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.
