ugly black flies that I had to catch and crush. Flies - always horrific in my dreams. A later dream involved a meal of bacon meringues; dried sweet meringues with fried bacon. Then an amusement ride which involved climbing to the top of a tall spiral tower which had a slide down to a huge fall into a net below. I was with a small group which included my father (he, the consumer of the bacon meringues) and he decided went down the slide and fell as part of the ride. I was afraid to take the slide and went down with the others in a huge juddering lift, an creaky iron relic from the 1950s painted in yellow enamel paint. A pile of teenage bullies taunted us as we descended - curiously they were outside the lift, clinging to it.

I awoke too late, with a strange headache which gives localised pain in my left temple when I cough - the second day of this. I started by looking at my website. It needed some sort of redesign so that the sub-menus on some pages (eg. Sculpture) are more obvious. These looked more like headings than an actual menu, so I experimented with looks and the style code.

I then started to convert the Infinite Forest music. My new faux-orchestral instruments sound much more realistic than before. Not very realistic, but certainly less mechanical, all due to the improved way instruments are handled by Prometheus. Musically, however, the music is (or will be) in identical. Is is worth re-recording and album that is almost identical, even if the sound quality is a little better? This is a conundrum. It would generally be better to have the best quality version out there and available, but this music is old, so re-releasing it would, as with the 2020 re-release of Synaesthesia, propel it to the top of my 'new' releases; all quite wrongly, because it's not like my current music.

In the long term, however, will these things matter? At the moment there are no videos for the old, original, album... I don't think I'd want to make any, knowing that I can make the music sound better. I'm sure nobody would care anyway; well if anyone does, it should be me. I would probably not promote the re-release much if at all. It will soon be replaced by The Myth of Sisyphus, and, after all, I did the same with Animalia last year.

Another option is to extend or somehow improve the music. Many of these tracks fade in and out and are fairly short; the album was originally a game soundtrack, lots of very short (1 or 2 minutes) looping tunes. I've never had the album commercially replicated on CD, but did make up a few CD-R copies back then but have sold zero, as far as I can tell.

Of my older albums, this is now the lowest recording quality. The sound quality and mixing is fine, but the instrumentation is very mechanical compared to my current, more emotion driven music, and the work and cost of an improvement is slight. I will work on it this week and see how good I can make it. I might also design separate stream and 'CD' versions of the tracks (even though I have no immediate plans to release it on CD because I know it will sell nothing and be ignored at the moment. I do aim to press all of my albums on CD one day, the physical existence of music is important, and I know that all of my albums will, one day, be in demand).

I ended the day by updating my website, updating all 50 pages and adding new sub-menus for each page.

The rest of life; the bad news on Covid-19 and the race to vaccinate, Donald Trump's last days as president, being stuck inside and unable to see people or visit shops; this carousel rolls on independently. At this time, all of Britain is ascetic.

Slow Steps

I went to bed at about 11pm after listening intently to the album Scott 4, woke at 5am or so but unwilling to get up, then struggled to a headacheful sleep until about 8am, then dragged up like a marionette at 9am, battling through a fog-like mood of grey walls of liquid that needed to be pushed through.

Most of the day was spent promoting the Jabberwocky single online, here and there, a task I dread, like all 'art marketing'. There's even an art marketing association - an awful concept. Art exists to share, but the idea of battling with other loud artist voices to be heard is horrible, I hate and dread it so much that I actively avoid it, and can't help but avoid it, yet sometimes we must try to make ourselves heard, in case there are one or two people out there who might like our creations.

I've ordered a Yamaha Reface DX synthesizer, seemingly a nice little toy with digital (FM) sounds that I don't have in my arsenal. My aim with instruments is live performance, and a new small synth to augment the Microkorg will undoubtedly be useful. A new tool or instrument is always an inspiration but there are limits - this excitement must result in new creative work. My goal is efficiency; efficiency above all things. I can't hoard instruments or anything else, and throw out anything that is unused for a certain time. I'm no fan of software synthesizers either, though Kraftwerk use these exclusively now, I suppose for their sort of performance this makes a set simple, but I love the feeling of real instruments and the expression of a keyboard and the different timbre of different amplifiers and location for each instrument. I prefer a quieter, more intimate setting too. Of course, Kraftwerk are no Romantics.

As a consequence of the Reface order, I spent a few hours organising equipment. Nothing else done. I know that my aim is to rework The Infinite Forest. I can do a better job than the first time around but the music is still very simple. I feel that everything I've made before is childlike and poor, but this is because I know and feel that there is better to come. My voice is coming along. I will, no doubt, rework Burn of God and other vocal albums one day - but there is so much new work to do. So much. I must keep remembering this, my goal at times like this is that horizon of gold and awe that I so longingly yearn for. There is so much good work to create.

I must cling to this, push and battle and smash through the walls of liquid fog, complete that which is half complete and always keep pushing for better and better. Every apparent peak is but a new start, a new base of a new mountain. To see the future peaks can make today frustrating, but we must build today's path upwards, slowly, and with great care, match-stick by match-stick, step by step, with solid, angelically perfect, foundations.

Tonight I have listened to Beethoven. I must do so again.

Admin Saturday

Woke late after a disturbed night of many dreams.

My first job was to file and update my website with the new 'Jabberwock' sculpture. This involves updating the SQL database which lists all of my artworks (paintings, sculptures, digital art, albums, books... most of the things on my website). There are squillions of entries so I've made this easier by using a macro in a spreadsheet that builds the SQL command from the data in the cells. There's also the matter of sizing and uploading the images.

Next, I had to do this for my album art. I have a page that shows all of my album art, and every album cover is available as a print (or other product) on RedBubble, so I had to list 5 new albums on there (the latest five, such as the Flatspace covers, up to the new Fall in Green ones). It's quite a lot of admin work, typing those keywords and descriptions, and I've never yet sold an album print, but for neatness I like the idea of having them there at least as some sort of option. There are 46 album covers listed so far.

This took the morning up. Then a nice sunny walk in the park, which was very busy for a lock-down weekend, perhaps because the park is one of the few places anyone can go, and because it was a sunny day and a Saturday. Many children were zooming around on electric machines. Not so long ago, the children ran and the old people used wheels.

Back home, and uploading and preparing the Jabberwocky video, and a birthday present for Bruce. I also discovered that Google Play, which had listed my albums, is now discontinued, so I had to remove about 100 dead links. More admin.

So the day ends.

Culturally, my two engagements were with the New Music Show on Radio 3, one of two Christmas themed episodes. The presenter talked about one artist as something like 'one of the many women engaged in their solitary practice for the sake of art rather than fame or money'; a sexist point that made me feel yet more excluded. The bias of the presenter was (unusually) an annoyance a few times, but the music was as interesting, good, different, and inspiring as ever. The choices were often simple in instrumentation; pure vocal works, and one piece that used FM sine waves, something like telephone keypad tones.

My other engagement was listening to Kraftwerk for the first time, notably, The Man Machine. It's overall structure was the most interesting part, the reuse of musical themes.

Jabberwocky Video Complete, Singing Training

A full day, the last of 7 full days working on the Jabberwocky video. I think it's complete now. It's interesting to think back on the process. Initially I began inspired by Jim Henson's Storyteller, filming Deb on 6th December. Then I knew I needed some shots of myself by the 'Tum Tum Tree', and playing the synth, so these were recorded in a few hours on the morning of Christmas Eve; the only few hours with sun and without rain for weeks - fate was with us.

Most of the work started last week, with the first rough edit on Jan 2nd, but so much has changed since then, even if aspects of the basic structure remain as they were (of course, the mood must follow the music). I've added the Alice Liddell parts, and the Argus animation, the essential climax, with Hausu and The Shape of Water all helping along the way.

Today involved the most final of tweaks. At the end of an art project there comes a point when you're unsure of whether a change is better or worse, and in that situation either is fine. Among my last changes was to make the mermaid glitter-globe a cranberry red for it's third and final appearance; for love, or blood... it could be either. The last change was to blur my harmonica shots a little as these were too crisp. As well as tone, hue, size, speed; crispness and blurness of a shot can change the mood too... mood! Emotion! This is the key thing. What is actually happening is secondary (although, obviously, plot can create mood - this is the long term emotion vs. the short-term spectacle).

I sang a little too, managed a high D for the first time. My vocal muscles and throat are generally stable now. It's astonishing that it's taken about 8 weeks of usually daily practice to just get to this basic level, this start. The joy of singing, in many ways, is that it is all-consuming, requiring all of your body, a transformation of every expression into an instrument - it is like dance in that respect, yet a dance that can be recorded intimately and totally using a microphone. Every day, every training session, there are tiny changes, tiny improvements, yet any ultimate destination is miles, days, years away.

It's Jan 8th. A good year so far. On we run, down the rabbit-hole.

More Jabberwocky Work, Colour in Film

Lots of work on Jabberwocky today. I started by filming some synth playing outdoors. It was -2 degrees outside, so I had to be quick! I brought a tiny portable sound player with me so that I could play in time to the music (and rehearsed the right notes!)

Also recorded some scenes of a Queen of Hearts playing card, torn, destroyed. The elements I wanted were then complete.

The final change was/is the colour, which is often the key difference between 'cinematic' looking films, and digital-looking ones. Most contemporary films are very beautifully photographed and coloured. In the pre-digital era, it took filters and film stock and other techniques to colourise, but this is now done to a painterly degree digitally and with great ease. I say painterly because the key use of colour in film is to avoid white or black, as in painting - this, perhaps for the first time, truly distinguishes colour films from black and white films.

Colour massively changes mood and there are so many choices, all manipulations of contrast, chrominance (strength of colour), and the hues themselves. Here is the raw footage I shot of Deb, lit with yellow and cyan spotlights, with a good degree of ambient light too:

Most of the colour needs removing so that it can be bent towards a common range. Here it is when lightened and with less chrominance/saturation:

Then colourised, only very slightly, yet this tiny tweak drastically changes the mood and feeling.

The same goes for later on. Here is the plain footage of myself near the 'Tum Tum' tree. It looks like any old photo, like a polaroid perhaps...

Yet a few tiny tweaks to the colour transform it into something like a painting:

I used colour to broadly match the mood, with cyans and blues for the night, story-teller scenes, inspired by the overrated romance The Shape of Water (Guillaume del Toro, is he the new Tim Burton for being so instantly stylised, or the new Peter Jackson by managing to tell a 45-minute story in 3 hours?). I used insipid yellows and odd pinks for the 'brillig' outdoor scenes. And strong reds, and black and white scenes too.

Colour is best used like musical tones; just as Bergman used red, white, and black so boldly and brilliantly in Cries and Whispers. Generally it is rarely used as a story telling tool at all. Cyan with yellow/flesh tones are overwhelmingly used in all films; not only in The Shape of Water, those colours dominate the Marvel films, and the His Dark Materials TV series, for example.

So many changes to the video today. It nearly complete. I now need to watch it several times to finalise the timing of various aspects.

Jabberwocky Animation, and Hausu

Great progress on the Jabberwocky video today, though at times dogged by dead ends. All creative work has dead ends and lots of time wasted chasing unusable dreams. This phenomenon particularly seems to plague the film maker.

First, I watched the Japanese film Hausu ('House') last night - an amazing film which I'd not heard of until two weeks ago when Deb gifted me the DVD. Sadly, the creator, Nobuhiko Obayashi, died last year, which is probably why it's undergone a bit of a renaissance. Made in 1977, the film was released on DVD (and had a limited cinema release, apparently) in the US and Britain in 2010.

Technically a horror film, Hausu is really a surrealist Romantic film (Romantic like a 19th century symphony), making use of every emotion; even great tenderness for the ghost at the end. One of the most inventive, and best, films I've ever seen. If anything, it reminded by of The Holy Mountain, but far superior. As a horror, it's hardly scary and contains a lot of comedy. The sounds and special effects reminded me of Chinese classics Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Mr Vampire, and the old Monkey series, and the initial bright colours and constant pop-music-like background reminded me of The Monkees show or The Banana Bunch, but an endlessly captivating film. I must look up more work by Obayashi.

The imagery was exactly the stimulation I needed. Hausu is the sort of film I would make. So many films now are all pretty photography (all modern films are lit and framed beautifully) but have no story or emotion. Hausu is the opposite, a breath of fresh air.

I started the day by working on the animation sequence for the climax of the music. I wanted at least a jabberwocky image torn or destroyed, and a spiral of Alices, and I spent a lot if time creating a 3D model of a plane in lots of segments to use in my bespoke software Argus:

I had to work out how to texture the plane as one object, but save out little shards of it as individual objects. Fortunately my software Hector can hide or show specific polygons, storing the visible arrangement in something called a 'vision state' so I used that. After all of the time hiding and showing and saving these shards, it didn't look particularly good, so the first hours of the day were wasted. I scrapped it and simply created two polygons with a zig-zag edge. These still look very digital. I might go back and make them look more organic.

Then, Alice, which went more to plan. I had a few seconds to play with (the whole animation is 387 frames) so I added a spiral of love hearts and the white rabbit... chasing love. The Jabberwock of anti-love is slain and love is pursued... then lots of Queen's of Hearts' appear... (Liddell's mother?)

The result fades to the graveyard where I'm playing synthesizer. Getting this to work wasn't that easy because what appears to be a stationary shot has some hand-held quiver which I couldn't fake, so I had to use the actual video frames in my animation.

Then lots of timing changes and little flickers, memories, reminders. There is still a lot to do, but for the first time, I'm starting to like this video. There are flickers of emotion... love, the loss of love, death. These are always the ultimate themes in art.

These 6 minutes have taken me at least a week so far. I think Hausu took two years.

Climbing The Jabberwocky Mountain

A full day working on the Jabberwocky video.

Last night I had a dream that I was in love with Alice Liddell and afraid of her mother discovering this. This is the perfect thing to include, that the feared Jabberwock was somehow Alice's mother, or guilt. This must be handled carefully.

Before bed, I formed a plan was to use Leonardo da Vinci anatomical images for the 'Beware the Jabberwock' sections, so I assembled lots of these first, but then thought that I'd probably need permission to use them, and I wasn't convinced of their relationship to the whole, so the first hour or two produced nothing.

I then decided to use some clips from the ancient silent adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the video will tell the story of Alice in Wonderland, the background of the story. These silent clips seem to add a lot, and I've broken some of the modern footage to look like these, like a memory. The first half of the song is a slow growth, almost organic and dream-like which will build to the climax of the 'One Two One Two' line, but I have nothing yet for that climax, except that it must be bright and white. It needs to be a confrontation of this love-guilt, something shattering...

Day Three

Very long and frustrating day working on the Jabberwocky Video. So much wrong with it, but there are a few nice sparks. I feel I'm hammering away at it, hour after hour, yet hardly making any progress... but very slow, achingly slow, progress is being made.

One thing added today is a montage of images from the Alice books and the life of Lewis Carroll to signify the approaching Jabberwocky. This works well. I have two main areas that need attention now including the main climax. This film is so difficult. It's nearly 9pm. I'll get back to hammering away at this adamantine rock-face tomororw.

Jabberwocky Video, Otamatone Modification

Day two of working on the Jabberwocky video. I want to get it done as quickly as possible but this stage seems achingly slow. I've made two more drafts, noting the bits that are good enough and bits that certainly need redoing. I filmed some of the Jabberwocky itself. I need to work on the transitions, fades and flickers. Rather than listing possible ideas it's usually more efficient to instantly do them... I must remember to do this! But there are always cases of trying things that don't, in the end, work.

My latest idea is to have a montage of 50 to 100 images about the history of the Jabberwocky and Lewis Carroll and text from the book.

In the middle of the day I listened to the BBC Radio3 new music show, the only good exposé of cutting edge music around. This inspired me to thing about composing a concerto for Theremin or some otherworldly instrument, then I remembered that I had an Otamatone; so I decided to dismantle it and fit it with a 1/4 inch jack plug so that I could plug it into my guitar amp.

The procedure was very fiddly - the whole device is so cheap and shoddy. The compartment for batteries is held there by a screw and a very high tension spring. But after some soldering I attached a couple of wires to the exact same terminals as the tiny speaker. I then drilled a hole in the case and threaded them out.

The downside is, it's so loud through headphones that I'm afraid of plugging this cheap toy into my £400 amplifier. So I'll wait until I can try it on something cheaper first... the Otamatone really needs a volume control itself, but it hasn't got one.

I must pull myself together and work at full speed on the video tomorrow. I've also been rather chilly, coughy and sneezy today. It feels like a regular allergy, chill, micro-virus that inflicts me every 10 days or so. On we roll!

Jabberwocky Video Editing First Day

A full busy day. Started with website updates and have now filed my writings in order from recent to old; it seemed silly to have the same old ones at the top.

Then started the process of working on the Jabberwocky video. We have shot about 50 clips. The first job is to review them for useful parts, name them, discard any that aren't suitable, and convert them to avi for 'hand' editing using AviSynth. Then it was a matter of going through the tune section by section, adding clips to match the mood and reviewing these often to make them all fit neatly. Speech and voices need to be synchronised at times too.

This process took until about 8pm; 6 minutes is so long for a music video! Doubling the length of a video seems to quadruple the time to work on it because of all of the countless watching and re-watching, but now a first, very rough, draft is done. This is only a mix of the clips so far. The colours are inconsistent, there are no nice scene changes and I probably need to shoot more footage. It would be nice to include the Jabberwocky model in there at some point. This is a much more complex piece of music than most of my other music videos, there are lots of areas for contrast and emotional crescendi.

Here is Deb, as the Jabberwock approaches...

The result is very rough at the moment, almost like lots of paper pages sellotaped together in a chain, but there are one or two moments that grab the attention. Next I need to watch it a lot and build on those moments, and try to work out what new footage is needed.

I expect this will take all week. I hope that by the 13th I can have a first draft complete enough for a 'taster' video.

In the evening I played electric guitar to Histoire De Melody Nelson, which was great fun. The amp has revolutionised my guitar, as did my Chicken Pick. My playing today sounded at least as good as on the record, well, of course, I added a lot more. It was good to use a lot of staccato in there, stabs of chords and notes. Jazzy music like this is such a joy to play.

My mood is good. A long and full day of work is perfect.

Poems and Song Filing, Snowballs and Singing, Jabberwocky Pre-Order

Slept fine on this New Year's Day. A glance at the news and social media filled me with despair and sadness at Britain leaving the European Union, not so much because the E.U. is a perfect institution, it has many flaws, but it is based on moderation and order, and those who champion and have championed Brexit are, speaking only from those few I've encountered, exactly the nationalistic, selfish, unsympathetic, racists that they are stereotypically portrayed to be.

My sour and unhappy mood stuck with me for too long, but I got to work on something rational and useful.

It's a new year and I realised that I used to be more productive when my website was ordered in sections year by year. The new, blank, year page was like an empty wall in a gallery, waiting to be filled. My website used to order everything by year, but this wasn't ideal because it created a huge quantity of pages and made it hard to find or browse art; the website looked and worked more like a phone book that anything artistic. So I've wondered how to balance these forces.

In 2020 I re-ordered all of my poems and song lyrics so that they use the same filing codes because my poems and song lyrics had started to merge and overlap, so today I've merged both online too, and created a master list of all of them, with a page for each year from 2002 when I started to file everything. In a second section I've created pages for published works; books and albums which include songs, and on those pages, each poem (from the corresponding poetry book) and each song with lyrics is listed, linked to the words.

So poems and song lyrics are, again, shown by date, but also by product. This took many hours.

I could do the same for paintings, as the galleries, at one time sorted by style or general period, have evolved to be broadly based on year once more, and a year-by-year display might encourage me to paint. The books and albums/singles/ep releases are more difficult, as they are generally released only one or two a year (or none!) but sooner or later I'll probably have to divide them up too. The album page is already a little too big.

I went for a walk and had a snowball outside with Deb; the cocktail, that is - I did not create a sphere from ice crystals. I returned and had a good 20 or 30 minutes of vocal training. The key is to really open the back of the throat in a relaxed way, turning the mouth into a sort of floppy gramophone horn, where all of the sound shines from the larynx alone. I felt this truly for the first time today. I really need the time and space to train more often, but any training is better than none. After training daily since mid-November, I aim to record the Sisyphus vocals this month.

My next job is the Jabberwocky video, I have lots of source footage. We've done quite well considering the lockdown and other restrictions on contact. The single is, today, available to pre-order in various places. It's a good single. Far better, for example, than Donovan's version. It will mark a moment of destiny in any account as the poem is so famous and remarked upon. Jabberwocky could be for Fall in Green what Ticket to Ride was for The Carpenters.

Detecting Race/Gender Bias: A Psychological Experiment

I had the idea of a psychological experiment for detecting race or gender bias, or any other sort of psychological bias about people's appearance whether conscious or unconscious. The experiment compares a human distribution that should be random and meaningless vs. a computer distribution which is actually random.

1. Assemble a group of 100 images of faces which are categorised by a particular race or gender. Face #1 might be Afro-Caribbean Male for example, face #2 South-East Asian Female.

2. Create more groups of 100 faces like the above. This experiment must be repeated several times so it would be best if different faces were used each time.

3. Importantly, the order of race/gender sorting must remain the same for each group and always fixed for all participants and for every round of the experiment, so, in the above example, face #1 would always be an Afro-Caribbean Male. Faces should be chosen to eliminate race or gender ambiguity.

4. Choose a number of subjects and divide these into 3 groups. Those in group 1 are told that the experiment is to test racial bias. Those in group 2 are told that the experiment is to test gender bias. Those in group 3 are told nothing (or, for example, that the test is simply about reaction time and spatial awareness, or some other such thing).

5. For the test, the subject is tasked as an employer and is asked to distribute roles to employees. 10 employees must be assigned a management role. 20 employees are to be assigned a technical role. 70 employees are to be assigned a worker role.

6. The subject either uses a computer or picture cards and is shown each of the 100 faces in order. A count-up timer is present to add a feeling of time pressure; this either appears on the screen or the researcher should visibly use a stop-watch. The subject must assign each face to either management, technical, or worker. Subjects can swap around faces; they can change their mind and shift the roles as much as they want.

7. When all 100 faces have been shown and all roles have been assigned the test is complete and the time is stopped and noted.

8. The experiment is repeated by the same subject several times because an average result from many rounds is taken. There can be a time gap (hours, days) between rounds of this test, and this is perhaps better as it stops fatigue and any memory bias.

9. The fixed order of the faces is necessary to stop simple tricks; eg. if a subject put the first 10 faces as manager, the next 20 as technical, the rest as worker then this would be apparent in the data, whereas it would appear as random if the faces were shown in random order.

10. The experiment is also completed by a computer using a purely random distribution. It comparison of the human distribution to this random distribution which will reveal any bias in the average choices of the human subjects.