Cock of the Woke Underpainting

A long sleepless night and a tired day of a constant and strange headache on the right side. Completed the Cock of the Woke underpainting. It's a strange work, completely non-commercial, and I'm unsure about almost every aspect of it. Its greatest success is how realistic the figure, face, and limbs etc. look, when these were (unusually for me) painted from imagination. It is a continuation of my 'biomorphic objects', like Malformed Phoenix Embryo from 2018, which remains one of my favourites. I need to think about the new one for a long time.

I decided to change my website a bit, removing the frames from most of the images (keeping them for works like The Bully, where the frame is a sculptural element). This has a cleaner look, the frames are there to remind people that these are paintings; they look much better in real life than on screen, and there are so many digital images online that people can become used to these 'fake' virtual images, yet, the paintings look better bigger and with less distraction, so I've decided to remove the frames. There are over 3000 images on my website of main paintings, excluding close-ups etcetera. Fortunately I can automate the conversion process.

Painting Aspartame, Cock of the Woke

A long painting day, very tired now. Completed the Aspartame underpainting, then decided the start on one called Cock of the Woke, a painting about pride which, like Aspartame, has a somewhat wry and amusing feeling; tongue-in-cheek, raised eyebrow, something like that.

In speed and technique I'm painting better than perhaps ever before; I feel I need to paint a lot while I can, a sort of duty to create great artworks, as I am filled with the ideas and ability and won't be forever. I need a gallery, exhibitions, regular sales.

Crewe is such an artistic backwater, I feel sure if I were in almost any other location in Britain or the world that I'd be nationally or internationally famous by now, though I must remind myself that I've only been painting for 15 years and only called myself an artist for 10, and have done a huge amount in that time. Ten years is mere blip. The best is yet to come.

The Fictitious Secret History of Aspartame Day 1

So very tired last night, I crawled into bed at 9:30 and was asleep by 10pm. I woke up in a sweat, from a nightmare, at 5am or so. I took my temperature and it was an unusually low 36.1 degrees. I think this is a slow-down response to the sports-car busyness of my past few days.

I rose early and decided to paint The Fictitious Secret History of Aspartame.

The canvas was prepared with an ultramarine tone. I prefer an acrylic toning now, rather than an oil imprimatura; it's more reliable from a sketch stability point of view and faster and easier to apply. Here is the original concept:

I had no real ideas for colours at first, but by today I was more sure that the background should be sky-blue with grey storms behind the child. The planning bounced between ideas, from a stormy right and blue left, to the opposite. In the end I thought that the rainbow and cloud on the left near the child represented hope and positivity, with the stormy pantomime (and amusing) villain of Aspartame on the right, so I made 'his' area dark. This was my first painting with my new paint box, and several fresh paints, so I chose a mix of colours, trying to use a few neglected hues to struggle away from routines and into a more exciting, experimental area. I chose cobalt blue for the sky, which worked perfectly on the strongly blue toned canvas.

Oranges and yellows were used, and faded to dark brown-blacks. The pink cloud used light red and Naples yellow, although some yellow ochre was mixed too and used in some areas like the baby.

I was unsure whether to include the fine lines in the underpainting or save these for glazing. The finest lines are best glazed, but everything is, generally, best underpainted; this is a real borderline area. These can be glazed over and still seen beneath, allowing the line to be painted over relatively easily... generally it is better, in quality terms, to underpaint everything and glaze everything. In the end I did paint these and I made the lines relatively thick, about 1mm.

One curiosity is that the cloud shape is lightning shaped, like the second cloud (Aspartame's eyebrow on our left). I wondered about painting these as lightning or not... they also have the aspect of the finger, the touch of death or Zeus... mirroring the hands of Aspartame.

Songs of Innocence and Liza Minnelli

Woke early for some shopping, a rare and happy morning trip with Deborah. How I wish for normal times. It been over a year since we could relax together indoors, but apart we must stay for now. The Covid-19 situation in Britain looks positive, and, on average 40 to 50% of the western world has had at least one vaccine dose. Many who haven't been vaccinated appear to actively object to it and prefer illness to health. Evolution in action.

In the afternoon I wanted to work on the Chinese translation of my version of Songs of Innocence and Experience, so I finalised the English ebook in Calibre first. I realised that I hadn't included a Table of Contents, which is an essential part. I also needed to add a new page for the Transcriber's Note; this was attached to the colophon in tiny writing in the print book, but it makes more sense to put it on a separate page here. The print book is 'landscape' format, so I needed to design a 'portrait' eBook cover. I did this a few weeks ago:

The Chinese version involved finalising the English epub file then making a duplicate, and copying the Chinese text into the HTML over the English. I did this line by line at first, but it was taking a long time, as you might expect, so I started to copy larger chunks of text and then add the HTML formatting tags corretly; still per line but it was faster this way.

This took until 3pm. Then I needed a Chinese cover. Wu Yi, my brilliant translator supplied the text, and I thought I would embellish the lettering in a similar way to the English cover:

I hope it makes sense! I also used an image of this lettering in the book. By 6pm the first draft was complete and sent away for proof reading and checks. Errors are inevitable, this is one thing I've learned and have grown to accept.

I then uploaded the English file to Smashwords and it is now instantly available for free worldwide. There is little point in charging for this, the English version. The poems are widespread online, and the beauty of this book is owning the colour print copy, so perhaps people who see the online book will buy a print copy. The Chinese translation is new and unique however, so will be sold.

I feel exhausted again, my energy levels at times feel so very low, but I think this is a response to the high energy and anxiety of my recent days; I'm merely calmer now. I expect that I am 1000 times more productive and efficient than William Blake.

In other art news, I donated my Liza Minnelli painting to Barnardo's in Macclesfield today, so it will go on sale there to 100% benefit the charity. It was one of my earliest works and my first multi-layered painting; this itself helped the work because the underpainting is strangely sad and drooping, its lugubrious strokes visible beneath her translucent skin. Her complexion is pale, like her skin in Cabaret. The dark eyes are stark, the 'sky' and green mountainous landscape strange and dreamlike, like the whole image. It is sad, and slow, like the Weimar era, like a disintegrating past, and life. The painting contains so much about Liza Minnelli. It's a mysterious and magical work with the unique, and instantly magnetic, feeling that all great paintings possess.

Tomorrow I may get back to painting. My eyes are now fizzly, my head aching on the borderline of migraine, as happens at the end of many days now. Forwards we fight, with youth, vigour, genius magicked from the divine air.

Argus, Canvases

A long day. I feel exhausted, sapped of all energy.

Most of the day was spent updating Argus, tracking down this texture glitch. I suspected last night that textures are optimised to repeat seamlessly, so that a tiny fragment of the right edge is visible on the left when the left edge texture coordinate is set to zero. I spent a little time confirming this, then it was a matter of what to do about it.

Texture coordinates are a number from 0 to 1, where 0 is left and top, and 1 is right and bottom, but the thing is that this number should really be measured from the centre of a pixel, not the left/top or right/bottom of one... so a 1024x1024 pixel texture wrapped onto a flat square would not use 0,0 and 1,1 as the corners, but 0.00048828125 for the left (and 1 minus that for the right); that number is 1/2048, which would mean the centre of the leftmost pixel. This tiny fraction is why bits of the right edge loop round to appear on the left.

My first fix for this was to add the option to set all texture coordinates to a fixed amount at whim, so you can choose to have them 0,1 or something slightly 'shrunk', but that applied to all objects and was a bit of overkill. Instead I added the option to apply this 'shrink factor' to any object as needed. So, for my Lego Superman, I could apply a little, telling it that the texture is 1024 pixels and so that the coords need to be 0.0004 to 0.9996 (ish) but the other objects are left as it. 95% of the textures I use are all faded to black at the edge anyway, so this is such a rare problem, and even then, the visible fringe is really tiny... but I had to fix it. Things have to be perfect (well... as perfect as possible).

This took me to 3pm. Then I made my remaining two 'canvases' for the Nightfood album: Young, Attractive, and Physically Fit, and Theme from Burnout.

Then I spent ages working on a video for 'Don't Think I Can Feel Love Anymore', inspired by the appearance of the other 'Swift' track in the Nantwich Museum exhibition; but now I think that Spotify might object to the nudity and/or general weirdness.

You'll also notice a mirror effect there; I've created a 3x3 grid type object for stills like this.

I feel I'm working over the top for little effect and little result, this is normal for me, it remains important that the quality is as good as it can be. I also feel ignored, overruled, sidelined at home from any choice in life. Creatively I feel as active and life-lustful as ever, but the days feel like the days of Wolverine in Logan, hard smashing at the rocks of life.

Argus alone is unique software that few people in the world could create. I must ensure that it is used to the best of its, and my, ability.

In paint news; some Michael Harding Burnt Sienna arrived. It is a pasty terracotta colour, very orangey and rather like Light Red. It's nothing like the dark, transparent, rich chocolate hue of the Winsor and Newton Burnt Sienna. The Winsor and Newton colour is a beautiful deep orange, like an iron-ultramarine. The Michael Harding one looks like a crude sandy clay, so very different.

Spotify Canvasses, 3D Glitches

A busy couple of days. I wanted to investigate creating some Spotify Canvases using my software Argus. These are short looping videos with an unusual 9:16 aspect ratio, the opposite of widescreen. I chose 720x1280 and made a normal HD 1280x720 animation, previewing and creating it all sideways, then flipping it when complete. The max length is 8 seconds, which I used. The visual effect is something like an animated gif, rather glitzy and eye catching but could get annoying. They also remind me of the animated 'photos' in the Harry Potter newspapers in the films.

Creating these was very easy in Argus (apart from the aesthetic parts, art always takes time to get right). A lot of time, several hours, was spent updating Argus and detecting minor bugs. This is highly bug-free software; it turned out that what I thought was a bug was actually bad animation design, I tried to move an object that I hadn't told to appear. I've added a few features and shortcuts too.

So today I've created five 'Canvasses'. Here are some screenshots, from Take This Rose and The Dream of Wasps:

I will make these for all of my music releases now; they are not much more work than the extensive work I put into the CD album art.

I found an annoying bug and I'm not sure if it's in Photoshop, the dds converter, or the renderer:

You can't even see it there! Inside the red ring is a very thin strip of pixels, or half pixels. They are only highly visible at certain angles, like exactly 270 degrees as here. The left of the texture should be pure black, no visible pixels at all. The 3D plane which the Lego image is wrapped on to uses exactly 1.000 as the U/V texture coordinates. Setting the values to 0.999 eliminates the line. The texture is 1024 pixels, so this error is about one pixel or less (it looks less). The image though IS black there... I wonder if the texutre is repeating, that the line of pixels are those from the right edge. For a high end graphical application, tiny things like this need tracking down. Little unexpected lines, however faint, are not acceptable. I've never noticed it before.

I'll spend more hours investigating tomorrow. I've uploaded my five Spotify Canvasses for Nightfood and it's been a very long and tiring day. Time to rest.

Washing Poles and Software Updates

A slower day. I put up a washing line post, which required digging and cementing. After digging down about 60cm I put the pole collar in, then the pole and attached a piece of string as plumb line to make sure it was vertical, then I decided to fill the lower half with gravel, thinking that this might be more concrete-like and rigid than just cement. I then filled the top with liquid mortar. Soon after though, I regretted the gravel part. I could have either mixed it into the cement, but I think just cement alone would have been better. Well, an hour later (it was quick-drying mortar) the thing was set. It seems solid enough, but I think I could do better next time (which may never happen, this was my first pole assembly in 48 years).

I made some rough plans for paintings, slowly awakening my painting brain, and ordered £75 of new oil paint; new tubes and colours are always inspiring and I'm already excited to paint with them. Sometimes the very act of buying new things creates motivation. I bought eight new tubes, so no colours were particularly expensive. Of the colours I do use regularly, the most expensive is probably the cobalt turquoise at £35 a tube. Fortunately I don't like Cobalt Violet, which is one of the most expensive common colours at £55 a tube. Michael Harding sells genuine vermilion at £70 or so. I had a 1kg jar of the pigment a few years ago which was theoretically worth £500 but it's so very toxic. I was happy to sell it on eBay for £20 or so just to be rid of it.

I like Michael Harding's colours, the tube design and quality and texture, and so wish he would grind blues and greens and violets in safflower rather than linseed as I think it's a crime the grind beautiful ultramarine in yellowing linseed. I use Harding's white (which he does grind in safflower) but only use his reds and yellows for this reason. I prefer Blockx generally, not only because they use poppy oil, I like the firm and highly pigmented texture. Their tube design is poor though and is prone to cracking and leaking. Old Holland are my next favourite, but they are overly expensive and secretive about the exact ingredients. I still prefer Winsor and Newton for some colours.

I also updated Mapper to v1.16 after finding a minor bug, and found another minor bug in Prometheus so updated that to v2.70. I've also read about Spotify Canvases, small 3 to 5 second looping animations which apply per-track. It would be good to make one for each new song release and I will investigate.

More Paint Boxing, Mapper v1.15

A slower day of small and annoying jobs. I realised that I will need a paint box lid so started by cutting the wood for this; I used 3mm H.D.F. for the top for weight reasons, although it doesn't look as pretty as M.D.F. and is more difficult to glue. I attached some 12mm M.D.F. cuboids to the back to screw the hinges into and by this evening it was glued and complete:

Here it is with paints in. The ranks start with blacks, then red/orange browns, yellow browns, then earth reds, yellows (ochres), greens/blues, then bright red, yellows, greens, blues, violets.

Many of the tubes were really sticky and messy and are in little bags for now, which will make them awkward to use. I aim to put new, clean tubes in without bags. I've barely touched some colours like gold and silver since buying them in 2005 or so and the tubes are a mess. It would be pedantic to buy new tubes just because they are clean but I'm considering it. The iridescent white, which I very rarely use, is the only colour that is in such a mess that I will have to buy a new tube.

In other jobs; I copied over some poetic lyrics which I've been working on all week. I've got about three folders of music 'in progress' but this is all experiments and probably won't go anywhere. I don't want to leave it for long, that is too messy. I'm not one of those artists who had half finished projects from years ago all over the place - I sometimes have ideas like that, but after a while I'll file them away, or use them, or delete them.

I then read a thread on itch.io about hex maps and how some are staggered vertically rather than horizontally, so I decided to experiment with adding this to my mapper, and it wasn't that difficult, so I added the feature for different staggers of hex map.

That's it for the day. I've been casually watching Logan, a good Marvel superhero film (which itself is rare). The film has made me feel tired and ill and old. This week has been Wolverinish in the amount of running up and down and about I've done and I've slept only a few hours last night and the night before, less than four hours each, due to excess nervous energy (generally positive 'excitement' rather than negative 'worry' - this probably makes no difference).

Box Done, Cornutopia Mapper

Tick tick! A busy day. The launch of Thermonuclear Domination on itch.io went well overnight so it looks like a good place to release my old games.

I started the day by finalising the paint box, gluing the new parts. Here is the finished article:

I can't decide whether to screw the front (the weakest part) or leave it. If it comes unstuck now it would be harder to reglue, but would look uglier if I screwed it. It feels quite solid, so I will probably leave it, partly as a test of the strength of Titebond II (if I screwed it, it would not be a test). I could also either paint or varnish it, but that's quite a lot of work for essentially nothing really, as the wood is pretty tough anyway.

Then I started to rework some 'loop' sound effects for possible release on the Scirra 'Construct' site, I have a library of 100 or so, but after I'd assembled everything, made art and previews for them all, it turned out that I already had them on sale in the other packs.

So, I turned to Cornutopia Mapper, my old tile map editor which I originally began work on in 2003. I had a map editor on Amiga called SCM4, which was vital for games like Hilt II, but that wasn't nearly as good as this mapper. For games like Taskforce it is/was an essential tool, and has been free on my website for years, but I removed it last year when working on the remastered Taskforce. Today I made a few cosmetic changes and added a new pdf manual.

The Chinese William Blake translations are ready so that is a job for the next day (or week) or two, I will release this and the English version before the end of May. With the Nightfood release in May, I think June would be a good month to release the second edition of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. I would also like to update some of the older games that I've not touched in over a decade: Arcangel, Trax, Roton, Martian Rover Patrol...

And I have about eight paintings drawn out... these need a little more planning of shading and colouration... I may work on this tomorrow.

On we march.

Paint Boxes, Thermonuclear Domination

More steady progress on the paint box today. First drilled out 4mm holes in the wood for screws, then 7mm holes in there too to accommodate the screw heads...

These hold the handle...

Then gluing the left side and the front. See how handy books are for woodwork! I'm worried that tugging the front will pull the box apart; the only strength is the glue held on the edge of these 6mm pieces of wood. I'm inclined to screw it too, though it will spoil the look.

Then I spent some time working on a revamp of my sound effects library. I must do something with them.

Then, created an account on itch.io, a gaming platform that sells (or gifts) directly to players, far cheaper than Steam (who charge £80 per game, even for a free game, plus 30%). This platform is free except for commission of 10%, and even that is optional! It's more free, more sleek, faster, etc.

I assembled by first game, Thermonuclear Domination with its new manual and have launched it on there as donationware and a kind soul has downloaded the game and donated $2 already! That's more than I've ever made from this game in 23 years. I will put some other games and software projects on there and gradually migrate any software that I currently host to them.

Domination Manual, SY-85 Fixed, Paint Box Progress

A great day today, I feel reborn into a new skin.

I started by fixing some errors in the Radioactive manual, then decided to write a new manual for my first PC game, created as a programming test: Thermonuclear Domination. This was/is effectively the same as my Amiga game Global Thermonuclear Warfare, the precursor to Radioactive. Anyway, it's always been a free game but had an ancient manual from the late 1990s, so I've made a fancy new PDF version.

I started this first thing, then paused at 10:30 because the new drive part arrived from Germany for my Yamaha SY-85 synth. I plugged it all in. The most difficult bit was knowing which way was up because the floppy IDE connector was a perfect rectangle and could seemingly fit either way. I took my best guess. Here is the adaptor:

I screwed it up and switched it on and it seemed to work. I tried formatting a disk...

It got to the end and said 'Format Failed' eek! I tried again and the format worked. I also then saved the current presets to the new disk (which also worked) and loaded the factory presets from Yamaha's original 1990-something disc, and this also worked. When I press the disc section of the controls the synth seems to lock-up/freeze. Not sure if this is a limitation of the new adaptor or a fault with how I have installed it (to be fair, there is not much I can do but plug it in - I could take it out and wobble it or wipe it but this rarely does anything in electronics). When there is a disc in the drive, it all seems to work correctly, and the lock-up can be cured by turning the synth off and on again. Apart from this, everything is completely functional and the drive itself (a 'new' Sony in great condition) is better than the original Yamaha one, which I will keep with the synth anyway.

I want to sell this synth. I didn't want, would never want, to sell something broken, so I repaired it first. The synth is now in great condition, almost as good as new and cleaned and restored inside and out.

Then I went to Deb's, hoping to do some garden work there, but this wasn't possible, so we sat in idyllic sun for an hour or so. It is five years minus one day since the happy moment when we met, when she was a guest on ArtsLab on RedShift Radio.

I walked home and decided to continue work on my paint box so set up the pedestal drill and drilled the 80, 6mm holes, then got the jigsaw out and painstakingly sawed out the slots. Marking and sawing these was the most time consuming part of this project:

Then the anxiously exciting part of slotting everything together... it worked! It was amazingly easy, far more-so than I could have hoped. I had half-imagined needing to sand or shave the edges to perfection, but the whole thing, even cut by hand, worked brilliantly.

Now it's a matter of the sides. I will need to glue these. I will also have to glue the whole 'matrix' to the base, and will use some thin and long screws to hold it. For this, I'll need to draw around the matrix in situ, drill outwards using the drawing as a guide (so that I know where the screws will go) then glue it, then screw in from the outside through those holes. I also need to work on the handle on the front and/or back... it's a standard drawer handle but it will be a commitment to a part that is hard to replace or change. Normally desk drawer handles can be unscrewed and replaced, so this makes me slightly hesitant.

Paint Box

Decided to start to make my paint box, here is the plan:

Happily this all fits onto one sheet of 610x1220mm M.D.F., so I marked it out and cut it. First 7 strips of 80x354mm, then 7 of 80x174mm (one cut down to 102mm), then 7 of 258mm (3 cut down to 246mm). These had to be done in sections as the measurement needed to be exact and the width of the saw blade is/was an awkward size (about 1.6mm). So it was a case of drawing 7x 80mm strips, then measuring and cutting the 354, 174, 258, then cutting each of the strips so that they were the same height.

I measured and drew upstairs, and cut downstairs, so it was a lot of running up and down and cutting. At the end of this, I had my pieces: 23 strips (two extra thinner ones for 'handles' on each short edge), and a base. The handles felt like they would be uncomfortable to use, so I looked around for some normal drawer handles, and found some, so I'll use those instead of the 'i' and 'j' sections in the plan.

These will slot together with neat joints, so the next step was the mark and cut the slots, which are ideally, exactly, 6mm wide. I'd not done this before, so I tried a test joint on a spare piece. I started by drilling a 6mm hole at the distant end. This worked, but the back of the M.D.F. was badly mashed by the drill, I'd forgotten about that effect, so used a second piece of wood behind it. This will be important for the actual drilling as I have a lot of holes to drill, and each needs a new, clean, bit of wood behind. Other than that, the test joint worked well, so I measured and marked out the 6mm slots for the criss-cross points. A lot: 80 in total.

I would have loved to drill and cut these today but I was just too tired. I think I'm still recovering from my vaccination, my arm still hurts. It would be difficult to complete this box in one day anyway, I've managed about half.

My next conundrum is which way to store the oil paints, lid side down or up? I suspect that the oil will float to the top and the pigment sink to the bottom; the oil separates like this with peanut butter, so I'll try lid down. I will use little bags as liners first to stop oil leaking messily.

I haven't done much else today, but have heard that Nightfood is all set for release at the end of May - five albums in five months. I won't have time for one in the next month, though I am filled with ideas and inspiration for music. I'm still concerned with structure. I like the structure of three or four movements or sections, as in a symphony or concerto. These 'sonatas' in Nightfood work well, but a large number, 10 or 12, as in many concept albums (including Sisyphus) seems too many somehow, although perhaps this is my idea of neatness... Mike Oldfield's Amarok had repeating themes despite having (technically) one big unit. The Spiral Staircase, however, felt very unified, perhaps because it had sections which repeated and built upon themselves. When you have lots of options, its a good idea to try them all.

Covid Musings, Nightfood Finalised

My 'no symptoms' from the vaccine developed into pains all over and a fever of 38 degrees for most of the night, perhaps a positive sign that my sports-car immune system has adapted, ran through its new assault course. Not a pleasant experience, and it's made me a little anxious about the second dose, the booster, and the prospect of yearly jabs (which we may all need for a few years), but, of course, actual Covid-19 would be far worse. It made me wonder about those who deny Covid, the still shell-shocked who don't realise that there is a genuinely deadly disease out there that cannot be avoided. There is no point in complaining. Discomfort, inconvenience, and all of the worse aspects of this pandemic (death etc.), must be tolerated and 'got on with'.

I feel fine today and went for a sunny walk to the park in the afternoon. I didn't watch any of the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral, but wanted to get some productive work done, so have queued up Nightfood for worldwide digital release on May 28th. Then registered the music, and spent an hour or two getting the new Tree of Keys and The Infinite Forest correctly documented with the music authorities. There is a lot of admin work for each new music release, and with a big back catlogue (Nightfood is my 59th release) the work can spiral because older albums often need updating, but I'm getting to grip with it now.

I've also listed the cover artwork on my website, and will soon list the full album there. I should do some actual creative work at some point, but this admin does also need doing, so I might as well do it on this 'rest day'.

Vaccination, Land of Beauty and Sorrow

My first vaccination day; up early and entered the Vaccination Centre (pharmacy) ten minutes before my appointment. Shown to a seat which formed a queue and asked a few basic questions, within 3 minutes I was moved to be injected, handed the leaflet and left, leaving 3 minutes before my actual appointment. All super efficient and lovely people too.

At home I read an unfair bad review of Flatspace IIk, criticising the controls with little mention of the free game (which uses the same controls) or that a controller can be plugged in to be used instead. Hundreds of people have played the game over the years, including many that (thankfully) persuaded me (insistently!) to release it on Steam at all, yet after 4 years there are only 15 reviews, and, as usually happens, they are often only written to complain about something rather than accurately represent the majority. I've had zero game sales in a few weeks, and just one review like this can cruelly and unfairly end a career.

Then I wondered what to do with the day. I'd completed the videos. The Dream of the Tao video is just too simple... just recycling footage is too easy, so I'll not do anything with it... yet. The irony is that I've deleted it from my art channel - it does have the music after all, so if it's anywhere it really needs to be a good one AND on my music channel.

I made plans for my paint tube rack, but I thought it best to take it easy today so I decide not to saw the wood - although I have, as of now, zero vaccine side effects. I remain convinced that Vitamin K (which I take every other day) is one key to coping with Covid-19.

I decided to paint, and added the glaze layer to Land of Beauty and Sorrow, an idea from 2018 that I underpainted on May 22nd last year, so this tiny panel has taken a long time:

It has done me a great deal of good to work on painting again, though I struggle with headaches and eye strain now. This one had so much detail in the underpainting that I didn't have to do much during glazing (more detail in an underpainting is almost always good - I tested this, the more, the better, the only exception is very fine lines, super-thin hairs, for example, which need very liquid paint). The glazing didn't add much and at times I wondered why I was glazing a flat colour with another, but the finish and glow is improved a little - this is unique to oils. I told myself that there are two things I don't respect in other artists: those who cheat (trace, or use projectors rather than draw, singers who pitch-correct etc.) and those who use acrylics because they are easy, and look worse in real life than oil - but look as good if not better in a photo or on a 'fake' computer screen - which make them double cheating.

I listened to some of Vulnicura by Björk while painting, an album I love, and L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches, another great work. I was reminded that Vannier defined Gainsbourg's sound on Histoire de Melody Nelson to such an extent than its more his work (musically) than Serge's.

I, Spider, Tao, Tree of Keys

A better, more settled day. Worked on the 'I, Spider' video, one I've already released, adjusting it, tweaking for the new music. I have limited resources, mostly too little time, I must do everything myself, and though I (think I!) am capable, other things wrestle for my attention, so everything must be a compromise and nothing quite as good as I'd like, just a reasonable balance between time and quality of end result. This is probably true of all artists. We all have finite time and finite resources.

I finalised this for the new Tree of Keys, and set the album ready for release. It won't be a major event, but I felt that the two tracks that I have rerecorded need to be out there and not the old versions. I've also put together the new Plastic Superman video (it is the same as the old one, but with the new music), and worked on an old video for Dream of the Tao. That only uses stock footage and seems a little simplistic. I'm always thinking of how to make the best from limitations.

In the afternoon I went out with Deb to some shops, for the first time in many months, and bought some essential wood for painting and projects. It was idyllic. Tonight I'm inspired, and have started work on something new, and have written three sets of lyrics. The inspiration is this image, or something like it.

My online exhibition at Nantwich Muesum went live today too.

Repairs, Photographs, Nightfood Artwork

A long and frustrating day, how I ache to make art but I seem to expend huge amounts of energy barely doing anything, spending long times caring for existing work, promotion, record keeping.

First, I added this year's art exhibitions to my website: Bickerton, Art Fair Cheshire, NEORENAISSANCE in Nantwich Museum, and the Macc Art Lounge display. Like most artists in Britain I had zero exhibitions in 2020 so these opportunities should be celebrated.

I had an email request for an image for the NEORENAISSANCE Online exhibition press release, so set up the room to take a few photos. This was time consuming as it involved choosing a painting and unwrapping it. Hanging these are often a problem because paintings tend to swing down and forwards when suspended from a thread. The solution is to fix the thread though an eyelet or something in the top and back of the artwork, so I had to do that, then get changed, set up the camera, and take a few photos. None of this was strictly necessary, but for a press release or exhibition announcement, I think it's important to have a face in the picture, the artist and a painting, to tell the story in an image.

This all took about 3 to 4 hours, and when doing so I noticed that one painting in storage had a scratch in the sky, a 15cm mark caused by an accident a few days earlier. So in the afternoon I took out the easel and prepared to repair it. The painting took only about 15 minutes of work to fix and the result was perfect, invisible, but taking out everything and putting it away (including carefully packing the painting) each took about 40 minutes.

Then I discovered another painting, 'So, How Have You Been?' had it's Perspex chipped right in the middle; it was ruined, so I had to de-frame it and remove the plastic.

On the broken Perspex I experimented with possible fixes to the chip and made some deliberate scratches to try and fix them. I used a heat-gun and blowtorch, which worked well at removing scratches, but also tended to bend the whole plastic and/or create air bubbles. Then I tried acetone, which had surprisingly little effect. I then sanded the surface and used acetone to clean the white powder. This worked best but the fine scouring of the sanding remained very visible. Perhaps a dedicated acrylic plastic polish would fix it after this.

Anyway, these tedious and effortful tasks took me beyond 4pm, by which time I felt that I'd hardly done anything with the day despite working constantly.

Then I mastered the Nightfood tracks, and finalised the artwork. the art is quite nice for this (as it is for The Myth of Sisyphus). When will it be seen by anyone? One day for certain, yes.

Then I started finalising a new edit of the I, Spider video for the new Tree of Keys release. This, again, is an old video, created in a hurry for ArtSwarm. I feel I need to make it as good as I can, yet it feels so Sisyphean to work at it, perhaps because I've worked on it for many hours before... the hard rock-roll of art, a self-driven job in pursuit of doing things better. If it is easy, it is not good, so effort is part of the artist life.

New videos of Plastic Superman, Take This Rose, and perhaps Dream of the Tao are needed, all revisions of older work, but perhaps not great changes are needed. I feel exhausted, working hard to stand still, and my eternal headache continues each day, but work I will, twice as hard, three times, to push forwards and onwards. One day I'll push through the dark trees into a blissful green field of sunshine and freedom.

Radio Video

I dream of a chef making tomato pasta sauce and he is using sausages mashed up with beef (two parts beef to one part sausage). He washes the meat in dirty dishwater with detergent suds in it, which I object to. I advice him that he should quite cookery and become an artist, and we move to an hall, like the exhibition room upstairs at Stockport Art Gallery, where some people, art club executives, are sitting behind a desk. The chef enquires and is accepted, and he loves painting.

I think the dream is telling me to paint.

A full day today. Started by booking my Covid-19 vaccine appointment because today these became available in my age range, then some video work, inspired by the Neorenaissance Online exhibition plans.

Created a new video for Mandalino from Apocalypse of Clowns. This is a simple tune and video, using some footage shot for ArtSwarm, plus some time-lapse clouds captured last year. It involved a complex mix and took a long time to balance, partly because the glittery, night-time, images are quite strong for me here. I would have liked to include some stars, but I am happy enough with the results.

Then, some editing of the 'I, Spider' video for the new recording featured in Tree of Keys 2021. The music has changed just enough to invalidate any spoken parts.

Neorenaissance has had a few technical hiccups, as well as about 10 spelling or grammatical mistakes which I shamefully didn't even think of looking for. I wanted to include a link to the Swift music, but the streaming of audio is nigh on impossible. The exhibitions are PDF based which limits including audio (well, basically you can't) which made me ponder the inefficiency of so many online things. PDF format is good for books, magazines etc. but was never really supposed to be interactive. HTML was designed exactly for that, but is so awkward to author and bespeckled with conflicting versions, style sheets, plug-ins and other nonsense that it's always looked ugly or been difficult to author or navigate (or all three). It's 2021, 30 years since the invention of the web, yet text, with images, and optional audio (never mind video) is still stupidly complicated. In the end I ditched the audio idea and left it up to the museum whether and how they included it.

In between this I photographed my newly framed paintings. That's it for today, though I just heard a rumour that The Myth of Sisyphus has been on Chester's Circl8 radio, at least for some sort of mention, which is to be celebrated.

I must next finalise Nightfood. Every day my eyes and head aches and it is hindering my work capability.

Admin

A day of headache, I can't seem to work for longer than a few hours without migraines and feeling of pain like I'm crossing my eyes. It has been a long day of seemingly endless and seemingly pointless chores, but of course, they are not endless or pointless.

First I've updated all of my music web pages to point to a Songwhip page, a neat single page for links to stream and download music. This involved a bit of database editing and php coding for my website and the Cornutopia Music website.

Then I decided to do create some new artwork swatches. All of my artworks have some sort of image; for the paintings or drawings this is at least a 300dpi image of the painting/drawing/print. I need to use these quite a lot so it's a bit inconvenient to find and resize them from their respective archive directory, so I've created another place which simply has them all in there in jpg format, all resized to 2400 pixels on the longest side, which is a nice maximum size for emails, sharing etc. Now, these tend to be the 'framed' images for paintings, but sometimes I like to show unframed ones, so today I went through them all and added unframed images too, so now I have 1019 images for my paintings there to date. It doesn't include everything, but most of everything. This was tedious and time consuming, finding, resizing, and saving each image.

Then my SY-85 floppy drive adaptor arrived, so I opened up the synth to try the new drive:

The adaptor thing sticks out from the back, which I expected, so I had to do some sawing to the aluminium drive case:

I used a jewellery saw and pondered about the many little skills I've picked up. Alas, the adaptor didn't fit the SY-85's ribbon cable... so I had to order another more expensive one from Germany, which will take weeks to come. I've already spent nearly £100 trying to repair this drive. Once a job is started I just have to grip on and stay gripped no matter where fate pulls me.

Then I documented every YouTube Music video (33), plus 3 for Fall in Green and 3 for Marius Fate. I noted the URL of each of them, and checked the playlists. Bizarrely, sometimes the videos were duplicated in the playlists for some reason. I also updated the links there with Songwhip links.

All so very eye-straining and not like making art. I like organising and making things neat, and I seem to spent half of my time doing it, but often, this tedious job makes me ache for and want to create art, so it has a purpose in that too.

Neorenaissance

Another full day. Most of the day spent putting together the online 'Neorenaissance' exhibition for Nantwich Museum. I tried to focus on work which had a multimedia or ekphrastic component.

Covidopolis, Neo-Renaissance

Woke early and decided on a full day of painting, the underpainting to a picture called Covidopolis. The hues are dark greens to peachy pinks. This took until 17:00 and was very tiring, my eyes seem to struggle these days, but I'm full of enthusiasm and ideas of all sorts.

While painting I listened to Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies and Scott Walker, and after painting did some final tweaking to Nightfood. I'm pleased with The Myth of Sisyphus, my first song album where everything fitted as I had hoped it should, as good as my former work like The Spiral Staircase, or Cycles & Shadows for example. It was a leap up from my other vocal albums (I know I can revisit and tweak those to perfection at any point, but there is no rush). Nightfood is a leap up again, but there are many leaps left, two two are but steps, I can see so much more to do.

Tomorrow I'm putting together an 'online' exhibition for Nantwich Museum, a simple slideshow of work which I'll show in December (or whenever the exhibition is). I had planned lots of events for this, 'Neo-Renaissance', about multimedia. The events would involve, or would have involved, local poets, musicians, other artists... all in the name of cross collaboration; basically an evolutionary step on from my previous solo exhibitions of Arazmax Kane in Chester and 21st Century Surrealism in Stockport, because the 10 or so solo exhibitions before that were largely unattended and unseen. Covid has thrown a spanner in these plans. I feel I need more of a theme, a unity of sorts, more of an installation than a general exhibition, yet I have so many paintings, from years, eclectic, many unseen that people really need to see in person. A big show in my small and local museum is bound to have some sort of retrospective aspect, though my eyes and mind are on the future. I often feel like an alien here, a Man Who Fell To Earth. I have so many paintings from the past 15 years and too few outlets for them.

Sisyphean Mix

A non-stop day. I started by re-recording new vocals for some parts of Nightfood because I wasn't quite happy with the current tone. When singing, like speaking on the radio, it's important to remember that you're talking to someone personally, not just singing over heads; not matching mere notes, not announcing, but talking to someone. This is the magical quality in a vocal performance.

Then some work promoting on The Myth of Sisyphus, some emails sent, messages, etc. I found a website called SongWhip which calculates and lists music links, very useful. I've seen things like this before but this one is free while the others charge a fortune. I don't think anyone at all has streamed or discovered Sisyphus yet, but, people will eventually, perhaps trying this weekend. There's so much music out there. Even top artists from the 90s are just now be rediscovered by people. Even for me, Gunstorm, from over 10 years ago, is periodically 'rediscovered'.

I've framed the artwork I drew for the album and will give this to a charity who requested artwork. I've also decided to donate one of my earliest paintings, Portrait of Liza Minnelli, my first ever painting in two layers:

I love the painting, it has a strange and stunning quality, a shocked and sad expression. The paint quality isn't as smooth and fine as I can paint now, but this is less important. Every aspect to a painting makes it unique. The strange pastel-colours here are due to the greyscale underpainting; this was my first, so experimental, new, different.

Nantwich Museum have asked for something virtual to commemorate the original (now Covid-postponed) launch date of my exhibition there. Very short notice as the date is Tuesday, with more time I could have involved other people or done more, but perhaps I'm over ambitious, as ever. I also had news that the annual Bickerton Art Exhibition will take place this year, so have lined up work for that, this process itself takes at least an hour.

I noted Nick Drake's birthday, perhaps an opportunity to do something with my music track of the same name. I updated Prometheus with two new features. The first flips a modulator's amplitude around its mean, rather than around zero. For an LFO, like a sine wave for example, this makes little difference, but for a volume ramp which ranges zero to one, it's usually more useful to swap the zero and one, rather than make it zero to minus one. I also added a feature to jump the signal as in the picture:

And did countless other small jobs, the day has felt Sisyphean.

I look back in semi-horror at my paintings, some I still think are great, some I think look awful, but I expect this is always the way with artists. The only answer is to keep making new things, hoping that these will be better (fortunately, I feel they are). I have head pain, eye pain, again. This hinders my ability to stare, to paint, to work. We all deteriorate. I must make art!

Onward!

SY-85, The Myth of Sisyphus Launch

A slow day yesterday.

I wanted to download my Yamaha SY-85 sounds and discovered that the floppy drive had stopped working, which is a common (actually, inevitable) fault because it's band driven and the band gets more slack over time. This is not easy to fix. It's not essential to fix for two reasons; the data is generally stored internally anyway, so the 128 (or is it 256) presets are remembered without being stored. You can buy non-volatile memory for it so that even when powered off, the sample and sequencer memory is retained too, AND even then you can store and restore these data via MIDI, so the keyboard is 100% functional without the floppy drive, but it would be nice to have it working, and ideally, future proof it for a few more years, so I've ordered a replacement (vintage) drive and an adaptor for the connector... this last part might be problematical.

In other ways it was a slow day. I felt isolated and unsupported as an artist. This has always been the case with my family who do not show any interest in my work of creations, my key childhood emotion was being ignored, which results in a mix of very introverted and self-analytical behaviour, and, conversely, occasional flamboyancy designed to grab attention; like many artists, perhaps. When my parents note my creations, they tend to be critical and dismissive from the '[expletive deleted] row' of my piano practice onwards; though an alternative of praise isn't useful either, but it would be nice to have, or have had, some feeling of encouragement or, perhaps more so, some practical help.

This melancholy was caused my a reminiscence of a happier and progressive time in late 2014. Of course now, in times of Covid-19 lockdowns and imposed isolations, many forms of help or interaction are impossible. This and my geography are, I think, larger factors for feelings of isolation and un-support than anything psychological. Most people have no social groups now, or very limited ones, and I've only rarely had any, the few years when part of a weekly art group perhaps. Now I have Deborah who is wonderfully supportive.

The best antidote to emotion is to behave rationally; list actions and enact actions.

Today marks the digital release of The Myth of Sisyphus, so I've been doing various admin duties. I've posted on Twitter and Facebook about it, a basic marker, with links to the album. I've set the album as a highlight on Spotify. Sent out an email newsletter. Prepared the artwork for CD printing. Registered the album and the two edits of each track with PPL (this is my first album to feature different stream and CD versions of the tracks). I've updated my website and the Cornutopia Music websites, and the links to the album on those sites. This is a basic setting of the links out there to point to the new release, useful for those who are specifically interested and looking for the work.

Over the coming days I'll do a few things to talk about the music and the album. My favourite tracks, the ones I'm happiest with are the unusual and experimental ones. Deb liked Light Blue Evening and I Care most at first, the two most accessible tracks, the low slope of the ramp. Of course, I think they all work together, and the ideas and themes, even musically all mesh together in the way that I like.

Onwards we roll our rock. Every day we must strive to be a little bolder.

Echochamber

Echochamber

Echochamber
Round and round
Hear my voice
Sound my sound

Echochamber
Ego sum
Iron cube
Imperium

Album Tweaks

It's tax day so a more admin work and filing, and shredding of old things. I keep my records in seven boxes, one per year. I also keep a few special things as mementos in these, so after seven years can see them again and determine if these need keeping for longer or consigning to history. Some touching moments and letters were in today's seven-year old treasure trove from my whirlwind romance, a high that was crushed all too harshly, all too suddenly.

Echoes of this remain in Nightfood, like the snowy scene in 'Dreams of You', but only for dramatic rather than cathartic effect.

I found a bug in Prometheus again, this this one that's quite important and older than seven years! When tracks are silent for a certain time, normally one second, they shut off, to stop the time consuming and pointless job of processing silence. The tracks switch on again when a note is played. But, today I changed the definition of silence from 'left*left+right*right<threshold' to checking each channel individually instead, because the threshold number is tiny, and I thought it would be nice to adjust it manually. It turned out that the whole system never worked, tracks were never shut off, which explains why the 7:30 song of Nightfood, with 22 tracks, took 13 minutes to render. Not too bad, I thought, but I did notice it was very slow at a time when only one track was playing, when it should have been very fast there.

Today, it all worked and now the track renders in under 4 minutes. It all plays much faster too. Not only this, but playing notes did not wake up these sleeping tracks, and now they do. This has been a bug for at least 10 years.

After the time consuming admin and filing, I started to tweak the music and adjusted most of the tracks a little. Nightfood, at one point, had very compressed and band-compressed vocals (that is, one narrow frequency band was compressed, not all of it, this is actually far more useful and interesting to listen to). I applied the compression after the reverb and delays deliberately which had the effect of making the reverb tail really loud, like a reverse-reverb that grew at the end the of words. It sounded rather good. And then, today, in the final mix, I switched all of that fancy stuff off and, after running down this path of oddness, the plain vocals sounded better. I think I simply prefer a sort of pre-80s sound. The 90s distorted and compressed everything, to tear apart the too-clean synths and too-clean fake drums and too-clean sequences, but my sounds are programmed to sound more organic anyway. The Alan Parsons Project sound is too clean for me, but E.L.O. is okay, and Genesis' Trick of the Tail (an album notably cleaner in tone than their Peter Gabriel era albums).

All of those are far more rough than the super-compressed loudness-war cacophony that is contemporary pop. The important thing is the dynamism and feeling: drama and emotional power can be measured in contrasts.

Well, Nightfood is a strange song on a strange album, which I like. It's taken about two months, a short time compared to my recent albums, but feels like a technical and artistic leap above The Myth of Sisyphus already. I must strive to continue this.

I've worked on some artwork today. Here are some ideas so far. Both of these do seem to reflect the feeling of each respective 'sonata'.

I'm unsure about the main cover. This original idea doesn't seem to match either of the above, but it is an eye catching image...

I think I'd prefer something that is a mix of both. Between this, I'll think of future projects.

Nightfood Vocals and Wasps

Some final production work on Nightfood today. I recorded the vocals and added these.

I discovered and fixed two bugs in Prometheus too. First, the darn milliseconds calculation which hasn't been right for years but I'd not noticed until today. I know what exact sample the song is at, eg. 44100 means the song is exactly one second in. So the seconds are sample/44100 - easy; rounded down, so if you have 66150, that's 1.0 rather than 1.5. Now, 66150 should be 500ms... 1.500 seconds. My faulty formula was millisecs=s/44.1. Admittedly 44.1 is 44100/1000 so seems like it might work, but that answer is 1500, so my faulty calculation said sample 66510 = 1.150 secs. The correct formula should be sample/44.1-seconds*1000 so millisecs would correctly be 500 here. Another bug concerned song parameters changing while and not being reset to the start positions if/when the song stops.

Musically I've done a lot of small tweaks. The piano solo is now pre-rendered for speed and memory reasons. It's a complex part, it has a drifty and gentle feeling and I made the music oh-so gently slide to the left as though we are drifting on a river of summer (there are river sounds too). The music also fades away, but then suddenly the trills appear, something is wrong and we are snapped back to alarming reality, to the music here must shift right back to the centre and full volume. In fact, here is the exact movement of the piano melody, over the course of 106 seconds:

Some birds follow it, and these are instantly shut-off when the piano bass slams down, hence the need for that exact timing.

The vocals are all quite high in register. The 'pit' verse and the last one have 6 layers: two high pitch, two sung an octave lower, and two in a more chanted, spoken voice.

Now, for the 18th century 'party' at the start I needed some spoken parts, so I searched for some public domain films, partly because I like the timbre of old films. Essentially, my only criteria was a public domain film; anything else about the film wasn't important, so I found one called The Wasp Woman. I extracted a few segments of speech and only then realised that the theme of wasps ties in with the first track on the album, The Dream of Wasps. A stroke of serendipity! So I found another section from the film for the 'hell' part of the song, a dialogue about wasps and immortality. For a final hurrah at the end I added some real bees (a recording I made myself).

So now the first four songs form a quartet. My plan was a three part 'sonata', a middle song, then another three, but instead I have a definite four and three.

Now, the final tweaks, changes, balancing, listens. Then assigning the ISRC codes, mastering, artwork, paperwork etc. then release, then the next album, and so on for all time. Amen.

I really need some promotion work on these. The Myth of Sisyphus is to be released in three days to only my own fanfare. Still, the quality of the work, and continual production and improvement, is the important thing.

More Nightfood, Commercial Music

More work on Nightfood today, though going is slower. The gentle 'day' part is a piano solo, actually this turned out to be about two minutes long, but the mood here is drifting and gentle so it feels okay. This leads to some dramatic trills (these always create anticipatory tension) before its finale. I had to work on the trills a bit and recorded three different versions, the moods of those are so sensitive, both the speed, regularity, and the volume to build up tension. Come to think of it I don't think I've ever recorded a piano trill before but I've played them countless times.

After this it leads to a section that echoes the initial chords but without words, just a guitar solo so I recorded that too.

All that's left are the vocals. I don't feel like doing them here and now. Apart from anything else, my left ear is blocked and painful for the third day in a row. I have recorded some simple test vocals. I think I'll do that more often. Normally, I record the vocals at the end, I expect a lot of recording is done that way because you need a reasonably complete backing track to gauge the volume and mood of the vocals, but now I think it might help to have test or placement vocals there as soon as the melody is set, or even sooner, so that the timbre of the song can be crafted along.

Now I need to think of what vocal effects or layering I might need. I don't tend to use that many vocal effects, and if anything I'm using less, but for the 'they will drag you backwards' verse I might double these up. The range of this song is quite high, A1 to G2 (in my scales - that's a high G). This means I can comfortably double them an octave lower and might try that.

I took a walk to the park to meet Deb in this summery day (the week is set for wintery weather). I talked about Genesis, after listening to A Trick Of The Tail a few days ago. Tracks like Squonk aren't that different from later so-called 'commercial' recordings like Mama. Genesis were famously accused of becoming too commercial, as though this were a conscious decision to be artless - it might have been (a conscious choice!), but it seems that their music was always, gradually, moving towards a more 'commercial' sound with each release. Most progressive bands became more commercial, even by 1975; punk didn't end prog-rock, perhaps the lack of mass appeal did. Bands that didn't have hits, like Van der Graaf Generator, remained unpopular and failed to make enough money. Debts, and the Sword of Damocles of potentially losing contracts or jobs are probably powerful incentives to become more commercial.

The thing is, I think that many of the prog experiments ended too early, as though a trip across a desert was underway, and people decided to turn back due to worry and other pressures rather than continue, when they could have gone further on to new things, oases and ideas, that remain undiscovered. For me, what is 'progressive' simply means using all instruments, sounds, and tools to create an effect; like symphonic music, like all music historically, and now we have more timbres available than ever before, so a golden age, for the art if not for the money, is here and now.

Well, I hope to make as much music as I can... I must get Nightfood finished, then another album. I read about Roger Corman today. In one year, I think 1957, he made 10 films. I must try to do the same for albums, and certainly have the ideas; although it is rather a lot of work for one person. I listed Deep Dark Light on Smashwords today. I must write a book this year too.

Nightfood Work

A full day largely working on the production and recording of Nightfood. Last night I played the piano and recorded two parts for the song, a gentle flowing piano part in C-major, the 'day' before the finale. I also played with the harpsichord sound and created something based on the main verse chords, so now I have a structure for the whole song:

First we are in an 18th century party; checkerboard marble tiles, glass houses, with the harpsichord playing and a string quartet, it's evening but light. There is gentle chatter, then darkness, a black storm rolls in and the music changes to strange distorted instruments and demonic chatter. The melody is slow and morose, of the main verse. Then verses 1, 2, the quiet C-minor solo with electric guitar, then verse 3 and another demonic part ('the pit') which leads to an intro and verse 4 which echoes exactly the start of the song. This will lead into a relaxing sort of jazzy part with a gentle acoustic guitar melody which I played today, forgetting things... then, hopefully, this leads to the main verse (1, 4) chords but more aggressively before the finale in verse 2 chords/melody.

A lot of today was working on the harpsichord intro part, painting a picture with music, so I wanted background chatter and those strings to match the melody. String sequencing can take a very long time to make it sound half-good. I added some slowed down lion roars to the dark thunder section at the start. I used a real recording of a storm there, I've got a few which I recorded during dramatic downpours on my Zoom H4.

I also recorded that acoustic guitar part. The finale part is all to do. Here are the words (so far):

They only come at night
When your mind isn't looking
They come at night
To bite at your guts

They will eat their fill
of your meaty soul
with their smoky horns of silver
and their choking eyes of coal

they will drag you backwards to
the pit
they will drag you backwards to
the pit

there is nothing that you can pray
as you paralyse in fright
but you will forget in the day
forget in the light

But they will return at night
They only come at night

In other jobs, I listed The Burning Circus on Smashwords, a better platform than Amazon for ebooks. I'll do the same for my other books eventually. None have really sold, but I'm sure they will eventually, drip by drip.

Backups, Songs of Innocence ebook, Nightfood

A slow day yesterday. The 1st of April means three-monthly backups, which also involves general computer tidying. These quarterly backups tend to take all morning, but are very useful, stopping things growing, deleting unnecessary files. Miners must also build supports for their tunnels, and this is part of the job, as important as tunnelling. Filing helps create a long-term stable system.

It was a slow day after that. I spent most of the afternoon designing a tray/rack/storage box for my oil paints. I've kept them all in a drawer since I began painting in 2004 (well, I guess that in the first year or two I had too few paints) but they are messy, they all seem to leak something from the top or bottom, oil or paint. They all contaminate each other and the whole mass becomes sticky and messy like a rabble of school children urchins. This is part of the happily organic process of painting, but it is messy. I think that a pigeon-hole type box would be better, one paint per cell, so came up with a design:

A lot of time was spent on how to organise the colours. I've split them between the earth and generally underpainting colours and the brighter glazing colours. The broad spectrum of R, O, Y, G, B, V is there a bit, but there are a lot of browns and yellowy earth colours. Raw umber might be a dark yellow, and burnt umber a dark orange, but it seems odd to keep those dull colours with the yellows and oranges, so these are in a separate two rows at the top; then reds ochres, yellow ochres, then blues and greens - of course there are hardly any earth blues or greens, but chromium oxide and cobalts count, so those go together. There are no earth violets (I could count manganese, but it's too transparent, and mars violet is a red, of course, the pigment of blood itself). Then the bright colours. Again I hardly use any blues or greens, only viridian and ultramarine, and finally the three violets I use (manganese, ultramarine, and the suspicious alien dioxazine). There's also room for metallic gold, silver, bronze, which I use so rarely that I've still got my tubes from when I started painting. They are sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes, useful.

I can't buy the wood to make the rack yet anyway. It was a cold and sleepy day yesterday generally. Later at night I started work on creating an ebook version of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, my 2015 book. I didn't think there was any point in doing this at the time, the poems are free online anyway, so why would anyone buy the ebook? My Chinese translator Wu Yi wants to make a Chinese version now, so I thought about it again. Perhaps I could make this ebook itself free. My illustrations in there are rather small and unimpressive on a tiny screen (compared to the full book) but perhaps more people would find the book this way, and perhaps some would like the printed version.

Suddenly I was struck with a migraine, seeing flashing lights like a Vic-20 demo, which began as a blind spot in my vision which grew to cover the lower half of my vision, then all of it (I worked through this!), then a mild headache on the right side. This persisted, and even for most of this morning a cough sent shots of pain into the right side of my head.

Today by comparison has been a power-day. I started work on the Nightfood music. The structure now starts with an odd gentle intro, a distorted lead instrument, partly inspired by Bjork who used, it turns out, my SY-85 synth on one of her 90s tracks. I made my instrument fade by two semitones, giving it all a droney sad, and very strange feeling. Its melody is the main verse melody. There are lots of little tunes and rhythms in this, but I don't want too many. The problem with long music generally, particularly epic prog-rock tracks, is too many different melodies and too little structure.

The music moves to a guitar intro, which I played using the Boutique-Special setting on my Yamaha amp, it sounded so good. Then verses 1 and 2, then it falls into a C-minor solo, so I played one on the guitar. Then I decided to improvise an organ solo on the piano. It sounded okay, and I wondered if I could import the MIDI sequence directly into the sequence, but I couldn't really... I can import MIDI in the same tempo and structure as the original - so if the MIDI sequence was 120 B.P.M. then it would set the tempo to that and import the notes correctly, on beat, off beat etc. I wanted to import the 120 B.P.M. sequence (ALL of my piano recordings are set to 120 B.P.M., no matter what speed I actually play) but adjust it so that it plays at the original speed even though my sequence is 150 beats a minute; so it needed to stretch the timing of everything by 25%. The maths is quite simple so I programmed an option in Prometheus to import a MIDI fine and stretch the timing to fit the current sequence. It will only pick the basic song tempo (it won't adjust the importing speed as the song tempo is modulated) but it works, so I managed to import my 'live' organ solo as notes.

Then verse 3; this is in the verse 2 chords, then a quiet and odd 'hell' part, actually rather like a similar part in The Dream of Wasps. Then verses 4 and 5 which are in the melody of verses 1 and 2. The full song is around 3:30. I expect it will be a bit longer in the end, but not that much. I would like it to be nearer 10 minutes. I've had the idea of adding a new section of between verses 4 and 5 because the lyrics bring us into daylight... it would be nice to make that part happy... daylit... before a hopefully dramatic plunge into the night again.

In other news, our Apocalypse of Clowns album has had a mention in both Nantwich News and Crewe Nub News, all down to Deborah's publicity work. I've long stopped chasing any form or review or publicity. Crewe Nub News did at least mention the musical content in a generally good write-up. My music has only ever, to my knowledge, been reviewed twice in the over-20 years I've been making and releasing it; mainly on a website called The Borderland run by retired music journalist John M. Peters. He broadly gave me good reviews, and he copied some to the Amazon pages for those old albums, but with errors, and sometimes even putting the wrong review with the wrong album (sigh). My only other review was a brief online mention of The Spiral Staircase. Both that website and The Borderland are now defunct, and I've never had a print review - but I know I will one day...