Two full days working on the Salomé music, it seems that each track takes about three very full days to complete, and no vocals have been added yet. I'm eager to get this over with, but, what must be done must be done.
I spent yesterday refining The Planet's Oracle, building the dark intro pianos and enhancing the mood. There were only relatively small changes, but as in writing or any art, these last tweaks take an awful long time. The track starts with strange clicks, I want to paint a 'Victorian' image, wooden, pacing, the nervous energy of Nietzsche. Then there's a dramatic series of knocks, like fate knocking on the door (these are bangs on the shed outside, I hid the sound recorder inside and banged on the door to time). A final knock booms out and reverses into the piano intro. I spent quite some time on the basic white-noise based boomy/thundery percussion sounds (now called Deep Oracle). Then we enter a room, furious writing to the rhythm of the main theme. Then some guitar solos, one for the frantic chords at the start, and another for the climax which breaks up the mechanical perfection of the sequencer.
This was largely complete, well up to the next step, by lunch. I then worked on Truth Seeker, which was in a draft stage. It needed a solo in the middle. Last time I worked on it I recorded a guitar part for the start on my eternally ugly-sounding Yamaha 700 guitar. This sounded tinny, like an acoustic/electric cross (of course, it is) it didn't work. I started with the solo, which jumps back to the pounding pianos of the intro, and added a wailing organ solo; this was in part inspired by recent listens to Time Of The Season by The Zombies. Despite the jazzy overtones, this seemed to resonate with the church element, the church Salomé fled. This then breaks open to 'outdoors' or a crowd, this is actually a recording of the chatter from the interval during the live performance of Salomé, so it's appropriate on many levels.
I remembered that the title is 'Truth Seeker in a Madding Crowd', and this is the crowd. We have the church, memories of distant Russia, and the busy streets of Zurich, or wherever in Switzerland we are. I played an eerie melody on the MODX using an instrument called Santur which sounded like an exotic string instrument, a zither or Vulcan guitar.
This morning I went back to the intro. Those two parts; distant Russia, memories of the church, break into the crowd. All of this has echoes of the Herr Kasperle music and the German shop. I added a new organ solo for the start, an organ version of the (now deleted) guitar part, an echo of the main 'Truth Seeker' melody. I then recorded 16 layers of Russian-style chanting to use for the church, and mocked up a bell sound by taking two bells and making them loop in each ear, a distant and sonically interesting sound.
Then I made a couple more changes to Prometheus itself, little things, making it more efficient in the modulator auto-name section.
I then heard that my painting 'Love and Wifi' has been selected for the Ty Pawb open in Wrexham. They eccentrically informed me in English and Welsh, perhaps the result of a mix of 'woke' political-correctness and right-wing nationalism, disparate elements which seem to equate to the zeitgeist. I need to frame this, but I have time.
Then I went to work on The Bird in Borrowed Feathers and made a basic backing of sweeping strings, many echoes of Beethoven's 6th and Peer Gynt; perhaps, I thought, this is too clichéd, so I decided to try a synthetic flute that, at times, pretends to be a Theremin (but the bird-like melodies and themes are really flute-like and don't lend themselves to gentle bends).
Very busy, very energetic, very stressful days.
I've been paid by the Lyceum after over 40 days of waiting; anything to do with arts here feels like it goes to the bottom of the pile. I've had my first meagre Steam royalties in months. Money is going to be tight for months, I've no idea where the next thing will come from. I must focus on this music and make it brilliant.
