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.
