Archive Complete, Beethoven Musings

Finalised the music archiving today, nearly 50 CDs burned and recorded, and updated the official Cornutopia Music Catalogue document, so after 3 intense days, things are a little more stable. I'm a little more free. Today I sent off the new 32-bit remasters of The End And The Beginning, and new (but just about the same) archive versions of Gunstorm. It's amazing to think that those great albums are now 15 years old. We won't be doing anything with them. The original CD sold so few, if any, so I wanted to share it at little at least, to keep it alive. How fragile the life of music is. How thin our artistic ice.

I'm making these backups as an attempt to future-proof my music in these ephemeral times. My next step, this week, is to create more sheet music of my work, with an aim to publish everything correctly at some point. This is a huge task, more work than the creative recording process itself. I'll work for a week, the occasional track or song here and there, the occasional album, but keep producing new music, new art too. I think of Beethoven, his writing, correcting. In later life he produced less and less music, but perhaps he was also mired in this sort of daily administration work, piano lessons, bills, correspondence, his silent diary to the cold and silent world.

The Borderland Reviews: The End And The Beginning

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

Mark Sheeky - The End And The Beginning [with Tor James Faulkner]

The End And The Beginning is a departure from Mark Sheeky's usual music - it is a vocal album and a concept album about life and death, in particular about the crash and resultant coma of a motorcyclist and the death of his girlfriend in the same accident. Not fun stuff, to be sure, but a story which obviously resonates with the musician and will do so with the listener - and, of course, anyone who rides motorbikes. Musically, we aren't too removed from Mark's usual style, electro-pop but with more reflective, almost ambient sections, complimented by [Tor James Faulkner]'s voice on most songs and even Mark's voice on a couple of tracks. This is quite an adventurous album and a big stretch in both technique and style. It will be interesting to see how Mark Sheeky's music will progress from here.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: The Twelve Seasons

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: This applies to the first edition of Animalia, R6A, released 21/06/2004.

Mark Sheeky - The Twelve Seasons

The Twelve Seasons is a 'proper' album in that it is all original material and unrelated to any computer game soundtracks. Having said that ...Seasons continues to showcase Mark Sheeky's propensity for a great tune, just listen to the opener The Dance Of Summer and A Day In The Life Of An Aphid to see what I mean. It would be unfair to class this as a concept album but it does have a theme, that of the passing seasons, so some of the tracks are bridged with the sounds of nature, which offer a breathing space before the next belter. There is certainly much more variety here, the dozen tracks offering varying shades of lightness of touch and sound, and more adventurous layers of instrumentation. This may not be Vivaldi's Four Seasons but it shares some of that piece's grandeur. You could say that generically Mark's music lies somewhere between the thumping low brow drama of techno and the lighter electro-pop genres - the music has the oomph of the former and the melodies of the latter. Highly recommended.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: Stupid Computer Music

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

Mark Sheeky - Stupid Computer Music

Composer/artist/computer games software programmer Mark Sheeky is no stranger to MusicWatch and it is good to see and hear more of his work at this time. Stupid Computer Music is a compilation of themes and incidental music he wrote for his computer games. Opening with the insanely catchy China Syndrome, this album is a showcase proving that music for computer games doesn't have to be insular and clichéd - in truth, this album is a prime selection of electro-pop instrumentals that would give any 80's knob twiddler a run for their money. Gunstorm, the only vocal track, could be a ringer for classic Erasure and a #1 pop single if there was any justice in this world. With titles such as Music For Supermarkets and Journey Through Fractional Space you could be forgiven for thinking Brian Eno had his hand in there somewhere, but no, all these tracks were composed, performed and produced by Mark Sheeky. And I have to say that the man can come up with great melody lines that you will be humming - the old grey whistle testers would be dancing madly if they still existed! If you have not tried any of Mark's albums before then Stupid Computer Music is the best possible place to be introduced.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: The Four Seasons Of Dance

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: Of course, the link is dead, but I wanted to reproduce the review of this (now-deleted) album faithfully. The music was used as the core of my subsequent release The Twelve Seasons.

Sadly only a CD mini album or in the parlance of the old vinyl days, an EP. But what an EP! As before Mark has taken his programming and composing skills to create a set of four tracks of 'pop' electronic instrumentals. Of course, calling any album The Four Seasons of Dance is likely to make the listener cock an eye in askance and wonder where Vivaldi is, but Mark has avoided taking any of the classic Vivaldi pieces as his inspiration and this is all original music. Thankfully, there is also a lack of faux-baroque styling here too, this is pure electronic music with a smattering of dance beats to propel the music forward. I can't say that the music evokes the four seasons of nature for me, but the tunes are undeniably 'perky', energetic and with some cracking melody lines that should stick in the grey matter for some time to come. This is a case where Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn will lighten up your life. I'd like to see Mark tackle longer compositions, something a bit more multi-layered. He's ready.

For more information about this artist, album and availability visit: http://www.cornutopiamusic.com where you can discover this and a lot more, including galleries of his artwork and a library of software programs and games.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: The Incredible Journey

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

Mark Sheeky - The Incredible Journey

Unlike Arcangel, The Incredible Journey is a full length album of poppy electronica that is pretty much guaranteed to raise the spirits of the listener. And that starts with the very first track, Challenger, a smooth, pumping track that evolves into a piano-led grower - think of Robert Miles and you're halfway there, but Challenger is much better... Please Wait follows, a short nimble piece that demands to be extended and given a dance mix. Next is Superhighway, an explosive riff-laden track that won't fail to get those legs pumping. Downloading slows the pace a little [but not a lot!] with some slippery percussion backing and not a little funkiness - at over six minutes in length it's the albums' longest track and one of the most atmospheric. Silver Glance follows, this is a heavier piece, with pounding drum pads and a cyclical melody line that burrows insidiously into the skull. Kopakaramba opens with some restrained funky percussion and oozes a carnival/party atmosphere with its steel drums, bubbly synth lines and free form whistling. Loneliness Pt 2 drops the party feel for quite an austere pulsing drum loop and a simple melody line over the top.

Half way through the album and next up is Catacombs, this opens with a cavernous slow beat, and some drifting ambient synth lines over the top that morph into one of those tunes that hammer around the inside of your skull for a while. Circle pretty much describes the music, a cyclical sequencer riff fades in and out as various percussive stabs and synth lines set up more background. Loneliness Pt 1 is very sparse, a single marimba-like melody line that is over far too quickly. Autumn and we are firmly back in Robert Miles territory: restrained dance beats and orchestral lines topped by a flighty piano lead. Great stuff and once again far too short. Penultimate track is Gaea, a mid-tempo atmospheric tune which sounds a little like early Depeche Mode [sans vocals]. Finally there is Termination, another classic.

The most amazing thing about most of Mark Sheeky's albums is that the music is actually created using his own music generation/recording studio software called Noise Station, a software program that he has written himself. The end results are, if you get hold of his albums, extremely spectacular and offers the musician a very different method of creating music to the conventional midi-based system. Anyone requiring more information on Noise Station or the above CDs should check out Mark's website.

Of the four CDs I now have by Mark Sheeky The Incredible Journey certainly ranks as one of the best, but as the others are equally good it makes it difficult if not impossible to make comparisons. One thing is for sure and that is that Mark is producing music that should be heard much more widely, it equals if not surpasses that released on the commercial labels.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: The Flatspace Soundtrack

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: This applies to The Flatspace Soundtrack, now known as Flatspace (The Official Soundtrack). The rename was due to contemporary streaming rules regarding soundtracks. The music was always, and remains to date, the same: R6A, released 03/12/2003.

Mark Sheeky - The Flatspace

The latest album by independent musician and games programmer Mark Sheeky is the soundtrack to a new game he's written called Flatspace. And while I have no idea what sort of game Flatspace actually is, I can tell you that some of the music he's written and performed to accompany the game is extremely fine indeed, and stand up in its own right as pop-inflected electronica.

In some ways tracks such as the title tune and Conversion remind me a little of the music of French band Air, while Cobra has a little of Jan Hammer's Miami Vice funky vibe to it. The following tracks, Wilderness Fog and Snow are more ambient and probably represent tranquil sections of the game. But taken overall this album of music transcends what you would label as merely soundtrack and stands out on its own merits as extremely upbeat, atmospheric music that is well worth listening. What is equally amazing is that while Mark designed and programed the game and composed and performed the music he also wrote the recording studio/synthesizer software called Noise Station 2 on which it was created.

If you'd like to find out more about Noise Station 2, or how to order this album or game then I strongly urge you to check out Mark's website - see the link on the left.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: Arcangel

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

Mark Sheeky - Arcangel

Arcangel began as the soundtrack to one of Mark's computer games that he programmed. I have no idea how the music fits in with the game but as a collection of standalone tracks this is a superb collection of electronica. Seven tracks of varied and extremely ear-friendly tunes follow: Mnemonic pulses with energy and funkiness, Epitaph is more eery, simple synth lines set up an atmosphere of unease, SPDF is another slow burner with a lovely cyclical melody line, Lepton has one of the killer melodies on the whole CD and a dance mix of this would [should!] be a massive hit in the clubs if the DJs had a chance to hear it, Pioneer is another slow burn winner with a 'tubular bells' type lead and a nice line in minimised atmosphere, Requiem For A Scorpoid is another lighter piece with a pan-pipe-cum steel drum sounding lead, Inside Messiah concludes the album with a slow choral flourish that leaves you wanting more.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: The Spiral Staircase

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: This applies to the first edition of The Spiral Staircase, R4A, released 28/06/2002. The addendum mentions the second version, released 01/03/2008.

Mark Sheeky - The Spiral Staircase

Mark Sheeky - The Spiral Staircase This latest album by Mark Sheeky comprises a single thirty-seven minute track, so in this instance all of his musical eggs are in the one basket. The album opens with a crash of sonic thunder before wave after wave of synths start to create the structure of the track. That structure is almost symphonic - this is music on a grand scale: bass synths provide the rhythmic foundation, while a number of melody and arpeggio lines intertwine over them. It's all very, very dramatic, and definitely not for the chill-out zone. As with Synaesthesia the overall influences are Jarre and Vangelis, whose styles are so individual that melding the two together takes a special skill - especially when turning it into something uniquely your own. But there's also a strong feel for classical baroque music in there: Vivaldi, JS Bach - some of the keyboard runs remind me of the harpsichord continuo sequences found in their music. There's also something offbeat about this music, some of the glissandos are so drenched in distortion and ambient 'ice' that the music becomes angular and jagged and on the edge of being dangerous. The bottom line with The Spiral Staircase is that it is simply a tour-de-force showcase of electronica fireworks, but the music is also well worth investigating for its own merits. These two albums by Mark Sheeky reveal a talent worth noting and exploring.

Update [Feb 2008]:- Mark Sheeky has recently re-recorded The Spiral Staircase, adding several more minutes of music and using improved software and instrumentation to give the music an even more dramatic impact and presence. The original single piece of music is now a ten track suite with section titles such as Ascent, Sky Dragons, The Goblin Graveyard, Sea Monsters etc. The above review still stands - this refinement simply enhances what was already there. The album is now available as a professionally produced CD or as a download from Mark's own website, plus iTunes.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: Synaesthesia

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: This review applies to either the first version of Synaesthesia, R1A, released 01/08/1999 (which I think is most likely, this version was briefly sold by a small label called REV Records) or the second version, R57A (also coded historically as R1B) Synaesthesia, where some tracks were re-recorded in better quality, and some tracks re-recorded using NoiseStation 1 and released 19/06/2002.

Mark Sheeky - Synaesthesia

One of the pleasures of this job is discovering talented people beavering away doing their own thing and creating music far superior to that being pumped out commercially. Mark Sheeky is one such 'renaissance man': computer programmer, graphics artist and composer/musician, Mark has combined many of his talents to create Synaesthesia, one of the best commercial-sounding synth albums I've heard in quite a while. It's fair to say that this album wears its influences well: Jean Michel Jarre, Enya, Eno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream - yet the end result is uniformly original and for any self-respecting electronica fan a bit of an ear-opener. The overall 'concept' for the album is life and death on a cosmic scale, so this album is pretty spacey sounding, lots of interesting and weird electronic chatter fill the celestial void.

Synaesthesia may be a tad short at thirty-five minutes, but it is packed full of catchy melodies, interspersed by short atmospheric pieces. Favourite tracks include The Runner, Interference, the very funky Refuge, the fuzz-ladens Termination, the Enya homage Waltz of the Ghosts, and Resurrection. The final tracks Islands of Memory and Epitaph are particularly atmospheric and remind me of Vangelis. This is a fine album and it certainly deserves a wider audience.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

The Borderland Reviews: Animalia

The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.

My note: This applies to the first edition of Animalia, R6A, released 21/06/2004.

Mark Sheeky - Animalia

I can't think of many composer/musicians who are equally adept at creating good music and the software they create the music on [outside of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, perhaps]. As far as I know Mark Sheeky is somewhat unique in this, and his latest album, Animalia, proves the point more than adaquately. Using the latest version of his Noise Station II production software, Mark has crafted a fine album of poppy tunes, ambient sections and even the odd burst of industrial-style noise to create an album of many textures and moods.

The album begins with Andromeda, a bright, perky tune that reminds me of the proto synth-pop band Space from the late 70s. The next track, Mantle, is a short piece of ambience set to the sounds of running water [guaranteed to get my father running for the bathroom!]. This is followed by Oceanic, a mid-tempo piece that is reminiscent of rolling waves, distant horizons and possibilities. Cephalopoda jacks up the beats and rhythms into something danceable. Next is Dreams of Flight, which as the title suggests slows the pace down to something akin to a tuneful music box melody - this is arguably the most pretty tune on the album. The pace picks up again with Eagle Interceptor, whether this is an Eagle spacecraft from Space 1999 I don't know but it has a lively sci-fi tv theme feel to it and is damn good. Mice is the 'Popcorn' of 2004, this tune will weave through your brain for weeks afterwards, it's so damn catchy! The next track, Rhino, is a pounding [and thankfully short] techno noise which I have to admit I don't like much. But it does mark a break in styles, which leads to the next track, Monkey, which is perky, jaunty and full of monkey-style mischief. Track ten takes us back to the big production sound, Paragon takes a theme and runs with it... with enthusiasm! Penultimate track Nectar plays with a simple series of notes and treats them to echo and delay to create something fragile and dreamlike that finally tails off into the distance. Final track Cellular Automaton is the culmination of the album and finishes the cd with a grand flourish, plus it rocks.

Mark Sheeky has privately released several albums now [all orderable from his web site - see link at the end of this section], and I wouldn't like to say where Animalia stands within that catalogue - in terms of production quality it is the best yet and the album is full of great tunes played with wit and verve and a large degree of panache. The album also acts as an excellent showcase for his Noise Station II software, and any serious musician [or even half-serious one will do] should check it out immediately.

- John M Peters/The Borderland

CD Archiving, Catalogue

A really tiring day or CD archiving, burning CD master copies of my albums. Perhaps the very process is overkill considering that it takes so long and is a lot of hard work, and that I have digitial copies of everything - but there are a a few benefits. I've already discovered several errors in my catalogue due to this, usually small things like track lengths - but this data is used all over the place, so even these errors are important to correct. The track lengths on Musicbrainz, for example, which I file upon completing an album, are certianly wrong for some tracks. The difference is slight and most commonly one second because I used to round the timings, not knowing that all music track timings are rounded down (ie. 2:34.8 secs is rounded to 2:34, I used to, wrongly, round these to 2:35).

Another benefit is that perhaps one day I'll not be able to used Sony CD Architect, and CD mastering software is probably as obsolescent at the medium, so a master copy might be useful to have because it may, one day, contain data I can't create in any other way.

I'll also have to correct the Cornutopia Music Catalogue. For reference, here is a list of all of my releases to date:

Album Releases

R1A Mark Sheeky, Synaesthesia (1999)
R2A Mark Sheeky, The Arcangel Soundtrack (1999)
R3A Mark Sheeky, The Incredible Journey (2002)
R4A Mark Sheeky, The Spiral Staircase (Original) (2002)
R5A Mark Sheeky, Flatspace (The Official Soundtrack) (2003)
R6A Mark Sheeky, Animalia (2004)
R7A Mark Sheeky, The Four Seasons Of Dance [EP] (2005)
R8A Mark Sheeky & Tor James Faulkner, The End And The Beginning (2009)
R11A Mark Sheeky, The Spiral Staircase (2008) [CD]
R12A Mark Sheeky, Stupid Computer Music (2008)
R13A Mark Sheeky, The Twelve Seasons (2008)
R15A Mark Sheeky, The Infinite Forest (2010)
R16A Mark Sheeky, Pi (2010)
R17A Mark Sheeky, Once Upon A Time (2010)
R18A The Harlequin Kings, Fear Of The Thing Itself (2015)
R20A Mark Sheeky, Flatspace II (The Official Soundtrack) (2011)
R21A Mark Sheeky, The Love Symphony (2012) [CD]
R23A Mark Sheeky, Bites Of Greatness (2013)
R24A Oldfield 1, Art By Machine (2014)
R26A Mark Sheeky, Synaesthesia (2015) [2015 Remaster]
R27A Mark Sheeky, The Anatomy Of Emotions (2016) [CD]
R28A Mark Sheeky, Cycles & Shadows (2017) [CD]
R30A Mark Sheeky, Genesis (c.1996) (2017) [2017 Remaster]
R31A The ArtsLab Collective, I, Leviathan (2017)
R32A Mark Sheeky, The Modern Game (2018)
R33A Fall in Green, Testing The Delicates [CD] (2018)
R39A Mark Sheeky, Tree Of Keys (2019)
R39B Mark Sheeky, Tree Of Keys (2021) [2021 Remaster]
R43A Mark Sheeky, Music Of Poetic Objects (2019) [CD]
R44A Marius Fate, The Modern Game (2019) [2019 Remaster] [BOOK]
R44B Marius Fate, The Modern Game (2022) [2022 Remaster] [BOOK]
R48A Mark Sheeky, Burn Of God (2020)
R48B Mark Sheeky, Burn Of God (2022) [2022 Remaster] [CD]
R50A Fall in Green, Apocalypse of Clowns (2021) [CD]
R51A Mark Sheeky, Animalia (2020) [2020 Remaster]
R52A Mark Sheeky, Synaesthesia (2020) [2020 Remaster]
R53A Mark Sheeky, The Dusty Mirror (2020)
R55A Mark Sheeky, The Myth Of Sisyphus (2021)
R56A Mark Sheeky, The Infinite Forest (2021) [2021 Remaster]
R57A Mark Sheeky, Synaesthesia (2002) [2002 Remaster]
R58A Mark Sheeky, Nightfood (2021)
R59A Fall in Green, Wonderland (2021)
R60A Mark Sheeky, Secret Electric Sorcery (2022)
R62A Fall in Green, Lou Salome Empathy With Daisies (2022)
R64A Mark Sheeky, Remembrance Service (2022)

EP Releases

R9A Mark Sheeky & Tor James Faulkner, Gunstorm (2007)
R19A Mark Sheeky, The Sky Disc (2011)
R29A Mark Sheeky, Finnegans Judgement (2017)
R34A Mark Sheeky, A Walk In The Countryside (2018)
R49A Fall in Green, War Is Over [EP] (2020) [CD]
R63A Heart Of Snow (2022)

Single Releases

R10A Mark Sheeky & Tor James Faulkner, Gunstorm (2007)
R35A Mark Sheeky, House Of Glass (2018)
R36A Fall in Green, Who Is Afraid / She Floats (2018)
R37A Mark Sheeky, Masculinity Two (2018)
R38A Fall in Green, Time Falling (2018)
R45A Marius Fate, Masculinity Two (2019) [2019 Remaster]
R45B Marius Fate, Masculinity Two (2022) [2022 Remaster]
R54A Fall in Green, Jabberwocky (2021)

Game Content

R25A Flatspace Music Pack 1 (2005)
R14A Flatspace Music Pack 2 (2008)
R22A Flatspace Music Pack 3 (2013)
R40A Flatspace IIk Music Pack 1 (2019)
R41A Flatspace IIk Music Pack 2 (2019)
R42A Flatspace IIk Music Pack 3 (2020)
R46A Future Snooker (2019)
R47A Future Pool (2019)


Now, you may wonder which album is 'best'. My music has gone through many phases. The electronic, Jarre-influenced, era had more epic works like The Spiral Staircase (which I still love) or Synaesthesia (the 2020 remaster of this 1999 work still shines as one of the best things I've done) as well as collections of instrumental music with a story or theme like The Twelve Seasons, Animalia, or The Infinite Forest; or albums of game-like melodic tunes, which are similar in quality (Stupid Computer Music, Bites Of Greatness, The Flatspace/Arcangel music). 'Best' is too subjective... all have pros and cons.

The live art-performance phase includes The Anatomy Of Emotions, Cycles & Shadows, Tree Of Keys, Music Of Poetic Objects, and spins off into the Fall in Green works, which continue to evolve.

Finally the more rock/pop types works, which you could say includes the (still good) The End And The Beginning as well as The Modern Game. The Dusty Mirror is surrealistic fun, still a favourite for me, though of all of this era so far, Nightfood remains my personal favourite, a love equivalent to The Spiral Staircase... but really, it's impossible for me to rate any of my artworks. It's amazing how my opinions have changed or flipped over the years, too. Things continue to evolve and grow.

For now, this archiving phase is proving to be exhausting. As well as making these CD archives, I'll be notating more of my music, but, as you can see, there is a lot to do.

Super-Archiving, The End And The Beginning Remaster

A super and surprisingly very stressful day spent archiving. I've decided to remaster the two albums I made with Tor, Gunstorm and The End And The Beginning. Not, I stress, re-work them in the way I have with every remaster so far. Some of those have varied a lot (like the Burn of God or The Modern Game or Synaesthesia versions). Many complete re-recordings which are noticeably better even when the track names are the same, like The Infinite Forest or Animalia, and some, like Tree of Keys, were 90% the same with a few new or re-recorded tracks.

No, here the aim is purely one of the final recording quality, no mixing or any other adjustment. The originals were burned to CD from 16-bit files, were not dithered and were distorted quite a lot. Now I can render in 32-bit float (which is 24-bit resolution) quite easily, and my new Gothic and Cathedral Limiters can make everything much nicer and avoid clipping. See here Before and After images of Nineteen Eighty Five:

Back then undithered 16-bit was the best I could do.

The remaster process involved finding the old Prometheus files from 2009 and re-rendering them. This should have been easy, but some plugins have changed since then. In fact, I think that all of the plugins have been recompiled at least, so there's no guarantee anything will be the identical. The chorus vocals in 'AI' (which was old in 2009) used an ancient version of the peaking filter, so I needed to tweak it to get it working the same, and the echo timing of the pianos in Challenger was totally wrong, set to the default 500ms, rather than 1.5 beats... fortunately, I tend to stick to even sizes. I could hear that one echo was slightly slower so I could fix this exactly with some experimentation.

There was a bug, back then, too, which failed to switch off silent tracks. This is fine, but it means that modern re-renders of old tracks can be tricky, so I've had to temporarily switch off this 'zerosamples' feature.

The final hurdle was the last track, Leaving Home. The snare drum used a reverb effect which is now obsolete and deleted, so I've had to use the modern version, which sounds pretty much the same. Strangely, the timbre of the main lead instrument is quite different, even when it is supposed to be the same. It's possible that a fix to the anti-aliasing, or filters, or some other 'correction' over the years has changed the tone. The new 32-bit master itself may simply sound sufficiently better to sound different. The odd thing is that this track is the only one that sounds audibly different at all, despite the clearly visible difference in quality.

I had a panic moment at 11am when I discovered a new bug in Prometheus caused by a limit-check to the Set Parameter events, a new feature I included in v2.89. This took over an hour of careful work to fix, and caused me great anxiety, partly because I hadn't planned for everything to take so long at all. I'd hoped to quickly re-render these files in 32-bit; use those as output, and move on. I hadn't at all counted on the compatibility errors, or the distortion. What I'd hoped would take a morning will take a few days.

Well, the files from The End And The Beginning are rendered now, but not checked in detail. The master isn't burned. Musically, to my ears, there is almost no difference, even when comparing one directly with another. For this reason, I won't be updating the steam version of the album, or doing anything apart from burning a master CD for archival reasons... or a future CD issue.

Everything will need checking carefully, then I'll do the same for Gunstorm.

By about 3pm, the renderings were complete, so I started to archive albums, burning a new CD master copy of each album in optimal quality. Some albums, like Pi, have never been burned to CD, not even for my personal playing; I still prefer to listen via a CD rather than MP3 or a stream.

I've archived 10 albums so far. I'm not doing all of them. Albums that have been replaced, bad versions, old ones, there's no need to archive those, but I have archived versions of albums that are good enough, different enough, like the 2002 version of The Spiral Staircase. There's really no point in keeping an old copy of Animalia, or The Modern Game, or Tree of Keys, when the replacement is basically the same but better.

It's this archiving process which has taken up my past 10 days or so, and will continue for another week or so. I must and will get back to creating new music, but not (as Telly Savalas sang) today.

Salome Notation, Simon

Finalised the Salome notation yesterday. Gosh, it took far longer than I expected, especially considering that all of the music was notated to start with, but inaccurately. Like the final proof-reading of a book, the last stages of making every note right takes so much work. It's take about 3 full days overall to notate the 12 tracks, just for solo piano. Adding the strings and other instruments should be a little easier. I notated The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke too, so this album, 1 of 64, is all done.

Also yesterday a trip to see Simon, my oldest friend, on occasion of his 50th birthday. He has so much knowledge of TV, film, every actor and director in everything for decades, it seems, and a great knowledge of history. At the rare and occasional pub-quiz events we used to take part in, Simon knew 90% of the answers. Science is probably my specialist subject.

Today, updated my Steam games with new (required) graphics. These products involve constant plate-spinning to keep them alive. A welcome sale of the Flatspace music and The Spiral Staircase cheered the morning, and the money is instantly useful for archive materials.

Next jobs are to archive my album collection, and notate more. The Anatomy of Emotions and Cycles & Shadows, and the Fall in Green albums are perhaps the most complex to notate, but again, those have been notated already to some degree. It would be good for me to notate some other albums like Pi, or a song album, to test my MIDI export. I could add lyrics to the sheet music too. It's all extra work, a lot of it. One day, I will publish all of these correctly, and will notate all future albums from now on as I make them. This is far more important than, for example, the Spotify Canvases for that transient platform on the transient internet.

May God and St. Luke grant me the years and decades to do this, and to make 64 more albums! On we charge.

Lyric Booklets, Salome Notation Continues

Two busy days, as ever, yet they don't feel as productive. Finalised the lyric booklets yesterday and filed these with the albums, also filed the few old iTunes digital booklets I have. These were stored with the album art, but it makes more sense to file them as 'books', with a finished copy with the album only, as I have with these lyric booklets. The Spotify canvases are the same, the source files etc. are files as films, with a final copy also stored with the appropriate albums.

Then some new 'archival' quality CD-Rs arrived, these are 'printable', which actually makes them much more archival, both chemically and from a light sensitivity perspective. I burned two CDs and wrote details on them, but then thought that the pen itself might harm the CD. It's not supposed to, on a printable disc, but I'd prefer not to risk it at all for these master copies, so I spent time developing a paper label, and ordered some cases. I must aim to do everything to the best museum standard. Then, Peter's piano lesson, which went well.

I then ordered the Salome CD copies, the final album.

I slept badly, as I did the night before. I can't seem to relax or calm down even slightly, I feel hot all of the time.

I keep thinking of the music notation and publishing my work. This will be expensive but I will aim to do so, perhaps when I've typed up the notation for everything.

Today, more work on the Salome sheet music. Cosmic Solitude took ages, at least an hour despite the fact it was already notated to a great extent, I wanted it to be note perfect as the version I actually played. In one case, I couldn't do this, one small phrase had an extra beat, an extra note in my playing. The gentle C-minor part too varies so much in tempo, really flowing from slow to fast to slow. I make it fit and sound like four perfect bars, but actually it's more like 5, or 4.5...

These notes are, or should be really the same, but they do double in speed or more, so this fits best. Maybe I need to toy with it a bit.

Then, shopping for supplies. I must try to finish the Salome music as soon as possible.

Lyrics Books, Ownership Record

Art is about making, then filing; tunnelling like a miner, and shoring up the tunnel. I seem to spend a lot of time shoring up. This is natural, a part of life as much as art or anything. A band who writes an album, shores it up by touring for a year and playing that same music to people. They probably and apparently love this, but for me, the creating of new things is such an overwhelming drive. I feel guilty when doing anything but that and frustrated by paperwork when new and great idea call me.

I also have a natural dislike of sharing my work generally. This comes from my childhood, perhaps a Catholic guilt complex, but perhaps more-so the attitude of my parents and how much they dislike and belittle everything I do; art, music, computer programming, the way I look, speak, and everything else. This doesn't matter much, fundamentally. I know what I want, my drive to create, learn, and improve myself, and, in my hope, humanity; but I have been trained to fear sharing anything by the attitudes of those around me.

Today I made the last two lyric booklets, for Gunstorm and The End And The Beginning, which I'd forgotten yesterday. I sang along to both, enjoying it for the first time. I'm certainly, today, a better singer than ever before. Singing is a constant, lifelong, skill which takes many years to reach any sort of acceptable level. It is the very difficult physical challenge of singing which I love. I love everything which is difficult. I hate cheating, and winning, ease. Struggle is wonderful.

Everything I can do now is and will be better than anything I've done before, but this also means that my endeavours of the past seem poor. We don't know how bad we are at something until we become good at it; but whatever our stage, things are never perfect, though hopefully improving steadily, drip by drip. I could have spent the past two or four years training with singing, guitar playing, piano playing, studio production; but I spent it doing and that was and is my training. For me this is ideal. I have a record of my progress, and I've recorded a few of the hundreds of songs, 1897 at the current count, I've written. To 'train' and produce nothing would be such a tragedy. I'd much rather act as I have, to create, learn, grow. Much rather have a huge and unmanageable back-catalogue of works of variable quality than produce one or two strained objects - which would still never be perfect. The secret of art is the joy of creation. I know that everything I make will be better than before, that everything of the past will look ugly, poor, crude, that things of the present will be better than ever, and that this trend will continue until my senses and physique, or a failure of resources, fail me.

After making the booklets, Deb and I dashed around town on a super-efficient shopping trip; four shops and home in under an hour. I've spent the time since working on an Ownership Record for my artworks, but it's yet another layer of administration and bureaucracy to cause me frustration. It may help. I've already discovered and fixed a few errors in my painting ownership list due to it. Why does it matter if I know who owns what? It can be a little silly... would a young Elvis want a list of the people who have bought each record? For paintings it can matter, the 'provenance', but artists generally leave that to historians and don't care themselves. I know the importance of these data in counteracting entropy. Entropy, decay; the enemies of survival, of truth, of success; so it's for rather odd motivations that I keep such records. They are a manner of shoring up the tunnel, but yes, for each music sale, for each book sale, it's less important. I only store 'notable' sales for mass-produced items.

If I can complete this record in a day, then it's fine, then I can update it forever from now on. I don't want to waste too much time on it; I have the data anyway - it's in my painting record, but putting it all together gives me the option of making it public and easy to access. It may inspire collectors.

I'll also continue to work on the sheet music for all of my albums as part of the filing process. Elton John apparently wrote and recorded four songs in a day for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but he didn't write the lyrics (obv.), his music generally sounded the same, and he didn't play all of the instruments like I have to, didn't act as recording engineer and producer, didn't program his audio software, or build or engineer any of his instruments, didn't design, format and scan the album artwork, publish the lyrics and the sheet music, he didn't write, direct, and film all his music videos, develop Spotify canvas animations, or manage all of his bookings, the legal registration of his work, or any of the other countless jobs I do, and have done, every day for most of my life. Long may it continue.

I am the Sisyphus of the two rocks. Long may I roll both with joy a defiant roar.

Lyrics Books, Amiga Source, CD Archive

A busy day. I thought it would be a good idea to create some lyrics books, pdf files in a print-friendly format which is as well presented as a 'B-format' book, with simple artwork and layout, something like my game manuals. I'm not sure if these will ever be popular, but they do look nice, and the workload to create them relatively small.

So I've spent today putting those together for all of my albums which have words, which number 16. They all look rather pretty:

No worse, for example, than the lovely Kate Bush book, How To Be Invisible. This has taken most of the day. I'll make the files a free download somewhere, and certainly include them in the download purchases of the albums on Bandcamp. I've also listed Once Upon A Time on Bandcamp, the last album for that platform, so all 32 of my currently 'live' albums have been released there now. The others are generally older works which have been superseded; the only exception is The Incredible Journey, which has never been released digitally, but many of its tracks have been anyway, and it's an ancient album from the NoiseStation 1 days, so the sound quality isn't good enough. If I were to do anything with it, I'd re-record it.

I've also added the Amiga source code to my games to itch. The code is of little use to me. I can't compile it and have forgotten just about everything about how to code on Amiga or in assembler. I've no plans to update any game, and if I did, it would be easier for me to make a game from scratch than use the old code - though in theory the level designs might be useful to rip. Anyway, someone might find the code useful, and sharing it may keep the games alive.

I'll proof the booklets tomorrow, then add them to various places. I've not created booklets for the Fall in Green albums, this is a bit more complicated as most of the words are Deborah's, and there is already a book called Testing the Delicates, the original poetry book upon which our début album was based. The only booklet that includes words that aren't mine is The Anatomy of Emotions. It's an unusual case, as the album is listed under my name (which made sense from a music publishing standpoint; the alternative would have been to create a 'band' name... which seemed overly complex), but the lyric booklet is credited to Tim Watson, as all of the words are his - it would be silly to credit that to me.

I also intend to make an audio-CD archive of all of my albums in a spindle. At the moment I tend to burn one copy, or retain a first copy of a replicated or printed series, but over the years, some have been kept, and other not, and all here and there and in different cases. One solid archive is more secure. It may also be a good idea to make several archives... perhaps sell my current 32-disc back catalogue as one 'box set' on a spindle (which is called a 'cake box', for some weird reason).

Salomé Notation Starts

I've spent today starting to notate the sheet music for piano versions of the Lou Salomé album. This has taken far longer than expected considering I already have notated versions of all of the tracks, I initially wrote them in this way before the live show and recording the album, but now I need them to match the actual recordings, which differed a little, and the only real way is a time-consuming combination of live listening and peering at the MIDI sequences, which is painstakingly slow.

I'm also inexperienced at notation, reading and writing, but I'm doing it in my way; that is, avoiding repeat marks but actually repeating everything, and using text above the stave for mood/feeling/tempo in English, being poetic, rather than putting Italian terms below the stave. Maybe my methods will annoy people, but the key is to have the music there at all. One important reason for actual repetition rather than using repeat bars is that I can more easily add the strings or other instruments in this way.

I want to notate all of my albums, and will aim to do so with future works, at least. I hope that I can speed up the process.

Tortoise

I'm definitely a tortoise not a hare.

Bandcamp and Scores

A busy day of admin work again. I've now added all 31 of my active albums and EPs to my Bandcamp page, complete with an early pre-sale option on Heart of Snow. This is a first step, it allows me to more easily add special items to albums. The Marius Fate book, for example, was for sale with my PayPal based Shopping Cart, which I'd programmed myself on my website, but after 5 years or so I'd only ever had one sale from it (in the first month or so), and the security risks and work of constantly updating the complex API was too much, so I decided to relegate all sales to external sites, like itch. Most things were sold externally anyway, my games via Steam, some posters and tee-shirt designs on RedBubble, books on Amazon etc. It made no sense to have a shopping cart too.

I've used Bandcamp exclusively for CD albums, but there's no reason not to use if for digital works. Bandcamp is sort of outside the regular regulatory framework; I'm unsure if they pay streaming royalties like YouTube and Spotify do, though those royalties are so pitiful that the only real benefit to an artist is exposure or, more correctly, accessibility to listeners.

Adding these albums took almost all day, then I proofed the lyrics for the Salomé album, and submitted those.

Finally I've started to look at my scores, and their filing. I file my instrumental sequences and scores together, 'B' then a code. These can be NoiseStation sequences, Prometheus sequences, or sheet music (usually in MuseScore and pdf format). Sometimes a composition was remade for Prometheus... like the old Spiral Staircase album. In that case I've given everything a new number, but things became complicated when I made sheet music versions of my recorded music... it makes most sense to give both the same code, so I do that. B1093A is 'Lou Salome Remembers', the first track of the album. At the moment there are two versions; the sequence AND the sheet music. Now I'll be making the sheet music B1093B, and putting an empty text file as a reminder/placeholder in the Prometheus folder. This is a bit complicated, but will be increasingly needed, as I increasingly use scores.

Another complication is that scores are often tied to a suite or album. I like to know that 'Lou Salome Remembers' is the first track of the Salomé suite, but I don't really want to call it 'Salome 01: Lou Salome Remembers' because it makes the filenames long and it's suddenly different from the name of the sequence.

Decisions decisions.

Bandcamp and Adminitis

A very full day of admin today. In the night I realised how precarious the digital world is, and that my music in particular, like my PC games, a huge proportion of my life's output as an artist and human, are extremely ephemeral. Should I die today, my music would probably vanish from the internet and world forever. Many albums exist only as single copies on my computer or on CD. In the early 2000s I used to sell a few albums, but even the most popular will number under 20 in the world as a whole. I wonder how many of those still function or new reside in people's music collections?

The world is indeed more ephemeral than ever. Even this blog could vanish in an instant. What will happen to our YouTube videos when we die? Google's policy is to delete all emails and data after 2 dormant years. Perhaps the policy lasts longer for YouTube, but surely, it can't forever.

A first act today was to put more of my music on Bandcamp, a continuation of yesterday. I did think of putting even old and deleted albums on there, like the (three!) former versions of Synaesthesia for example, or the Harlequin Kings album, but perhaps that is silly because those old albums were deleted for a reason. Much as I love Kate Bush's Phoenix Recordings, mine aren't as good, and perhaps more importantly, have been re-recorded with better versions.

I really need to make more CDs, more physical albums. This is expensive, but that is perhaps the point. People don't do this anymore due to this expense. It's only in the past few years, since 2017 or so, that the quantity of music exploded online due to new and cheaper ways of mass-releasing it, but this lack of attention span encourages ephemerality. Many forms of art are perhaps on this thin ice, the fickle internet.

My music has undergone a revolution this year, and this continues. The Salome album made great technical leaps. I was reminded today that I made the same leaps with Cycles & Shadows in 2016, a similar time-span and amount of changes to Prometheus (gosh! 6 years since those changes, I've nearly made 100 revisions to it!). I'm more able than ever to make better music than ever, for art reasons. This music is and had become an important part of my artistic output. In some cases (like parts of The Love Symphony) it's had more than a million online streams, yet all ephemeral. Only a handful of the CD copies have been distributed.

As well as Bandcamp admin, I've listed the Salome album in a few other places, and defined a new way of filing my albums by media. I've made several types of CD over the years. In the early days, late 1990s, early 2000s, I burned my own CD-R discs and used local printers to print simple paper inserts, the best I could do regarding colour. Many early albums were made in this way, and I have one copy of each of them, but I suspect that few have survived. REV Records had a few copies of the 1999 version of Synaesthesia like that, but they would have either sent them back or destroyed them.

After that I used a 3rd party printer to print the CD tray and booklet, but burned and assembled the CD-R discs myself. Most of the 2000-2010 era albums were made like this; The Spiral Staircase, The Twelve Seasons, Stupid Computer Music, The End and The Beginning (copies of which crop up on eBay now for £35 or so).

After that, The Love Symphony, Cycles & Shadows and The Anatomy of Emotions were commercially replicated, but still on CD-R I think, which is common for small-run CD duplication. The printing was as good, certainly more convenient. The on-disc printing was never very good. After that, I switched to a better (quality) company and since then all of my CD albums have been printed to the best quality, a transparent case, '8-page' booklet, and on-disc and tray printing. The on-disc printing is still not brilliant, but it will do.

I've noted all of these formats, and which albums and how many copies used them. I've generally kept track of it all, but the record is far from perfect. Still, it will hopefully be better from now on. One thing I will do is keep track of these vital physical items. Oh (and I've lamented this many times) for a new physical audio standard!

Salome Admin

A dark and dull morning, though unseasonably warm. I slept until 9am, relatively late.

The Salome album has been processed and is now ready for worldwide digital release on December the 2nd, near Rilke's birthday on the 4th (which is a Sunday, so we couldn't really choose that date). I spent the first few hours adding the album to the Fall in Green website, my website and the Cornutopia Music Website, then starting on the music registration admin with the PRS. This is merely stage one of the complex paperwork of music administration.

Then, filing the album data proper, which had already been prepared for. The album data totals 4.52Gb, which is a huge amount considering a full CD holds a mere 650Mb, but the artwork, raw files, 32-bit master files, and the Spotify Videos all take up space, and the album is over an hour long. Most of the source waves, like vocals, guitar solos and that sort of thing are not retained unless I judge them of special cultural importance (things like solo out-takes, or casual speech made during recording). The raw files that are used remain in the Prometheus files and can be saved out if needed.

Then filing the album artwork as artwork, that is, filing the cover art as an image in my painting catalogue, which I've been doing for years. Then I realised that I'd not filed Secret Electric Sorcery, Heart of Snow, or Remembrance Service. I added these to RedBubble too, so now, theoretically, people could order a poster or sticker of the album art, though nobody has done this for any album so far. I also added the album art to my website, the Digital Artwork section, and then linked to the RedBubble pages from the music pages too, so that people could order a poster from the album page. I also put the Salome album onto the Fall in Green Bandcamp page.

Perhaps all of the above is necessary, to some extent, but it feels a little pointless given the very low sales, still, it's better to prepare for success than be caught unprepared, and the Salome album is certainly a great album. We'll be ordering top-quality 8-page CD copies and already have an extensive list of people to send it to, including a few museums.

Commercial reasons aside, neatness means that I'd want everything to be ordered correctly. Art is valid to some extent because it is filed, validated, and registered as art. One key difference between a professional album or artwork, and any random scribble or recording, is this curatorial care; this care is part of the art. Van Gogh's paintings were hobbyist daubs for almost all of his life, but became great artworks after his death due to curation and analysis; this is more than 'sales talk'. Art is as much, more, the spreading of order and knowledge behind a creation as the creating of it, it's the communication of ideas and feelings - the curation is part of the communication, and my (sometimes obsessive) admin work is part of my (sometimes obsessive) art. There were probably great artworks, poems, images, words scribbled by Leonardo da Vinci and William Blake which were ignored and not recorded, and are now forgotten and lost as art because of their lack of filing, of curation; this vital part of the art itself.

I haven't really done anything creative today, but have made existing creations more accessible.

Brighton Rock, and Tycho Brahe Rock

A full and exhausting day. Didn't sleep much, burning with energy. The day has felt tired, even exhausting, but full of joy and hot lust for life.

I started by creating a new Tron Choir and Kraftwerk style bass sound for our Congleton performance of 'Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man' in November, it will be a dark electronica version with Gothic chords. I worked out parts of the song, and made a dub version of the Franz Hals song; that is now complete apart from vocals.

I started to watch Brighton Rock, which I'd never seen, then started work on the Tycho Brahe song, spending a lot of time crafting the bass and drums. This is one key thing that is new in my work now, each note of the song is made to fit the song at that point. Then I started to played the guitars for this. It's a heavy rock/blues song in the mould of 'Fat Bottomed Girls' or 'We Will Rock You'. Experimenting with guitar options and repeated playing of different parts took several hours. I'm reminded that playing guitar is a very physical experience.

I also assembled the final print-ready artwork for Salome, it would be good to order CD copies before November, then I watched the end of Brighton Rock, with an unexpected tear at the end, the brilliant touch of the damaged record. It reminded me of Arturo in my Beautiful Death novel.

Donald Trump's Funeral Dream, Franz Hals

A busy day, went to bed with a cough and had a feverish might of vivid dreams. At one point it was Donald Trump's funeral, which was a glitzy television spectacular. The glittery jacketed host, a Scientologist priest, paid tribute to Donald and introduced tribute acts which included dancing monkeys and a group of singing cats. David Bowie, alive and well in Pierrot garb, at home, watching it all on television, was asked to include one of his songs but he refused permission for the show to use his music.

Many other dreams followed.

In the morning I spoke to Simon at length, then performed a cement repair on the step of the house.

Then, a solid few hours of work on the Franz Hals song. I needed to record live electric guitars and and organ. I had in mid some simple backing sub-melody for the verses, so played a few notes in a rather 'thin' pickup setting, then played many times a thicker lead over each chorus, with leads into a solo immediately afterwards. This was relatively simple, but took a lot of takes. I wanted to be sure I got it right, and this practice is important; it's almost the oly guitar playing I do.

After that I added an organ solo, all chords, to the chorus. The guitars and organs took many hours in effect, and left me exhausted. the song sounds great so far though, very 70s rock sounding, something reminiscent of a band like Focus or Free. Here are the words (so far):

When you gonna paint me with your satin brush?
When you gonna flick my big moustache?
Are the frills I'm wearing really to your taste?
When you gonna make my clothing paste?

Franz Hals, Franz Hals, Franz Hals.
Franz Hals, Franz Hals, Franz Hals.

Paint me as your mother in her rocking chair.
Show me every strand of silver hair.
Dress me in formica if it suits the scene.
Melt my lacy spirals into cream.

Franz Hals, Franz Hals, Franz Hals.
Franz Hals, Franz Hals, Franz Hals.

Break me into fragments of a broken day
Yellows turn to black
What will come of you
Franz Hals?

Digital Booklet Formats, Salome Last Changes, FIG Downloads

A steady day. Started by examining possible changes to Argus and then standards for digital booklets. I'm thinking it would be nice to have a PDF download of the album available, an art-filled booklet of lyrics, images, perhaps sheet music.

Apple iTunes have a 'digital booklet' which is 72dpi and horizontal. A rather odd format really; it's hard to print, rather low-res and recommended under 10Mb. I'm thinking that a standard 'B' format book; 5.06x7.81 in; might be better as this vertical format would make it printable, and it's -just- big enough for a CD, though one would have to fit it on the back in a transparent case rather than inside (it's too small to fit one inside the book). A larger book would fit one inside... but more size means more space... the B format is good book standard and about the same width as a CD Jewel Case. Any book could fit a USB drive (or other flash media). I started a template, experimentally.

Then I made a last change to the Freud's Lecture track. The tail of one piano section cut off rather suddenly, leaving 600ms of silence which sounded like an eternity. It took quite a lot of work to re-record the end section and insert it with more sustain. After that, and one last check, the Salomé album was complete and submitted to the distributor. It will take a day or two before we know all is well.

Then, in the afternoon, work on the Franz Hals song, which has taken most of the day. The electronic guitars sound so good and tight that I'll keep them. I've changed the song structure slightly, however. So many of my early songs simply repeated the same verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, and I don't like that now. I've added a change of pace and a quieter end. I must now also change the pace and tempo of everything. The tempo is the bedrock of a song so must be final before any live recordings; I'll almost certainly be adding live guitars and probably live organs too.

At 5pm or so I added a download page to the Fall in Green website, and created a couple of Desktop Wallpapers for it.

My parents went to Wrexham today, to see the Ty Pawb exhibition, and mum liked it. She said that my father moaned constantly, mostly complaints about having to spend any money. He 'earns' (in benefits) more in a week than I do in six, it seems. It amazes me that anyone connects work, or even intelligence or wits, with money, when, for the vast majority of European history the rich are rich only because they were born rich and will forever stay rich, and the poor are poor because they were born poor and will forever stay poor. The most intelligent have usually been the poor; the artists, poets, philosophers, and the rich masters, idiots, because they don't need brains, or indeed anything from anyone.

Music Prodding

A long day of prodding at various songs and fragments. I've got about 4 album project ideas; an EP about 17th century Dutch painters, a Marius Fate cyberpunk concept album, a dark Gothic album in the mould of Nightfood, and a collection of surrealist rock songs which are full of fun an energy.

Today I've revisited Girl Reading a Letter from the Dutch painters album; I've already recorded the tune without words a few years ago, but the pitch is odd to sing (this was way before I sang anything) and always seems to elude me. I've also looked at the Franz Hals song and one about Tycho Brahe, plus a start of a fast rock song called Rat People from the rock album. All have been unsatisfying, but each much better than they were his morning.

I feel tired, overwhelmed, and a dark and Gothic myself; perhaps that album, the only one I've not started musically, would be the best to choose. Choices choices.

Ty Pawb, I'm Tired Want To Sleep

The Ty Pawb preview last night was enjoyable. The only people we spoke to were, by chance and fate, the same couple we spoke to 4 years ago at the last Open I entered there. I feel that they are our sort of creative people. Writer Peter Read kindly offered to mention and/or connect us and our Salome performance with the person who handles events at Ty Pawb.

The art was good, notably better in quality than the Stockport or Grosvenor/Chester Open exhibitions. There is a definite gulf between England and Wales regarding art and culture; England has so little and is becoming an artless, uncultured, almost barbarous state, far less than America or any European country I can think of. Only in literature and poetry does England fare well, and one could argue that is due to the fortunate complexity of the language, everyone must, at least, speak. It still amazes me that the BBC have almost no arts programmes on television (the radio is far better, the BBC excel here). On television there is no contemporary music programme. The closest to a contemporary culture programme I can think of is technology programme BBC Click. Their slogan of the Educate, Entertain and Inform has given way to Entertain, Entertain, and provide news which we must hope is accurate.

As expected I had yet more changes to make to the video today, but these are now complete.

I've spent today working on a song, I have so many that I dived in, but many seem very simplistic and 'easy' now. I started with a tune called 'I'm Tired, Want To Sleep', which is simply those words repeated to the same melody forever which gradually recedes into choirs, a lullaby for sure. So I played this, but it's too boring and simple for me. Perhaps I'll spoil the restful mood if I make it too complex, perhaps this is a natural minimalist composition, and perhaps I should leave it this simple way for the sake of variety. Part of me wants to ditch it completely, and another part thinks that even the partial fragments are good and that I'd be sad if this song, which I keep finding myself humming, were unheard and never made.

Well I recorded the central guitar part, this alone is good training as I hardly ever strum a guitar.

Then I decided to add a break and new chorus which changes from the simple C-Major/G-Major drone into a dramatic chorus, an A-minor descent rather like that in Refuge from Synaesthesia. Then we return to the main melody. Is this good enough? Is this better than the original? Choices choices. My words now:

I'm tired, want to sleep
I'm tired, want to sleep
I'm tired, want to sleep
I'm tired, of it all

Don't sleep, little baby
The moon isn't high
Stay with me, in the starlight
Don't say goodbye

The dreams call my name
I walk to the lake
My soul is theirs to take
I'll see you when I wake

What is best? The strongest emotion is best. The strongest imagery is best. The greatest showcase of skill is best. What if the strongest emotion is that which is simple?

Video Edits, Salome Complete

Despite excuses, Stefano paid me for the video edit, which was something of a surprise. Today I awoke to a huge list of changes to the edit, which are expected in any creative job, and as I expected this time, they were messy and sent in a random order as thoughts occur over about 10 emails, often starting 'and one last thing...' - well; one set of changes was anticipated and completed despite taking a day of work, far longer than the original edit. Still, part of a new job is know how it is to work with someone (in this case, I expected it to be nightmarish), as well as gaining the experience of working on this new type of video.

I listened to the full Salome album last night in detail, it was excellent, something a new path. I hope that all of my (and our!) future music has this depth of emotion. Deborah's words and performance are wonderful. Only the first track needed a few changes, which were slight. I think the album is complete, but I'll listen again (and again and again). I created the CD-surface artwork today. I think that the creative aspect of this project is now complete.

I the night I wrote a few songs that were more like poems. I was imagining something of a cross between the Salome music and Gothic rock, strong on wild imagery.

It's the Ty Pawb private view tonight. This can be a celebration of the end of the Salome music; at least this stage of it, as time goes on, each project has more and more processes and work. To think that The Spiral Staircase was written and recorded in 10-days, and that that was about 5 days longer than any other album at the time. Now, the paperwork alone can take 5 days, and one music video (which I never used to make) 10-days or more.

Onwards to glory.

New Slideshow Video, Final Salome Checks, Fields

Spent yesterday filing the Salome album, and working on a video for Stefano Santachiara. Stefano has a habit of asking (or more like bombarding) me, Deb, and I'm assuming, everyone else he knows, with rather blunt requests to do work of various sorts for free, whether requests for music, artwork, video editing, book proofing, or any other manner of jobs.

I insisted on being paid, and he agreed, for a fairly routine video which is a slideshow with some video clips. His instructions were clear, each edit of the audio and video specified, and images and credit text supplied. It also interested me to create a slideshow using Argus, which is easier to use than other methods, although the three different slideshow sections meant different and varying segments and a need for exact frame counts. This added more complexity than I'd prefer because adding some time to one area throws out the frame numbers for the rest. Perhaps it would have been easier to create these as three separate videos. At 10,174 frames, this is the longest video I've yet made in Argus, so my motivations were as much curiosity and a learning/testing process as anything else.

The look of the slideshow is excellent, the sub-pixel 3D processing of images really makes things clear, even when the images themselves were often poor resolution. The fades are 'additive', rather than linear as in most digital software, so the result has a glow like an exposure-fade made by a film camera. It's also easy to make images move, sway, zoom, in pretty ways.

The video is complete, today Stefano requested a delay to payment of several weeks(!) He is quite a, shall we say, character. I insisted on payment today and have provided a proof-quality version of the video.

The Salome album is just about complete now, and I've divided up the tracks. My 16-bit dithering seems to work. Prometheus will load 16-bit samples, convert to float, and re-save 16-bit dithered OR undithered identically. In other words, only 24-bit or higher source material is re-dithered, which is ideal and as designed; anything larger than 99.99% half-rectangular dithering could disrupt this and lead to entropic loss.

I've typed up the final work list, and the 8-page artwork is complete too. Here is page 8:

I've also heard that NASA has, in the end, published my Hello Earth painting as part of their #NASAMoonSnap project, a promotional arm of the Artemis project.

It was also a piano lesson day yesterday, and today Deb and I are off to see Elaine.

I feel I'm treading creating water, with these two days of filing and small appointments which seem to focus the whole day. These tiny things can be disruptive, like a lone tree of appointment in a wide cornfield to be harvested. I want time to work on new music, new art, a clean slate, but the slate always has something on it, the field never empty enough. Perhaps I can start again tomorrow, though the Ty Pawb exihibiton priate view will take place at 6pm. I'm looking forward to it. I feel a nice creative energy from Ty Pawb place and people there whenever I visit. Saturday, however, is free.

Lou and Sampling

I burned the first test CD of Lou Salome last night and listened to the whole thing. There were a couple of slight changes, mainly to the fianl track, The Flower of Farewell, plus some changes needed to the artwork and liner notes. These were done today, then some more sampling of MODX waves, making things better, ready for the next project.

In the night I had an idea for a song about Tony Visconti. I imagined him wanting to perform himself, be a rock star, but no, was always confined to the producer (and bassist!) role, so I imagined him singing a song called Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride. Maybe I should record this! There's always a conflict between doing something fun, spontaneous, and full of energy, or slow, 'new', serious, experimental.

Concert, Lou Finalising

A rather lovely concert event last night, and my donation drawing for the Worleston Fate, the original Sisyphus artwork, was instead donate to the Mid-Cheshire Hospitals Trust raffle, the charity that last night was in aid of. I sold a three books and two Fall in Green CDs and the atmosphere was all friendly, relaxed, warm, as well as artistic. The hotel décor is terrible, abysmal landscape prints designed to neutralise emotion, the art equivalent of purely functional architecture. It was inspiring to imagine God Being Killed there, or any other painting of mine, dominating the room, cathedralising the space.

I'm inspired again. How I ache to create new things, better things, for the sake of creating these better things, self-improvement, the vital job of humanity improvement! In these moods I want to create everything simultaneously. How small my old works are, how inferior compared to the joyous and wonderful works within my potential, and how frustrating not to realise them, to have no guidance but my whims, and no incentive but love and those whims, plus, of course, the certain eternal glory I know lies waiting. Eternal glory does me, today, as much good as it did Vermeer. In this mood everything I invent is brilliant for a few minutes, then discarded, tarnished by a yet-more-brilliant idea. These emotions must give way to intellectual rigour and mechanical process.

I have spent today on the final mixing of the Lou Salomé album. Deb came round in the morning to record the vocals for 'The Flower of Farewell', and work on the liner notes. Both are now complete and the project is nearly at its end.

Prometheus 2.91, Crewe Hall Preparations

A software update today, I'll make more music after the Salome project, so time to upgrade in preparation. Two easy bugs were fixed, the 16-bit rectangular dither was added, complete with dithered save for modulators and samples, and some tinkering. Most of the time was spent switching the save format code from a simple 0/1 number to #defines and switch commands, a painstaking process because silly errors can easily be introduced here.

Then, preparation for tonight's event in Crewe Hall. I've no idea where my stall will be, in the foyer(?) the hall itself. There's little point in me being there if I'm only seen by people entering or exiting; but even then, one could argue it's better than not being there at all. This is my first personal art event of any sort this year, as the Neorenaissance events in January were all cancelled due to Covid. My only other event was the Art Fair Cheshire opening, which was a spark of light in an otherwise solitary, if not actually monastic, year. I'm looking forward to another spark of the Ty Pawb private view this Friday.

Food Prodding

A slow day. I started by checking the dance remix of Dream Sequence ('Dream Sequencer'), then preparing the artwork, books, and signage for the small pop-up stall at Crewe Hall tomorrow evening. What should be the aim of these events? There will be a few people there, this is hardly a market-sale event; perhaps a 'showcase' of my artwork, but I've not made much recently, not enough. Oh to clear the decks, to have space to create more!

I'll bring all of my books, a few CDs, even greetings cards, in the hope of some money. It will, I expect, be hardly be enough for the time and work expended; yet, isn't that art? Would van Gogh or Vermeer partake in a pop-up stall? Vermeer was a bit of an art dealer, so I can imagine him doing so, yes. I'll show the original God Being Killed frame with print #1.

After that I finalised the Spotify Canvas animations, and made a tiny upgrade to Argus to fix a bug in there, then more looking at the album art. As a process, it feels like an unispired child prodding at his dinner with a fork. I need something new, an overlap for the tail of this project. I find music so emotionally unsatisfying compared to painting, but painting is so self-absorbed when I have nowhere to show my work, nothing to do with it but hold it until I die. I love painting, but it has almost become a tool for self-mastery, when I feel I am master enough. Can I make music which is as transparent, complex, intelligent, and impactful as painting?

Salome Cover Art

A full and tiring day today. I started by re-examining my 16-bit dither algorithm, my >=-1 and <=1 random number generator. I reasoned that if a sample was in the exact centre of where it should be, it should never dither up or down, so I had the idea of limiting it to >-1 and <1, but this is a bit of a pain, as it involves an extra addition (ie. slight speed loss) to the seed value before taking a modulo.

I spent hours this morning experimenting with different random seeds and ways of mashing the numbers to generate a 'most random' result, but they seemed to work about the same. The values I'm working with here are miniscule, the width of one 16-bit sample (so 1/32767) and it's quite hard to examine such numbers. I discovered a bug in SoundForge where the sample graph display breaks down when showing a 3-minute sample of these tiny numbers. My >-1 and <1 algorithm should have worked but it's hard to test... the statistics show that some numbers were 0.000015259 - this is the =1 or =-1 result BUT it might have been less than 0.00001525925... I couldn't be sure because the number of decimal places in SoundForge isn't high enough. I decided to fix it by using the >=-1 and <=1 algorithm and simple multiply by less than 0.5 to shrink it a -tiny- bit from the edges.

Working and worrying about these tiny details can cause insanity.

Then I started on the Salome artwork. I probably work too hard on a full 8-page CD booklet for my albums when then odds of printing and selling any CDs is so poor - but in this case we almost certainly will print some. I still love CDs and jewel cases, and can't stand the cheap cardboard cases that seem to be the norm these days. Even the wonderful artwork of Bjork's Utopia (which is, if anything, better than the badly mastered and sadly distorted music) went in the bin due to the impractical shape. I care about CDs, I don't want them scraping along the sides of a cheap piece of cardboard.

As an artist, I sigh and wonder why I put so many day of my life into meticulous artwork designs for CDs that will remain unsold, unseen, and unheard, but, such is art. I must still do my best and push for better each time; this is art not commerce. How many people see my paintings in real life? Not enough, but some do.

The cover was easy, I wanted to use the poster design, but it needed a contrasting colour. The red on the poster really helped. I experimented with a green shard, like the shaft of a daisy for the 'o' in Salome, but later used a red heart:

Hearts were used on the inside cover, I decided to use a spiralling still from the Cosmic Solitude video:

Most of the inner pages are the yellow, transparent smoke, colour from the cover. The get the same granulated effect, I used different fragments from the source photos and blew them up, then layered them to create lots of interesting results. I wanted a contrasting colour on the back. I thought green, partly because the similarly hued The Myth of Sisyphus used blue... so I wanted something different. The result is how I imagined:

The red symbol from the cover, almost a kiss, really helps. I rather like this strange, floral, rosy, result, but I'm not sure if it matches the feeling of the music. These are all first drafts, early days yet.

Generally the colours are bold: bright sallow yellows, dark greens, dark reds, that is all. I've sketched out 10 pages so far. A busy day.

I must finish the music editing and general sound, and this artwork. I'm tired, I feel Sisyphean again, but I must keep pushing this rock no matter how exhausted I feel. Tempus est pretiosum. Vita brevis.

Music Mastering, Spotify Canvases

I'm in the final testing a checking stages for the Salome Music.

This is the mastering stage which is a process of setting the volume levels and tweaking the EQ, this is the only time in music making that I tend to use equalisation, which is why I was developing a 10-band graphic equaliser. In the end, I haven't applied or used the new equaliser, but I'll keep it in reserve in case I can use it. For me, EQ is about making sure that all of the frequencies are covered correctly, but to some extent having to use any at all is a failure of good composing - although this factor was and is always part of music making. In classical music the conductor is producer and mastering engineer, ensuring the right balance for the composition. I now use visual and technical tools to compare some EQ 'tuning forks' to my mixes to see if anything is way out. In this case though things are good enough as they are. I like to make everthing 'perfect' but this sound quality is also part of the art - one rarely experimented with.

One other change is to edit the 'intermission' track. This is a live audio recording of the room chatter which took place during the live performance. I've removed a few snippets of conversation by people who I don't know and can't consult, although the key point of this track is that nothing is particularly audible, and that it is absolutely authentic. There are many albums of 'live' music made but I can't recall any making a track from the incidental auditorium noise. The most audible here are those of Mike Drew towards the end discussing the line-up for the open-mic part. It ends with the 'lights out' speech that opens At Freud's Lecture, so unlike the Beatles' Revolution No. 9, my 20-minutes of musique concrète leads to a dramatic resolution. We wait the entire time for enlightenment (in more ways than one).

Most of today has been making the 8-second 'canvas' animations for Spotify. These are based on the projections, but I've had to brighten some up, and of course make them loop perfectly. Many loop anyway, but not at exactly 8-second intervals, so some programming and other fancy editing is needed. Argus is so good for making these.

Other news. I've re-watched 1970s classic The Man in the Iron Mask, and must create a painting about it. Our next engagement will be at Crewe Hall on Sunday, an artistic accompaniment to the Worleston Music School concert there.

Salome Music Ending

The end is finally in sight for the Salome album, the 16 tracks are complete in a first draft. A couple need new vocals from Deb, but it's time to work on other things. Today I finalised the composition for the Dream Sequence dance version, and made some balancing adjustments to Entwined in Infinity using the new Watergate plugin.

I've started work on the cover, which will be similar to the poster, and started work on the 8-second Spotify Canvases.

I spent a lot of the day working on a 10-band graphic equaliser. It's a simple array of band pass filters which are then boosted (or not) by the right amount. Here's the spectrum of white noise boosted across all bands at 0.200 bandwidth:

There is no dry signal there, just the peaks so it gives an artificially strong result. Here it is with 0.400 bandwidth:

The equaliser I tested seemed to employ more of a wedge-shaped boost rather than a peak; will that be too slow for my real-time use? Which is best?

Film Dream, Otesanek Edit, Waterfades

I dream of being in a film. I was acting, and delighted in how easy it was because I was behaving naturally and didn't know the script or what was coming up, unlike the other actors; which were I think two men and a woman. A camera was invisibly following us and I was smiling, delighting in being on film. We entered a restaurant and sat down. I was served thick chips, like potato wedges. I was informed that a steak was coming. This made me nervous, a fear of eating this rich food which invariably give me stomach ache. I began to worry at having to eat it on camera. Then, with this anxiety in mind and before the meat arrived, the scene changed abruptly.

I was now in a large bathroom with several baths and sinks, as though in an institution. It was clean, nice, lined with zinc-blue tiles, and the leading man and lady were here in a new scene of the film. He said that she should submerge her face in a large sink of cool water, to feel refreshed, and she did so. The sink was huge, more like a huge cubic bath or vat, perhaps a metre cubed or bigger. The pair walked to a corner of the room and conversed out of my attention. They seemed to be oblivious to my presence. I secretly moved to the sink and put my face in the cool water, to see how it felt. I held my breath under the water and it felt lovely. Then I climbed in to another bath in a slightly darker part of the room, holding my breath with my whole body under the cold water. A Japanese woman, dressed like a nurse, came in and threatened to put a lid over the bath/sink, trapping me underwater. This made me panic, I thought I'd better get out. Then I awoke.

A busy day. Started by making a new edit of Otesanek for a new e-zine. This involved a new bit of guitar playing, which added a bit of sparkle to the morning. Then I researched more random number generators, and specifically tests of a new 16-bit ditherer, which I'll implement at some point.

Then some work on a Prometheus plugin, Engram Input Waterfade, which fades a signal on a track based on the input of another track (or another anything, an 'engram' can be used to store sound from any part in the signal chain, permitting some complex, almost programming-style logic). The plugin isn't great though, it's too simple, simply reducing the volume based on a crude volume trace of the source, and the result can be stuttery, and the attenuation is related to the source too closely. So I spent a few hours redesigning it to be more like my noise gate, which has two gates, one triggers the other, to creates a smoother result, and with more standard parameters. I can now, for example, mimic the volume of the source rather than it's silence.

In between doing this I finished the main composing for the dance version of 'Dream Sequence', and played an electric piano solo for it, just live in one take. In a way this natural feeling part stands out, for the better, from the rest of the song, but there's not really enough quiet time in there to add more.