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...
