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.
