A sleepless night due to bowel pain despite a rather light tea of chicken and salad. I keep connecting my stomach and throat/ear pain, given this strange rawness and irritant cough, not particularly like a cold, and no sneezes, but certainly like an infection of some sort. Whatever it is, I can do nothing about it but wish my cells well. I feel particularly Beethovian: stomach pains and sore throats, a failing economy with skyrocketing inflation, and threats of war by a megalomaniac, and a scrape for money with eyes and ears on making the best art; all of which he put up with.
Despite my painfully slow digestion, yesterday evening remained pleasant. We watched Phase IV, a remarkable film for a very limited script and hardly any characters, and made watchable by the artiness of the photography and use of imagery. We saw many scenes which could be Pink Floyd album covers. The ending was a revelation, that the ant-fiends were ant-friends, or unexpected heroes, or rather gods to a new Adam and Eve (this part was a tad silly - a lot could have been done better).
My lack of sleep, persistent breathing difficult and a dull headache until 6pm meant that I've struggled to work. However, I dragged myself to the sequencer and spent many hours working on the dance version of Dream Sequence, and this evening on the Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. For the latter, the harpsichord sounded really good when flat, that I've left it like that and added some stroked chords for different moments in the music, then the most gentle of bells. Tinkle bells, harp, harpsichord, angel choirs - all very Victorian and fairy-like. For the intro I used a clip of the intermission speech from Salome (which has become a thema on this album). I sped it up to make the voices sound elfen.
So, another track done.The basic tracks begun are now complete, but we thought we'd record some new tracks too, some new poems by Rilke and Lou Salomé letters set to music. Those are out of copyright but the translations probably aren't, so we'll have to re-translate them, which can be a good thing; we might improve upon history.
A Flatspace sale starts tomorrow, and the Kindle version of How To Organise Your Computer Files is now live. I've tweeted my old Hello Earth oil painting to NASA and they replied, how nice. I love space science, of course, and am keenly checking on the Artemis progress, the James Webb Telescope and everything else in this exciting time. If I were prime minister I'd certainly commit a good percentage of GDP to science and space science.
