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.
