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.
