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:
