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!
