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.
