A nice morning, generally sticking to my new daily schedule. For most of my life I've had insomnia to some degree, due to eternal nervous excitement. Needing to wake up at a certain time adds to this anxiety and makes me less likely to sleep, so I'm ironically much more tired on the days I need to wake early for. So, recently, for a year or two, I decided to sleep for as long as my body wants or feels, let my cells take as much or as little sleep as they need. This, generally, has led to sleeping too late as well as being awake in the night for hours.
I now know the folly of my plans. Any plan that involves feelings is bound to fail. The clock and a rational logical attitude is the key to success in life - because the pure informational exchange of incorruptible data is a key force in combatting entropic decay. Eating, sleeping, working, and every activity, apart from judging other people or art - that's what emotions are for, nothing else works best without emotion. So, now I wake at 8:00, get hungry and eat at 12:30 and 18:00 (that has been the case for 30 years at least) and follow many other regular plans. My cells already love this new order. We now know what we are doing, and what to do at any specific time. Joyous.
Today I started work on the main intro, which needed a new, eerie instrument. The result is very sleepy, almost meditative. I don't really like ambient music, but variety is the spice of art, and I rarely make music with this mood, so I will use it. The result is reminiscent of the start to Synaesthesia, or the start to Genesis, my earliest teenage recordings. Synaesthesia keeps coming to mind... it's good that I'm aware of it so that I can avoid repeating myself in future.
Unfortunately, I discovered a bug in Prometheus. For long recordings, like this, over 90 seconds, I have to split samples up into 90-second seconds. I programmed a feature to do this automatically, which calculates the exact sample of the final song at any particular measure, thus, it can create a new instrument that starts on that measure and exactly trim a sample to start 1/44100th of a second after the previous one ends. This calculation gets complicated when the tempo is slid or modulated, and earlier versions of the program demanded a fixed tempo for this feature. Today I realised that it didn't work for over two sections with a wildly modulating tempo, so spent about 4 hours fixing and testing this.
In the afternoon Deb and I went for a nice wander around Dagfields. I thought, last night, that I'll probably find a rare Sparks album. I don't know why I thought that, other than I've been thinking about their early work. These antique/second hand places never have good music, but today I saw this...
Amazing. It is, I think, the only Sparks record I've ever seen. It was amazing that I should see this today, and it was rather rare. Apart from being a CBS demo, Introducing was/is perhaps their least successful. I've never heard any of the tracks, so will play it happily.
