Young, Attractive

A full day of work on the song today. I've managed to make it listenable to despite the fact that the song is 90% one note and 90% one chord too! Basically I went through each voice and each part, tailoring it to the mood. I start with the drums and hi-hats, making them dance to the particular part. Rhythmically there is something of a tango in it, the song is about seduction... like a tarantella or courtship dance so I wanted something seductive and with dramatic pauses at the end of patterns for the verses then a steady train of notes for the chorus like a disco robot-dance. Still a lot to do on this...

Young, Attractive, and Physically Fit

Another awful night of stomach pain which started about two hours after eating and gradually grew.

I used the time awake to listen to The Myth of Sisyphus master. I loved it, which is rare for me. I feel so excited about my abilities and possibilities for music, but, of course, things take a lot of time too. I listened to Burn of God too, for the first time in months. I'm pleased with so many aspects of it but can see the things I'd do better now. One thing about being any artist is growth, and any older work will hopefully not seem as good as your current, or even future work. Perhaps one day I can record Kyrie Eleison with a full choir - I'm certain I will, but, as Telly Savalas sang, not today.

I've been in stomach pain all day but have eaten as best I could, needing the energy. I've queued up The Myth of Sisyphus with an April 8th release date. I had planned on releasing an album each month, and I prefer to release at the end of a month. We have the Apocalypse of Clowns release in late March, but late April seemed too far away, the album themes of struggle in solitude seems appropriate for this period, but perhaps by St. George's Day things will be starting to open up and people won't resonate with it. Well, I don't think many (or any) people will hear it anyway, but I would like to release it sooner rather than later, there's no real benefit to waiting, I wouldn't do more with any extra time. I don't immediately plan on any videos, though I know it could use some, it's all so much work.

Later in the day I continued work on the simplistic song 'Young Attractive and Physically Fit' for the other E.P. I have in progress. It's a monotonic tune and even simpler lyrics, the challenge is to make something like this good. It's not that far from Kraftwerk's The Model. Think how simple it is... can drama be added? Can emotion be added? Back in The Model's day the very sound was new and interesting. How can genius be injected into something so simple? The rules for every song are the same, as in poetry, find the single point of impact or drama where expectations are either flipped or rewarded, and try to include scene, context, and enhance the feeling. I'm still not 100% sure if this song is good enough, but I will work at it and complete it. I finish just about everything I start. An unfinished anything is worth nothing (well, except the learning process or exercise of working on it).

My new title for this E.P. is Velvet Death Excitement.

Medical Dreams, Style Guru Vocals, Young Attractive And Physically Fit

My stomach is behaving. I slept and had a night of strange medical dreams.

A boy being interviewed by a BBC Breakfast reporter had a bandaged arm which apparently would not stop bleeding and his blood was transparent. The boy unbandaged his arm to show the leak from a plastic tube. The injury was caused by ELTONJOHN tranquilizers (the letters were like that on the label) and the team interviewed Elton John about the safety of his brand of medication.

In another part, a man, casually chatting to a friend while leaving a clinic, had something 'itis' (I can't remember what), an internal inflammation which may have been white blood cells. He said that his right foot would grow to be as long as his whole body. For some reason I was sleeping, with friends, in a B&Q warehouse. Deb was there, and Mark Edmonds and Anastasia from the old art club. The landlord or owner was unhappy that we were there and kicked us out, then asked my mum if she wanted a job there as a nurse. She said that she had trained for it in the past, but was cautious about accepting the job, wanting more money than she earned now. He agreed and she said yes.

I think the Elton John segment referred more to music than medicine. The tranquilizer should have been relaxing but caused a persistent and lingering injury instead.

A good and full day. No changes to The Myth of Sisyphus which I will set aside to cleanse my audio-palate, and re-listen in a few days. I sampled some bass sounds from my piano, and worked on an old frame which needed decorating with paint and distressing with wire brush.

I then did some singing training and sang the chorus to Style Guru Fashion Queen. I added an amusing effect to it in the mix, a weird wobble. I'm enjoying playing with different vocal effects and usage for the different lines of the song. Style Guru is an odd song in that the verse is a whole octave below the chorus. This can cause a few problems in the mix, it often sounds better low or high, rather than similar at both levels, so it means more work to make each part as good. Some songs are best recorded all in one go, but here, some lines are best done separately for dramatic effect (this is also useful when lines can lead into or overlap others; Queen famously did this in Death On Two Legs and I think Mercury's song was George Michael's inspiration for his similar treatment on Heal The Pain).

In the afternoon I worked on the Style Guru production and started a new song (actually, this one has been in my head for literally years): Young Attractive And Physically Fit. The lyrics are so simple that they represent a musical component... songs like 'I Like To Move It' did this. Sometimes simplicity makes for a better song... I remember that Steve Lamacq said that he preferred Pulp's Disco 2000 to Common People. The former is a more sophisticated song musically, it might be a nicer tune played solo on piano. The words of Common People are clearly better but also the music because it's very simplicity makes it better, and enhanced the drama of the song itself, growing like a pained drone, which is one good effect of repetition.

If 'Young Attractive' is good enough I will probably use this on the E.P. instead. Style Guru is a bit too bombastic and showy for the middle of this 'sonata'.

Stomach Pain, Glasses, Finalising Sisyphus

A pretty awful night of grinding stomach pain which started at about 7pm, it eased off a little but I awoke in agony at 3am or so and paced and stood for a few hours, drinking lots of water. In such circumstances I'm unable to sit or lie down, it feels as though my digestive system simply stops and all I can do is wait. I got back to bed at 7am, still in pain but able to sleep for a few hours while sitting up.

I used the dark hours to listen to Roxy Music's first album in depth, these night listens seem to focus the mind and allow the music to penetrate more deeply. I paid attention to the production and the general extravagance, it's that extraordinary bombastic bravado that holds the attention because there are hardly any noteworthy melodies. Well, the world knows this, the music is 50 years old.

I woke late and started basic work on Sisyphus, a re-listen to the tracks and one final experiment with some extra vocal layers but these didn't improve things. It is complete! I picked up my new short-range glasses at lunch time, and spent the time since filing the album, which is a complex process. First, I have separate CD and Stream versions of the album, so need to master it twice. Both versions are very similar, of course, the source material is the same, but the CD version blends and segues tracks into each other. The Stream versions generally start and end cleanly. As with The Infinite Forest (which was launched today!) the track lengths for the Stream version can be longer but there is less material; of course, the cross fading parts make those tracks shorter. Generally, I've made each Stream track start and end itself as a standalone track.

I also have to separate the tracks, name and note them, create ISRC codes, finalise the artwork and full track list, then go through the vocal and source recordings, deleting what I don't need. I don't really like to keep much, it's not efficient, but tend to keep the vocals I use with and without dynamics applied (this itself is a duplication, the files are in Prometheus and I could save them out, but it makes it easier to have the source copy). I don't keep any unused takes or experiments or any long raw recordings. This album has 400Mb of vocal recordings and about 400Mb of instrument recordings. The artwork takes up 600Mb and the album in total with the master and final files is 3.5Gb, which is typical.

My glasses have improved some aspects of my vision, but made other aspects worse... my peripheral vision of my right eye, well, anything not in the centre, is blurred now and turning my head makes the world go wobbly in an alarming way, so I've had a new set of headaches to compound my day of stomach ache. Well, I expect I will adjust. They are a short-term fix until I can see an optometrist properly.

I will work on new music tomorrow, giving Sisyphus a few days before a final listen. Here is the final CD surface artwork:

The Myth of Sisyphus Draft 2, Reasons Never To Use Auto-Tune

Great day. I listened to the whole of The Myth of Sisyphus last night and made a list of changes. I rose and 7am and got to work, it's a good job I can work with headphones.

The key parts were changes to Nick Drake and We Shall See. These have a similar structure of verse, verse, piano solo and verse. The solo was a bit aimless and needed more focus and substance. I started with We Shall See and added some child laughs and birdsong (originally trying to record some this morning, which would have worked if it wasn't so windy, the birds were performing well!) This instantly added feeling and atmosphere; it adds image. Then I edited the music itself, cutting out a tiny section of just a few seconds, and added more silence which flips from sun into rain at the key moment. I used my new Grey Wave plug in to create some good artificial thunder. In the end the central part of the song has gone from the worst to the best part.

Next, I extended the intro and did some tweaking to the mixing of The Invisible Man. I noticed a bug in Prometheus regarding the timing calculations, so fixed that too.

The Light Blue Evening. I've played with this song so much over the years (5? 10?) since I wrote it, I keep thinking that backing vocals would help, but I've tried many and nothing quite works. In the end I recorded some new ones, tuning these down by 3 semitones, then tuning them back up - this adds a new timbre to the voice. It's a bit like the trick I used for the China Syndrome video years ago. I think Muff Winwood used it for the backing vocals to Sparks' Equator.

Finally, Nick Drake, which has a similar extended solo to We shall See. I wrote some words for it and spoke these over the top. I had in mind the effect of the speech in Kate Bush's The Ninth Wave (Jig of Life, I think). The words fitted remarkably well with the pace of the music.

Drake Poem

I float through fields
of autumn corn
heavy with the dust of dusk
and falling feathers,
heavy with the bells of dew
sweet, like the first star,
like the last ring on the pool
as it collapses to return
distorted, a gift
for our dreams.

The 'bell' references the pub in Nick Drake's village but the words are generally about setting the scene of warm stagnation and peace that pervades the song proper; there's nothing explicit in the words but it's emotionally obvious, visually obvious on one level, that the song is depicting the static scene of death, flecks of dust in the harp of sun-rays.

I made a few more program changes then and have written words to two more songs. I had the idea of setting Style Guru aside and using a new song in that E.P. (still unsure of the title), partly because Style is such a strong song, but also because I have an old and simple electronic dance song that might fit there. I'll have to produce it all from scratch. I feel as though I could work at this pace and ability all year, if not grow still.

I was reminded today why no singer should ever use 'auto-tune' (I've certainly never used it and never will, I don't have any equipment that can even do it). There are three key reasons:

1. It sounds ugly. I hate the sound of it and can't stand to listen to it or even real vocals that sound auto-tuned like Michael Buble's mahogany drones. A vocoder, by comparison, sounds beautiful. Those E.L.O. tracks or the Beethoven music from Clockwork Orange is truly otherworldly and magnificent.

2. The point of music is emotional expression, direct human to human transmission, and a recording artist needs to know what damages this communication and what doesn't. Every effect or recording process damages the original, raw, source material and emotion. The goal of the recording artist is to minimise this entropic loss, so effects need to be kept to the minimum needed to convey the intended feeling. The voice is the most expressive instrument of all, we are genetically programmed to respond to it; we make other instruments in a desperate attempt to create a voice, so vocals should be left as raw as possible, there is no such thing as inaccuracy of expression. There is an obvious caveat, that being a good singer means singing in tune if needed; but if missed, no machine can 'fix' it without harming the emotion - an unfixed but naturally in tune version of the vocal will always be better.

3. Anyone who calls themself a singer is in competition with every singer; every singer alive and even dead ones nowadays. Those who compete must strive to be the best; not merely 'good enough', but better than everyone, and better than the best possible. Of course the best would never use or need auto-tuning. It would be shameful for the best to even lower themselves to need it. Would a champion cyclist use training wheels? It would be inefficient. The point of being the best is that you don't need them. I heard that 90% of recording artists use auto-tune, so by not doing so you leap from average to the top 10% in one instant.

There is one reason to use it though; like an audio effect, for the sound quality. You might want that specific sound, like Daft Punk did, or Jean-Michel Jarre did in Metamorphosis, or well, like Cher (or Kate Bush when she painfully, heartbreakingly, ruined her old song Deeper Understanding by making a new version). Strange and interesting effects are part of the palette of creation for a producer, nothing should be ruled out. I've said effects can destroy emotion, yes, but they can create new ones too; aesthetics is the balance between order and chaos and destruction is a necessary tool for this. Guitar distortion is destruction, but it sounds pretty.

We Shall See Production, A Light Can Shine Only In Darkness

A rubbish night. Awoke at 1am with stomach pain and generally drank water and paced around the room until about 7am before sleeping, still with the usual grinding pain of slow digestion, while sitting up. Consequently woke late and hardly did anything until the afternoon.

I worked on the We shall See vocals which I recorded the previous night. I decided to add a few more layers of 'aah' type choirs and some other backing vocals, so recorded these and added them to the song. Listening back, I think it's complete now, so I can tentatively say that the album is complete in a first draft after many months. I think this is the first time I've recorded 'aah' type choirs for a song, although I've added quite a lot of vocal layers on the past two albums.

In the night I was musing about re-recording lots of Burn of God, partly because I've improved so much in various skills since, guitar, vocal, and production, yet, it is a bit early, less than a year, and I know that in a few months or years I'll be better than now so there is no rush. An artist should be making new work rather than focusing on improving the old. I don't listen to my old work, so I generate a strange feeling of liking or disliking it based on probably false memories or various superstitions.

In the night I listened to a few tracks from Bowie's album Reality, one of my least favourite of his, despite the immediately prior one, Heathen, being one of my most favourite. Reality feels like the left-over tracks from those better days, though I must admire the production and musicianship. The George Harrison track is perhaps my favourite, several on there are too bad for me to even tolerate listening to. The last track, Bring Me The Disco King has great lyrics though, it sounds like a swan-song, about facing death and how good the old days were, the young days were. The music ends with a dying of drums, like a goodbye. This was also done at the end of You Feel So Lonely You Could Die on The Next Day, also a swan-song. Those reference the opening drums of Five Years. I feel that one idea led to the other. The Disco King music is jazzy 'any old note' piano which sounds just awful, yet the words are so good. I'm tempted to make a new version with new music.

Prometheus crashed, sad news! I really thought I'd fixed all of the problems. This is probably be a memory infringement of some sort which could be anything and anywhere. I investigated a plug-in called Choroleight as this was used today and I've never it used anywhere else, but the code looked fine (I did find one bug in there but it was not related to the crash).

It feels like a slow day, with only a few hours of work on We Shall See, but it feels good to do that at least. I must finalise the whole album now, create the artwork for the Plastic E.P. and complete the music on there next. I may have glasses soon and be able to paint. Oh, yesterday I framed my newest painting, A Light Can Shine Only In Darkness:

I already have some ideas for a new album, each must be thematically linked, like a film or complete analysis of a subject; there is no point in making just piles of pop-songs that anyone can do. My genesis of an idea is about populism, cancel culture, Orwellian Twitter-Napoleons etc. but it must be a full and timeless philosophical analysis, not a response to current times, an artist must never gossip or squabble among the rabble of now.

We Shall See, Take This Rose Balancing

We Shall See is the last song to record. A good hour of singing training in the morning, generally wroking on the clarity and style of high notes.

Then remixed Take This Rose as the original balancing was too bass-heavy. I've improved a lot in my mixing skills in the last year, both tools and skills. Here there is a winding snake of a lead, a filtered saw wave. Sounds like this can cause problems because they can dart all over the spectrum, one simple tip is simple to cut the bass as it's bass sounds which muddy up mixes. I try to limit this area just to the bass and bass drum now, rarely anything more. Most other instruments rarely go there, but vocals always need the bass removing or the results are boomy. Another trick with sweeping (or broad sounds like string chords or 'pad' sounds) is to band them, and this often sounds better, clearer while being quieter. Here I've narrowed the winding lead and it sounds clearer already. Generally I listen and 'feel' the whole song, and I find I can generally feel which sounds are too loud to too quiet.

I went for a park walk for a few hours in the afternoon which took up most of the rest of the day, then this evening sang We Shall See several times. Each time was better, growing, and different. The joy of singing is the sheer arrangement of possibilities. Here the better results were the more gentle and I tried to repeatedly sing the same song many times, each more gentle than before. This might be a good training song. The words and tone of the song is like a gentle fireside story, spoken by a wise old spirit or something like that, it's this essence that is key. I've recorded lots of takes, any one of which might be good enough, but I might keep singing this as a drill, or several times a day for a few days. I have this luxiry and it seems to bloom more with each singing of it.

I wasted at least two hours today browsing Wikipedia about The Bangles, Rickenbacker guitars, NASA Mars missions, watching the news about new Covid-19 developments. It seems that all adults will recieve a first dose of vaccine by the end of July, so perhaps a second dose by October, a timeline I expected; I can't wait, and will certainly not partake in any live event or function until then.

I hope to have We Shall See, and the album, finished by the end of this week.

Wasp Song Complete

Well it has taken at least a week but The Dream of Wasps is complete after a final full day of work. Aesthetics is the balance between order and chaos and the first draft was too chaotic, the main vocal melody was improvised and too loose. I used this improvised melody, it stuck in my mind overnight, but repeated it and sequenced it into the song, then resung it; I've redone all of the vocals today. For the finale 'solo' which switches to a chord of A-minor, the rest of the song is in D-minor, I used the same melody transposed up 7 semitones.

I also subtly changed the backing in the song proper. Most of the first verse was all D-minor. A violin played random notes; literally, I gave it C, D, E, F, G# and A and told Prometheus to pick any note but fixed to a rhythm of 'x.......x...x.x.' for the sequence. This is the work of 'Edward', one of the two A.I. music generators built into the program, here a very simple one, you can give it a list of notes and timings and specify to use either at random, or cycle them. These notes can be entered by hand as a text file, or analysed from an existing tune or selection, so it's quite powerful. Here, this randomness adds a dissonant and dreamlike quality, but it was too much so I've bent the notes to fit the vocal melody here and there.

I reintroduced the ghost-cat sound (you'll hear it!) as this too remained in my head overnight. One draft had just the lead guitar, but now the cat and guitar play at once.

Then the main solo needed some tweaks. I added an organ chord as an experiment, using a rhomboid modulator to cut it up to the rhythm, like Pete Townshend did on Won't Get Fooled Again (well, apparently he used heartbeats and all sort of things, I just wobbled it to the beat and added a filter sweep). There was easily enough space in the mix for this so it remained. Then the finale 'Makes me better when I tell you about it' which I chanted using the Microkorg vocoder set to white noise, as I always intended. The effect it something like the chants of Kate Bush in Get Out Of My House. I played some heavy guitar over this, in A-minor, but with a bit of a 9th chord too to duplicate what the flutes did with D-minor in the gentle intro.

So generally, I've pulled a lot of chaos into a more structured form, though the result is still rather unconventional. It sounds more like a sleepy jazz song than a rock song then changes into wild, almost (gulp) Vangelis-Yes jazz fusion type sounds with the wild synth lead, with the few-seconds of finale sounding like Queen or Nirvana or any rock band.

Overall it's a poetic fusion, but certainly an evolution on from some of the work on Tree of Keys, certainly in the progressive mould. A sharp contrast to the electro-pop of Plastic Superman and Style Guru on this E.P., which is the point.

I really need, soon, to complete the We Shall See vocals, then at least I can release The Myth of Sisyphus.

A Day of Frogs

A day of frogs. First, listening to Locus Sonus in the early afternoon I heard frogs chirruping live on the West Coast of America, which I'd not heard before, then, a short time later I noticed Kermit the Frog on my Twitter timeline. Then, walking to Deb this evening for our regular sojourn, I thought I saw a real frog in the black and wet street, but it turned out to be some sort of plastic mould, then just a few streets later I did see a real frog on the pavement, which subsequently hopped away across my path. I saw the same frog in the same spot when returning from the walk.

It's so rare for me to see a frog in the street, it might have only happened once before in my near 50 years, so to see one having thought I saw one earlier in the day is quite a strange coincidence.

In work terms its been a slow and tired day due to lack of sleep and rising late. My stomach pain has returned too, and indeed this was a factor in my lack of sleep, but I recorded some vocals for the Wasp song, in fact, a first draft is complete, but I'm not sure if I like it... I think I will keep working at it and develop some variations.

Wasp Song Reface, Stan & Ollie

A full day of working on the Dream of Wasps song yesterday. I spent a long time working on the drums (of all sequenced instruments, the drums are the most difficult and most key part for setting mood) and first part, shortened the middle solo part and shortened the transition to the bigger solo.

I then needed more for the end, so I plugged in my Reface DX and improvised a little, it sounded very good, distorted and very electronic full of wild bleeps and swirling sounds that reminded be of the EMS VCS 3. These really have to be played live because there are so few patches and places to store sounds that its more efficient to quickly modify an existing tone (which with the DX can quickly create wild variations) and just use them there and then. So I played along to a few sections and this was the bulk of the song. I played two guitar solos but, good though they both were, in the end it was overkill to have more than one sound at once. This is one disadvantage to solo playing. With a band or other players one may bow to another to allow soloing in turns based on the feeling.

More to do on it, yet for these final stages it's best to have other things to work on at the same time. I've also noticed that my eyes have constant blind spots. I can only hope that my new glasses help with this.

Another thing I did yesterday was sign the Chinese translation rights for The Intangible Man & Other Stories, and I watched the film Stan & Ollie at night, I love Laurel & Hardy. The film was touching and with excellent performances but spoiled by a lack of historical accuracy. I slept badly and woke late. The days feel like slow trudges, but move on we must, lots to do.

Wasp Music

I slept badly due to stomach trouble and a persistent cough, which feels like my ever-present semi-allergy. At times, a frustratingly slow day, but I must remind myself that constantly working on something is sometimes the best possible speed. I must also remember that all of my works seem slow and full of struggles but turn out well in the end.

I worked on the Wasp music last night and incorporated those ideas today. The structure which was approximately ABAB is now AB then a fusion of both (sort of first half A, second half B). I needed an intro so spent some time playing some gentle guitar to this, using quite a complex mix of cables so I could hear both the backing track and my actual recording input at the same time through headphones. I also needed a second angsty-solo in the middle, then a bigger, more bluesy, one later... but after recording all three, I wasn't happy with them. I remembered that I wanted a more structured melody... I can improvise forever, but sometimes I want more than random drifting.

At noon I sang loudly, and high notes, perhaps more powerfully and 'better' (so subjective) than ever, and recorded two new complete takes of We Shall See, a mix of training and experimentation to see what it might sound like, and a take of Style Guru. My voice was strong and clear this time, but the gentleness of the song seemed to suit the earlier vocals better. I might stick with those. The Style Guru vocals were largely good.

One other thing I did was program a new random pitch engine for my software. Now I can specify and lower and upper bound for pitch, so -1.000 and +1.000 would be anything between the current note minus one semitone to plus one. I could apply modulation (vibrato) to one but not the other so introduce a random vibrato for the first time. My inspiration was bass, where the bending, in real life, is often a little haphazard and interesting.

Tonight I had the idea of opening the Wasps track with a piano instead, and using the Take This Rose melody, it feels like being lost in the fog, a gentle dream. I then thought that for the first solo I can use the guitar solo from Take This Rose, which, later in the E.P. will be raw and angry but here will have a different context, despite being musically identical. It adds structure to the whole and saves me recording a new solo. Repetition can sometimes itself be inventive.

I still need the main climax part. Perhaps 60% of the song is complete. There is an ending after the climax.

Heroes, Dream of Wasps Composition

Deb's birthday today so a few hours of socially distanced walks and gift giving. Really nice, though, very different in these Covid times from a normal day. I expect it will be at least six months before anything like normality.

For music inspiration I listened to bits of Scott Walker's Tilt and Climate of Hunter, inspiring in the fact that there's so little there in most of the songs, in terms of melody, most of it in the vocals. Farmer in the City remains beautiful, but Cockfighter is such a loud and powerful contrast that it makes me laugh with astonishment almost every time I hear it. Today I watched a video about the making of Bowie's song Heroes, Tony Visconti (with glasses rather like the ones I've just ordered - coincidence or fate?) talking through the different tracks and creation process. One key thing is that Bowie was a fast and pragmatic (and social) creator and just got on with building and layering and didn't fuss too much about alternatives, radical changes or global structures, just sticking with things created by the band, and getting it done quickly. No angst, simple commitment. Of course, in the pre-digital era this was often a necessity anyway, as with watercolours vs. digital art; the first stroke must remain so this encourages instant expression as well as speed. In the past I've generally operated in a similar way and for most of my music or paintings or anything I do things once and instantly and get it over with, calling a first draft the last and leaving it at that. Now though, in the past five years or so since ArtsLab, I tend to explore alternatives and often make several versions of things; whether poems, songs, or just alternative lines or melodies, laying out several options before choosing the best. This is a lot more time consuming - I made three completely different versions of the Siamese Twins song for Apocalypse of Clowns for example, but it does tend to produce better results. It's a like evolutionary design: make two things not one, then pick the best and repeat.

I also watched a short video about the making of Strawberry Fields, which took 27 takes or something. That's the other extreme.

I've settled on the melody and chords for The Dream of Wasps, it's rather a floaty and drifty song generally in D-minor (like the finale Take This Rose, the melodies and chords from that song are constantly in my mind because the three songs here must be musically linked). The second verse, in my first draft, switched to male choirs and complex chords; F, B-flat, G, E, A... is a sort of Vivaldian cycle but this sounded too energetic and positive, and too much of a contrast, so I moved back to a simpler F and then E (minor then major at the end). I also added a moody intro and improvised some guitar there. This sounded okay, something like the guitar parts in Wish You Were Here - or is it Dark Side Of The Moon, well something of a hum with guitars over the top). My melody needs some refinement so I think I'll sequence a guide track and play to that. I think I'm generally settled on the structure of this now though not much of it has actually been done yet.

The second song will be more up-beat and rocky because this one is quiet. The three songs will be themed around broken love; the first bleak and lost, the second perhaps angry, the third bitter, of walking away.

Glasses, Plastic Cover Art Experiments

I ordered some glasses today which involved a rare trip out in the day. This noon appointment to choose frames, lenses etc. took up all morning, and the process went smoothly and well in these Covid times. The centre of Crewe, the famous town clock, was being demolished so I saw a moment of history in action.

At home I filed the recently updated Prometheus software. I didn't want to sing beyond a few light exercises.

A quiet and lacklustre day. I started some rough designs for the plastic E.P., here are two iterations...

I tend to make a tree of variations now and march on with those rather than take time to refine one design. The second is more striking and more like my feelings about the cover, but its hard to work on a cover when I don't know that the music feels like. Also the second one does not match the upbeat electro-pop of the second half of the music. There is something to say for variety.

I need to work on the rest of the music but I'm not inspired. My constant headaches and the work on the Sisyphus music has sapped me a little. I've created a few variations for the opening Dream of Wasps track, but I'm not sure if I like any of them yet.

I will slowly press on. Only one track left of Sisyhpus, the art and all of the rest of the music is, I think, now finalised. Style Guru only needs the vocals, then the two new tracks. I will probably not work on visual art until my glasses arrive.

Take This Rose, We Shall See

A busy music day. I recorded a new guitar part for Take This Rose, I can play far better now than when I first recorded that song, but also I have my fancy new amp which makes recording so much easier, and meatier in tone, so a new solo for that and some new power chords at the end (which, in version one were simulated).

Prometheus crashed when testing the solo - bah, a disappointing setback, so I checked through some of my plug-in code, almost an automatic response. I found a few anomalies (not bugs, but inefficiencies). For some reason my Chorus and Flange effect had a buffer twice as big as it needed to be, and the 1 second Pause effect had a 4 second buffer (very wasteful of precious memory). The Chorus and Flange also had a few other opportunities for optimisation so I made use of those. Both effects as standard apply the inverse of the left signal to the right (the inverse of the delay) but the code to calculate this was over complex; all I really needed to do was max+1-leftdelay... but some some reason I used an over-complex calculation that converted samples to seconds then back to samples. So, all in all, I recompiled four effects, but these were really about efficiency rather than anything problematical.

Then I noticed that Take This Rose uses a Randy Saw Wave (that is, a saw wave spiced with randomness) and it used an older version, which I didn't think I'd ever used... that was probably the problem. The old version had 5 parameters, the new and current one 6, so most of the parameters were in the wrong slots and wrong units. I fixed it and things seem stable now.

Then vocal work on We Shall See. It's a gentle and high pitched song which I love, and it is deliciously difficult, and thus enjoyable, to sing. I rehearsed it about 4 or 5 times, each time a tiny bit better but several sections in falsetto. This sounds nice enough, but obviously weak, and thin in tone... I will keep working at this song, it's like a knot of chromium bars to exercise over.

I also refined the cover art and added more to the Nick Drake drawing. Most of the art is complete. Overall this feels like my first real vocal album, at least since Cycles & Shadows. The Modern Game, Burn of God, The Dusty Mirror were developed to learn and grow in different technical areas. I didn't appreciate the life-long mountain to climb that is singing; piano and guitar are so easy to achieve a moderate standard by comparison. Those albums were tutorials in the complex medium of vocal work and song production, but The Myth of Sisyphus is more like a finished work.

But it's not finished quite yet. We Shall See remains. Then there is the E.P. which will consist of two sets of three songs (these trilogies or sonatas). Part one will end with Take This Rose and have a dark and gothic feeling, something like Nick Cave or Bauhaus. The second half will be Plastic Superman (the new Electroharmony Remix), Style Guru Fashion Queen, and the old Burnout theme, so brightly-coloured plastic electro pop. I need a title for the E.P. and my idea so far is 'In Plastic Darkly'.

Music and Programming

A busy weekend. Working on the final parts to The Myth of Sisyphus yesterday. We Shall See is a challenge of a song to sing, the same sort of vocal (and hopefully expressive!) range as Nevermore by Queen/Freddie Mercury. This, ideally, requires upper voice strength and can easily take months (or years) of practice... but I like the idea of a challenge.

I recorded the guitar solo to Style Guru Fashion Queen yesterday too. I knew the chord changes and the key to a solo is to base it more on the feeling than anything exact: feeling thrives on timing and pitch irregularities, not perfection, it is the interplay between the harmonious and discordant. The first time I've played guitar in weeks, it felt as fun as ever.

I also added a few new features to Prometheus, shortcuts and icons to do things in a click. I want to avoid adding too many features, yet just seem to add and add.

I started to relisten to the other tracks and refine the album. I noticed a tiny 'click' at the start of some vocals, the tiniest hiccup, and had encountered this before, so I decided to investigate today. Annoyingly it seemed to happen sometimes and not at other times. I switched different effects on and off and found that the reverbs and, even more-so, the filters seemed to cause it, or be active when the click happened:

So I had a peek at the 15-year old filter code, and noticed for the first time that some variables were being assigned without being initialised:

floatutility[0] (etc.) might be fine after first loop but on the very first iteration it could be anything, and its datum feeds into the signal path. Basically, I should have set it to zero before starting and I hadn't. Most of the time it seems that this is fine, but it seems that sometimes, it isn't. So many effects have filters! I have Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass, Band Exclude, Peaking, Low Shelf, High Shelf as basic ones, plus a Moog VCF (a different tone of low pass filter), an EQ (which combines Peaking, Low Shelf, High Shelf) as well as many other effects that use them, from my beloved Band Distortion to every reverb.

So today I had to go through each one and initialise the correct variables to zero, not all, this might slow things down a bit, but the ones that are needed, so that has taken all day, a full, tiring and eye-strainy day of bleakness and coldness. Early tests suggest that this has stopped the blips, but even if not this needed doing. Here's the wave after my changes...

Back to music. I need to record the Style Guru vocals at some point, and We Shall See. I'm also keen to work on some visual art, though my headaches and eyestrain are almost constant to some degree.

I wondered about painting something Grayson Perry's Art Club, a TV programme with themes and deadlines (a format I love!). The next theme is Food and I thought about the emotions of food. Of course, we all have many feelings associated with food, but I wondered about the feelings and characters of foods: Liquid Camembert is a fat depressed woman, green apples jovial rotund fellows, gherkins perky, quinoa is a beautiful dark-haired woman in a bath, Cheshire cheese a small boy wandering lost outside, etc. I wondered about encouraging a tomato to paint a self-portrait... surely a world first for art.

Onwards we push.

I, Sisyphus Vocals, Migraine

Woke late after a sleepless night. Worked on some of the cover artwork for The Myth of Sisyphus, I'd like to get the album completed soon. I filled the holes in some frames, using a powdered general filler which seems to work, though it is a little delicate as a material, little different from plaster. I think if I sanded this it would fall away to dust in no time. Some white Milliput would be better I know, but I've run out of it. Also Milliput is a lot stronger than the wood and plastic-like and repulsive to the paint which might make it stand out. My aim is for these patches to perfectly blend in. I've carefully textured the filler with wood grain.

In the afternoon I recorded the final 'I, Sisyphus' vocals. I've really transformed how I use vocals, as well as my singing, in the last ten months. I feel, as I often do, that I'm at a great start of things. I often feel like I've reached an artistic start. Even in my oil painting, I feel I'm just ready to start; I can see what. I can do now, so much more and better than what has come before.

Unfortunately I started to feel dizzy and queasy from about 2pm and in the early afternoon became too ill to work, the room spinning; another migraine due to my vision problems. My left eye continues to palpiate. I wore a blindfold, which helped, and sat on the floor for a few hours. Even listening to music through headphones was less pleasant than silence. Thankfully the intense pain of a few days ago was absent, merely dizziness, queasiness, and a dull headache that felt like oversleeping for many hours.

I managed to complete the production work on 'I, Sisyphus'. Most of the vocals are fairly unprocessed, but the 'with an ice wind and rain against me' lines wave in a melody like the guitar lead, so these have some filtering and a pan effect for a ghostly feeling. Kate Bush is an excellent guide and mentor for vocal production, her treatment of vocals in The Dreaming are always inspirational; echoes, pans, chorus or phaser effects, and filters. She doesn't tend to use much reverb. She rarely distorts vocals, I do sometimes, as The Beatles did with trakcs like Lady Madonna. She doesn't tend to layer or duplicate vocals in the way that Queen did a lot. As a producer she was as good as any other best: Toni Visconti, Reinhold Mack, etc.

Blindfolded and by peeking occasionally I struggled along working on some music and created the backing for the Style Guru guitar solo, which I'll perform soon.

The Sisyphus album is largely complete, only vocals for We Shall See are needed, and those time consuming final tweaks. 'I, Sisyphus' is so complex and layered that I could work on it forver, changing it in umpteen ways, but there comes a time when work on a project steals time from future work.

My eyes and head are causing problems but I'm certain that glasses, in a few months, will fix it so not a Heiligenstadt moment. To live like this would be difficult.

Style Guru, The Dream of Wasps, Composition and Production

More work on 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' today, such a nice little pop song, there's so much in it with little repeating melodies and hooks all over the place, easily pop-hit material. It reminds me a bit of Jellyfish or some of my electronic tunes from Bites of Greatness in that regard, but there's more disco 'oomph' and posing here, the image is of marching and posing on the catwalk. I worked more on the main melody today and added some vocode parts, which I may or may not use. It's a day of vocal rest so no singing.

I also worked on the old green frame (So...). This has screw holes in the side which need filling. I don't have any wood filler (it's on my to-buy list) so I used a mix of sawdust and wood glue (Titebond II), then filled the top layer with liquid Titebond. I first tried a mix of wood dye and Paraloid B72 resin (my beloved resin) which was fine but very glassy, too glassy, because it really needs to blend in well with the surrounding wood.

I also worked again on the I, Sisyphus verses, the melody, adjusting it now I know how the vocals sound in the song. I have the luxury of rewriting the music to better fit the production. At the heart of good production is good composition, the two are part of the same process.

I've also started work on The Dream of Wasps, the opening song on the E.P. which will include Style Guru. I've written the words but no music at all, which is always tricky (yet from this struggle I often produce my best work, I find the best process is to write both completely independently yet with the same mood and/or image)... I at least knew that the mood needed to shift between parts and then identify the main 'hook', the key point of dramatic impact. Poetry taught me this, this is the key to a good poem, but also in a song. Every song has one key moment, the 'good bit' we anticipate and grow to love. This psychological domino topple is designed by the composer, often a moment when a chaotic part or drone part switches into a tuneful part, a comforting resolution, but it should, at least, be a contrast, a subversion of expectation which creates surprise.

I have four parts in these lyrics, so it is probably destined to be ABAB structure, but I want to add more structure to the melody. There is no melody at all yet and the words are somewhat meandering and drone-like, like my Shadows music, or Scott Walker's avant-garde works. I'll try to develop a melody and reflect it in other voices. I struggle most with rhythm because it often pins down and defines the mood of a song so very strongly. This one sounds a little dreamy and drifty and a little menacing, a bit like the start of Tom Jones' Delilah (but in 4/4).

It's also start of a Steam sale today, so I've advertised that a bit, and went for a late night freezing walk. It's minus two tonight, a 25-year record but I felt too warm in my mask and many layers.

Framing, Singing, Sisyphus Production

Great day. Added my full music catalogue to my wbesite, and started work on framing. I de-clamped the small one from yesterday and sanded it to make it smooth and almost bone-like. Pine is so lovely when sanded soft like a pebble. I stained it black, then cut glass, backing boards, and spacers for both new frames. I also deframed the old 'So, It Has Come To This' painting which is in an ancient frame, I'll try to neaten it up, rather than reframe because the deep transparent green colour is very nice.

Then an hour of singing; new vocals for I, Sisyphus. The production didn't sound right, so I thoguht I'd try a new melody, but that didn't really help. In the end I added more layers and complexity to the vocals and adjusted the song production itself. It's such a complex song, there are three layers of different guitars (heavy backing, a wailing lead, and something inbetween), a rock organ, strings, wailing synth lead, full drums with lots of toms and a gong, bass. Trying to simply insert vocals was perhaps always too simple, so I toyed with the arrangements to get everything to fit.

It's strange that I didn't consider this difficult to sing when the chorus climaxes at a high G#, really near the top of my range (for reference, the climactic 'youuuu' in Roy Orbison's 'Crying' is a high A (though it sounds slightly lower, the tuning sounds a few cents off 440hz tuning to me).

Working on this production is a bit like working on a highly detailed and complex oil painting, like Ricahrd Dadd one; it's a matter of very slowly and meticulously working on each part separately. I've got several main sections; three verses, a two-line part of wailing (I've used that word a lot!) words, a dramatic part about crying to the gods and hearing nothing but a raven (the grating guitars come in solo to represent the raven - will anyone notice this?) and the chorus. I've added secondary echoes for several lines, two beats apart, so parts of the song sound like a canon. I've also added 7th harmonies (lower) to the highest parts. Perhaps a higher voice (female?) at the same pitch would help there. I imagine a gospel choir.

I also sang to Style Guru Fashion Queen but the screamingly strong high G notes on the chorus were a bit too much for me (again, think Hellraiser by The Sweet) - fun though they were to sing. After the hour my voice didn't feel particularly tired and still doesn't despite more singing this evening too. I realised that I had a tendency to hunch my shoulders or twist my neck or face to add 'feeling' to certain notes, but this didn't really do that; so stopping doing such things was a good lesson.

My neck and shoulders do ache though, and my eyes are tired. I noticed that pressing on my temples causes a shooting nerve pain across my skull and down my jaw which feels like a minor version of the migraine.

21:10. Time to rest.

Framing, Happy Easter Chocolate Day

I've spent most of the day working on two frames. First decorating the new frame for 'A Light Can Shine Only In Darkness'. I used a wire brush on a drill, a chimney sweep brush sort of shape, to distress the pine along the grain. This tends to knock away the softer, light-coloured, parts of the grain but keep the darker stripes, so has the effect of strongly enhancing the grain.

I then ebonised it; that is stained it black. The best black stain, and indeed the best black paint for any absorbent surface, is Golden Fluid Acrylic Carbon Black with about the same amount of water. This can be sponged on and, in several layers, used to paint anything black, even dye clothing (although it will also stiffen cloth). It won't work on plastic or metal, spray paint or oil based enamel would be best there.

Anyway, as a wood stain it beats solvent based stains by a long way (for most colours, solvent stains are better though, any water based stain will also swell the grain). I've made frames like this countless times but today decided on something new, I masked and painted the inner edge in gold. It looks fantastic and I know it will suit the painting well.

I also cut and set a second tiny frame for a new and secret painting that I painted yesterday with the scraps of leftover paint.

I've been somewhat sad today, pondering the loss of eyesight and lack of this year's painting. After framing I did some light music work, noted a melody for a really silly J-Pop song that jumped into my head last night and would not jump out again. I thought that nobody really makes Easter songs, whereas Christmas songs are commonplace. Of course, there could be songs for every celebration (Mother's Day, Shrove Tuesday, Solstice etc.). For some reason I liked the idea of a fun J-Pop song because Japan isn't a Christian country and probably has even less of a concept of Easter. My first verse is:

Happy Easter chocolate day!
Jesus died but he's okay
Happy little bunnies gay gay gay!
Happy Easter chocolate day!

The melody has all the complexity of The Wheels On The Bus but is more catchy. Of course, part of the fun, perhaps it's only artistic merit, is that is skirts a few boundaries. If I record it, it would be another totally random artistic tangent, but producing such work would hardly prove my brilliance as a writer or producer. Plastic Superman is a light electro-pop song, but my heart lies with darker atonal material.

Migraine

After my first full day of painting in over a year I was struck with a migraine last night, intense pain on the left half of my head, with some bonus nausea, which lasted several hours. I've had one of the aura-type migraines, last year I think, or the year before, but this is the first time I've experienced the pain version. I prefer the aura version.

Like the aura-migraine, this is clearly due to the deterioration in my eyesight, which, in retrospect, was a factor in my lack of painting last year. As it stands I can't paint as normal until I can see an optician, which probably won't be possible until I get vaccinated, perhaps August or September. I could paint in shorter sessions with rest time, or perhaps with one eye, or try other things, but it's likely that my visual art will be curtailed in 2021 as it was in 2020. Of all arts, I love and believe in oil painting most. I must continue as best as I can.

Self Portrait As Tripod

A full day of painting, my first in over a year. Feels joyous, perfect sunlight for it, thought my eyesight has noticibly deteriorated in the past two years it's fine at the distances for painting. I feel like an artist again. There is something about the long hours of focused painting that activates the art brain. Suddenly I'm probing the deeper questions of the universe and culture.

Neck Ache, Little Jobs

Completed the backing music to 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' today, vocals are needed before I can continue. I can easily provide these now but my throat still aches. It feels like tension, like a muscle in my neck is in spasm, rather than anything directly related to singing or speech. I always seem to have a muscle spasm somewhere. I have no choice but to stop work on music which I find frustrating; this joy and new focus for my art must essentially wait, but I can make plans.

I've compiled a few images for my self portrait and drew some outlines of a very old (c. 2006 or so) portrait of Oliver Cromwell as a carrot. I started a second Cromwell portrait from June 2019, but I've not documented this well despite painting most of an underpainting for it. Looking at it now I remain in two minds about it, but I can add details to it in a day and call it done. No sense in 'Kubricking' around with art, keeping projects floating away for years due to perfectionist angst, when we can 'Spielberg' it in a day and get it over with.

I've also made a frame for my recent 'walnut' painting but the garage was in a mess and was freezing (it was minus two today). I made an error in sawing one corner, my first frame in years which has a visible mismatch. I bought a mitre-trimmer a few years ago to get clean 'slices' for my corners, but it was no better than my hand sawing with my trusty floorboard-veneer saw (I say 'trusty' as though it is an old friend but I buy a new one every other year, I hand cut hundreds of frames). I toyed with cutting a new edge but instead I'll distress the frame to cover the error.

While cleaning my blocked wood glue bottle, the isopropanol and glue mix splatted me right in my left eye which caused some distress and remains irritated. So, many little things went wrong todau, but these summed up the day. I've generally felt lacklustre and done too little, annoyed at my neck pain and not inspired with visual art.

Part of me wanted to complete Sisyphus before moving on, but I cannot. The song itself presents a few artistic problems. The others fit my voice fine but this is such a classic rock song in production terms that my clean voice type is not a natural fit. We are used to certain types of voice fitting certain types of song. It can be artistically advantageous to break conventions though, and I will do this. How would Pavarotti sing Livin' On A Prayer?

Admin Tedium, Music in 2021

A grindingly slow day. I've prepared a panel and drawn out my first painting of the year, I only painted one underpainting last year, so this is almost my first painting in 18 months. It's a self portrait, 'Self Portrait As Tripod', but an unusual one, in the style of my recent 'bioforms' - paintings like the Swift Triptych and the Phoenix Embryo. I drew the idea last night in a few minutes and liked it enough to choose this as my Ruth Borchard work for 2021.

I also experimented with some song vocals despite my vow not to sing. I will try to keep my vow. I can't help but push limits and always want what is just beyond me. This will always create disappointment and frustration. I can confidently sing in a certain range now, but feel that I want to sing in areas that are on the limits, as a matter of principle, to grow, to battle. My main focus and aim with singing is to complete the last two tracks on the Sisyphus album.

The rest of the day seems to have vanished on music administration which takes up at least a full day each month. The new albums are listed on Musicbrainz now and, to some extent, with the PRS. Spent most of the day painstakingly copying tune-codes from the 350 or so tracks on there to my personal album data list. I may have to register there as a publisher as well as a writer (this costs £400) but I am unsure. I already register my works with PPL, an international collection agency, but in 15 years or so have only seen 2p of royalties. I may also have to register with an American agency such as ASCAP, and again register song and track details for most of my 50 album and single releases.

Music today is like white noise; not in timbre, but in quantity. For the first time in history, new music is a screaming flood of content. Gaining artistic traction in such a system is nearly impossible. Perhaps it's too easy to create and release music, but perhaps this vast quantity of admin is something that most people don't bother with, so that's at least one thing I do that others don't. In this white noise, artists are like tiny fish in the white water of the foaming river, tiny specks hoping for a sale here and there. Playlist curators try to make veins that connect to favoured fish, and generally charge these fish for the honour, but that rarely means the music is good, and I expect that the playlist curators themselve are targetted by yet bigger 'highways' of music, that they pay to be seen and everyone joins a rat-race based on money and advertising and not at all the quality of the music. Rick Beato said that the charts change to quickly that nobody in the chart was even there last time. The internet streaming work doesn't remotely feel like a culture, it's still a foam and yet to settle into a trend. The only 'main streams' are the big acts from major labels.

I'm reminded that Beethoven too lived in unprescedented times for music, he broke away from both aristocratic employment and live performance to, with famed struggle, eek out a living as a pure artist.

I've worked all day and achieved so little, but at least I've worked all day.

Style Guru Fashion Queen

A restful night and a pretty dream of exploring a student hall with Deb. It was initially empty, some sort of holiday, but students began to arrive and disrupt our relaxing time together, so we were moved on, up through the spiralling building to empty rooms, the places where the owners' family lived. The rooms were soft and brightly coloured with orange and purple furnishings. The male owner had some nice black patterned ties, and a lot of waistcoats; his clothes hung from hangers and lines next to the stairs.

I started the day working on the backing music for a song called 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' which will be the middle track of the 'plastic sonata', the first track being Plastic Superman and the last the Burnout theme. Musically this is a hybrid of both, mostly Plastic Superman, even using most of the same instruments and in the key of E-minor - it will, I think, dramatically switch to E-major and then its relative A-minor for Burnout. It's upbeat in tone; a 'catwalk tune' like the first is a 'workout tune', and the last is a driving tune. Here are the half of the lyrics:

Style Guru Fashion Queen

I walk like a cat,
Shine like a light
Everybody looks, can't help it

Look at the look of love in their eyes,
I get it everywhere I go

I'm a style guru, fashion queen
Always the person to be seen
Never the same as anyone else
Nobody can be me like

I'm a style guru, fashion queen
A statuesque dream machine
I'll make you jealous
I'll make you weep

Your memory of me... is the one you'll keep

In production it will be a bit campy-Scissor-Sistery, but melodically it's more like Hellraiser by The Sweet than anything disco.

My throat remains a little sore yet my voice is clear and doesn't particularly feel strained. This feels like something in my upper throat, perhaps a manifestation of the eternal 'latent virus' I've had for a decade or so and which periodically gives me sore throats, chest, ears and saps my energy. It's very minor, but annoying and I don't feel I should sing. I will not, but will use the next few days or week to work on other things.

I've also drawn out a few painting ideas and looked at some blank panels. A mildly artistic day. Feels somewhat slow, yet I've hardly stopped. Style Guru is about half complete but the rest is easy to finish when the first half sounds right. Emotional days can be used as creative seeds, ideas. Emotionless practical days are about the hard and steady process of building music or assembling images to realise those ideas, calculating how best to work on them, remembering their core feeling and image. Image, even in music, is a key aspect. When I start work on music, I must know the feeling, but also the image. The music moves in images as though a silent film is playing. For The Myth of Sisyphus, tracks move inside and outide, from windswept, craggy hilltops to cold apartments, staring out through windows.

The Dream of Wasps, Three Dreams, A Little Painting

The joy of art is that emotions can be transformed into art and this always results in good things. Every crisis moment is also a moment of rebirth, hence Beethoven's transformational Helligenstadt Testimony. Last night I wrote some words inspired by my wasp dream, but I have no music for them... not even really a feeling. I must calculate this and only then create the music, step by tiny step, like painting a picture with a tiny brush.

I had three disturbing dreams in the night and woke from each in a panic.

In the first a cyclist was finishing a race, and pulled into the finishing line dodging a row of saw-like metal zig-zags in the road which were some sort of anti-tyre device. He succeeded in avoiding the spikes, but a rally car behind him, his support car, drove over the spikes and into the cyclist. He fell off the bike and became trapped on the front of the car which the piled into another car, crushing the cyclist. The car backed out and, to everyone's relief, the cyclist was alive and generally unhurt but his right ankle was crushed and bloody. He flexed his ankle to indicate that the damage was not as serious as feared. I awoke in terror at this, the sight of blood in particular. After waking I feared that this related to my recent sore throat, but, on reflection, that doesn't seem to make sense.

In the second dream a dictionary opposite my bed started to move by itself then threw itself at me. A word in it was highlighted, meaning 'of music' or something like sonata, but an archaic definition. The word was 'Riioi'. Upon waking I thought that the i and o letters perhaps represent 1 and 0 in binary, and that the dream was somehow connected to my recent music programming. I also note that I ate ravioli yesterday, and looked up the etymology of 'egregious'.

In the third dream my phone was infected with a computer virus, it kept receiving a torrent of text messages, hundreds, and would not stop until I turned it off. My computer was also infected and communicating with the phone.

The day has been too slow, lacking in focus and productivity. I went for a walk in the sun and nature, which is always good, and took care to eat healthily. In the afternoon I did my first bit of painting since last May, some tiny and lovely work on a small panel called A Light Can Shine Only In Darkness. I listened to Bauhaus, I think for the first time, which was interesting.

I feel I want to rest my voice which has halted my recording. I have worked out a plan for the next two sonatas or triptychs of music and this 'Dream of Wasps' will be the start.

Wasp Dream, London Train Dream

I awoke at 4am from a nightmare. I was under attack by buzzing wasps or flies. I swatted one yellow thing from the air using one of my Slazenger pumps and it fell to the floor, it's wings fallen off, but still twitching, like a broken robot. Someone picked up its body between thumb and fore-finger and I recoiled in horror at this, telling them to put the thing down.

I can see now that the colours are the same as those I'm using for the Sisyphus artwork, orange yellow. The body had no stripes.

I lay awake for hours thinking about the future and my precarious situation of dependency. If something happened to my parents, would I become homeless? Would my paintings be destroyed? Would my music be deleted and lost? How could I preserve things?

I slept again and dreamt of being in London with Deb. We were in a train station and trying to find a train home but were thwarted, and couldn't. It seemed to be near closing time. We wandered around the maze-like building, at one point entering a ticket-office from the top, walking along a strange ledge, like a picture rail, that ran around the room. A section of it operated like a lift and we descended to the ground that way. A man in a dark suit behind the desk, an employee, told us that the place was just closing and that we should leave the way we came in. I explained that we couldn't so he let us leave by the main door, which he unlocked, showing us out just as he too left. He gave me his blue-silver mobile phone, and, in a bag, a tee-shirt of his which was long sleeved.

Deb and I sat in a row of seats, something like a railway station waiting area, but the large screen that shows train arrivals and departures was cleared for some sort of theatre show. The white screen showed the suited man and his girlfriend as shadows. They were now dressed as clowns or entertainers and putting on some sort of avant-garde performance. Deb criticised this after the show, I think the man was slightly hurt. I was more sympathetic. I felt cold and put on the man's tee-shirt but it had lots of holes and was worn out. His phone then rang. It was a female friend of his. I tried to explain that he gave me his phone.

The dream was at least partly influenced by rekindled memories of our trip to Euston Passenger Lounge in November 2019 where we saw David Mellor; his name was in the quiz show Pointless a day or two ago.

Art Life, I Care Vocals, Drawings

Back to work on the album in full swing today. I awoke feeling slow and lacklustre. I realised this was lack of work, normally I'm full of energy due to so much to do. I need ambitous targets that seem impossible.

I had a thought in the night that no good artist has a family or an employer. I was thinking of the other full-time artists I know and their strange lives, relative to these 'ordinary people' with families and jobs. Children or an employer will distract you, absorb your emotions, energy, and attention. To excel at art, it must have your full attention. Of course, everyone has some social life. Artists usually need customers, patrons, supporters, friends, and all artists must become public servants to some degree; art is after all a dialogue between artist and public.

I needed to focus on the album and today started by practising then recording the vocals for the main rock track, 'I, Sisyphus'. The musicality is fine but my normal relaxed voice is somewhat mellow, like Scott Walker, which isn't the rock voice I have imagined for this song. I'll think about the tone. The vocal production will be fairly simple I think.

I then recorded the vocals for 'I Care' but these sounded a little too sleepy, so after a pause of a few hours I recorded them with more feeling. These were fine, so this is done. I also rebalanced The Invisible Man, and the Problem Of Suicide. Most of the album is done, only I, Sisyphus and We Shall See remain.

My throat is a sore, not coarse to speak but tired. It's very easy to accidentally strain a muscle when trying to evoke an emotion when the goal is singing is complete muscular relaxation. I have sang and trained for a few hours today. I will rest for a day or two. This has highlighted that I can't create vocal music as quickly as instrumental music. I can make an instrumental album in a week, but it seems to take a couple of days for each vocal track. So, future work must occur drip drip.

I can't complete the songs, so changed focus towards to artwork and sketched out two of four pencil sketches for the album art:

I'll work on that tomorrow and get thinking about both some oil paintings (my mind must slowly move towards these, I've not painted in over a year) and other music - the Plastic Superman song or sonata. Technically a sonata is a solo work (or involves a piano) but I think it's fair game to call any group of three or four related small pieces a sonata; I like this word better than concerto or anything else (triplet?). Words are important, they affect and define our thoughts and ideas so a word for something can expand a concept into a new territory. I don't feel like inventing a new word... no need for 'songcycle'... that's almost the root of the word sonata. Sonata already feels light and refined and structured, yet not too tied to any particular type or period of music.

February Admin, Sine Tables, Ephemeral Digital Music

First day of the month, so regular backups and computer tidying. I freed about 25Gb from the Recycle Bin. I delete everything older than 6 months. I also listed my sound effects on the new Scirra 'Construct 3' store. This took several hours, as I expected.

I began thinking about my audio plug-ins, particularly how the sine-wave generators and the new Zeitraum effects use look-up tables for the frequencies. Originally this was for speed reasons. The calculation is:

harmonic=2.0f*sinf(PI*pow(2, i/1200)*MIDDLEC/44100);

Where 'i' is a cent of a semitone.

But, a table of the "pow(2, i/1200)" part is already precalculated and available in the main program. Not only that, that is altered depending on the tuning or scale of the system (I can 'tune' the whole sequencer, or even create alternative, non-ill-tempered, scales). The look-up tables are not only not strictly needed but potentially invalidate the tuning. So, this evening I've recompiled the 8 plug-ins that used look up tables and referenced the main program instead. Doing this involved painstaking checks for each one to ensure that the new plugins are mathematically identical to the old ones: creating two songs with new vs. old plug-ins and mixing the wave of one song with the inverse of the other - the result should be exactly zero. Each plug-in had 4 variants to check: normal, anti-aliased, 6-channel, and 6-channel anti-aliased. A tedious but important job.

In speed terms it's hardly made any difference; in fact, sped up some because the old code wasn't as efficient as it could have been, so those tables were really of no use anyway.

This sort of programming O.C.D. can be a distraction. I'm reminded that programming, like painting, can switch off emotions. I'll get back to music next. Just as I feel I've made a breakthrough in my music creation abilities I'm faced with the realities of the current music industry and art world. In literature, e-books never really took off, and probably never will. I still feel that the music industry too quickly capitulated to the ephemeral forces of downloads and non-physical music. I want my music to feel and be permanent. My goals are artisic and long-term, like Beethoven's. One advantage of painting is its longevity, and age lends a unique and special feeling to the physical. To see a 400-year old painting up close and see the strokes made by that ancient hand. The same is true of music, just, when we hear the voice of Caruso or others, but the digital era makes music feel so much more worthless because of its ubiquity and a false feeling of it being ever-present, when so much is lost forever on a daily basis.

Perhaps tomorrow I can start on the final vocal recordings for Sisyphus.