A full day. Started by gluing my two remaining frames, the stain needed hair drying in these damp and freezing conditions. Then, the start of the music admin for Secret Electric Sorcery.
Then I decided to record more of the SY-85 tunes. One, a remake of an ancient Amiga mod called Vektor3, was compressed and could only be decompressed on an Amiga. This was a surprise. I loaded up Amiga Forever Workbench and, after realising that I needed a new library, which I placed into Workbench/Libs, the old Octamed Soundstudio loaded the file, allowing me to save it out for re-loading into the PC. I've probably not heard this tune since 1998, as I'm sure I didn't emulate the Amiga back then, and I didn't have an Amiga and PC at the same time.
So, a steady day of recording the tunes. The quality is excellent, I'm really pleased I'm recording these. One, O5, I can't remember at all, so it was nice to hear - I've probably never recorded it before. There are also two versions of The Chase (aka. The Runner), one of the tracks from the earliest version of Synaesthesia, so it was nice to hear the differences.
I've now recorded 29 tracks, all of the tracks which don't involve samples. About 15-20 tracks remain which will need a mixer.
In between I've watched a film of Philip Glass' A Descent Into The Maelström. The music, from the 1980s, sounds very like Koyaanisqatsi. The director opened the film by saying that the original reason for recording and discovering the music was Brexit - yet there were absolutely no Brexit references, and then talked about the Edgar Allen Poe tale which inspired the music... but again there were few references to that or its story apart from an opening reading and the landscape with occasional whirls of water. The film is mostly local people going about their daily lives in the snow. The director explained that he didn't want to emulate Koyaanisqatsi, but in the end he did, to the extent that clips from one could be cut into the other and nobody would notice. I think I'd have used actors, models, animation and tried to tell the Poe story, or the spirit of it, more directly.
Of course the music is very pretty and full of swirls. It made me think that Philip Glass isn't a minimalist. His music isn't about repetition and the differences between iterations. Instead, his music is chord-based rather than melody-based, and uses fast or slow arpeggios to convey urgency or relaxation.
I mention this because my old music to Arcangel, which I recorded today, was compared to Philip Glass at the time. I knew nothing of his music then. I'm unsure if my music is like his, but at the same time, there is something of it in there, mainly the doom-laden bass notes in descending chords.
