Canvases, Radioactive v1.14, Cameron

A steady day. Created most of the Spotify Canvases, including photographing some net curtains for lace, and finding a few small bugs in Argus (which is rare, it's fairly small and simple software). The Chicago Institute of Fine Art allows free use of its historical paintings, which is wonderful. I love their style of art too, and I'd happily donate art there. Their policy means that I can use some of Cotán's vegetables for my video, and a portrait of Harmen Hals, Frans Hals son in the Frans Hals video.

All that's left are The Laughing Cavalier, and Tycho Brahe.

Tonight, Steam have got back to me over Radioactive, so have prepared the Demo and Update for release on March 10th.

I'm feeling weary and disappointed. Almost every game on Steam has lots of reviews and interest, yet my games none, yet my games are, I think, good quality, certainly not spammy, not clickbait, not gambling, porn, clones, idiotic or any of the other many ultra-popular rubbish that litter gaming platforms - even if Taskforce does include Zombies (though the whole plot is strictly tongue-in-cheek). I feel sad at the injustice in the world. I spent 30 years trying to make game, working on my passion. I made lots of games, and although some were more popular than others, like Hilt II on Amiga, like Flatspace on PC, none were successful, and now struggle to be seen by anyone.

Yet, what can I do? My games are part of my art and I'll keep caring for them and trying to make them available for an uncaring world. I often neglect then, but do care about them, and care a lot while I'm working on them. As such, I now think that Radioactive is brilliant, even if the world does not. My life would be changed hugely with just one hit.

In other news, I read about Cameron, the wife of John Parsons today, and looked at some of her art and watched the 'Wormwood' film. Those strange, magical, artistic people of the West Coast are my sort of people. Art is my life and purpose, and art is magic. I don't believe in magic any more than religion, art is my religion because it has something to show for itself, some active contribution to make. Magic, if it is anything, is the power to transform others, to change minds and therefore the world. I must strive to express more, stronger, better, and live art to the greatest degree.

Onwards I march.

The Golden Age Spotify Canvases

A full day. Made a few more changes to Radioactive, just in case, to stabilise the screen resolution iterations, then took a video of the game to test the screen recording options on this PC. Windows 10/11 ships with a 'game bar' which is actually a useful screenshot and screen recorder, so I took a few videos and uploaded those. The game is rather fun to simply watch.

Then work on the Spotify Canvases for The Golden Age, which I hope can be used for a few full-sized videos too. I had to create a new 'infinite' chessboard 3D object, using my Hector tool, which meant registering the ComDlg32.dll with a fancy command. Then creating the object in Lightwave, and texturing it in my editor (a 3D Editor and Texturer in Visual Basic 6, one of the many tools I've made and used myself due to necessity).

Then I cut up the main cover artwork painting, so I could use 'my' looming face and the painter. This worked quite well. Then work on the other videos. For The Girl with a Pearl Earring, I used the Mauritshuis image (a shame I can't credit them in these tiny looping animations, but I have on my website). This is the only gallery which permits free use of its artwork, so all of my images come from them. they lack The Laughing Cavalier, and Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, but I can use many others, including a good Rembrandt self portrait, and a few by Frans Hals. For 'The Girl', I made her blink with some clever (if painstaking) photoshop work on the Argus texture.

Then I started to make a model Tycho Brahe:

He's made from a folded sponge wrapped in sack-cloth, and hot-melt glued. The hair is string painted yellow, the eyes and nose polystyrene. He looks more like van Gogh than Tycho Brahe, yet, the metal nose is a giveaway. I could gold-leaf it! I may use him for a full music video.

I won't spend long on any of it, I can't afford the time/money, so I must do my best with extreme time and budget pressure. This rarely makes the best art, but it can, and, in the general wide world, much of creative life is done like this. Bless my genius and ability to do this! My speed and efficiency is thanks in part to my software. I'm aware that perhaps nobody on Earth could do what I do. How many musicians have designed and programmed all of their own music software, all of their DSP algorithms, and the 3D animation software for creating music videos? I'm also aware how worthless these skills are considered in this abominable world; but perhaps one day I can sell the software, or can at least try.

I want to complete all 13 videos by the end of tomorrow.

I'm still waiting on Steam for information on how to add a shared depot to Radioactive, and, amazingly, after a full week and about 12 messages, Soundmouse still haven't fixed the problem preventing me from uploading my music there. All they need to do is delete some of my uploads, which I'm not permitted to. The fix should take 2 minutes.

Stoic Marches

I woke late after a night of strange nightmares. A creature with red spiral eyes kept pursuing me, hiding under the curtains. I woke tired.

I started work by looking again at Fictive, examining possible changes and how to put together a separate authors' and players set for it. It would be nice if I could do something with this system and am thinking of ways to update and use it, share it, but often I feel that my efforts in anything are futile. I've spent my life creating trying to share things, but constantly feel like I've got nowhere and am getting nowhere. Of course, some things are more popular than others.

There was a strange bug in Radioactive which, when 4 computer players battle, caused the first player to instantly play. This was, I think, due to leftover data in the unit structures after the initial title-screen battle. I spent some time tracking that down and fixed it. I'm ready to update it, but need Steam to get back to me regarding a few technical problems.

I had my first painting ideas of the year last night, but painting seems as futile as any aspect of my life. My mood today is full of doom, yet, at the same time eternal action, constant work. Each day, each hour, I do my best, roll my rock, strive for what is better. What is best to do in life? I would ideally devote myself to art, painting and music. Though both are ignored by the world, I can see improvement, gradual but certain with each act, and this feel satisfying but anything else; the pursuit of wealth though games or books is soul-destroying as well as futile.

I feel weak and my resources are waning. Life feels pointless, but I will keep fighting until the last hammer.

I have a plan for March, and seem to have, already in February, ticked off a lot of it. My small goals for the week are creating Spotify Canvas videos for The Golden Age. I have old games to remaster. I know that these will be ignored too, but nobody else can or will do this, and they are part of my life. It would be sad if they were to remain unseen forever, even if only sad to me.

Curiously, the Kindle version of my Songs of Innocence book is 'selling' on Amazon for the first time. I say selling, but it's free and being given away by Amazon. Before this month, it had 'sold' only two copies to Japan, but there's a renaissance in the e-book now. No physical copies have ever been sold. If only they knew that the Songs of Life is the rarity, with about 10 copies remaining from the 100-copy print run.

Flatspace IIk 1.07 and Radioactive

A programming day. There was a bug in yesterday's Flatspace IIk update which stopped the ingame music playing at the correct volume (loading a new tune resets the volume to 100% - didn't notice this, and this is not needed in Flatspace, as all music was loaded upon startup, with the volume set later). This annoying bug took a few hours to fix and update.

Then, a day of work on Radioactive.

I love this game. I decided to update the audio again, adding a little ambience, then worked on the store page, and created a shared depot for the files, to make it easier to add the demo. This work is rather tedious, and I've encountered a few problems with the system, but I've completed the programming on my side. Now awaiting for Steam to approve the store and fix a problem with the share depot.

Radioactive v1.14

A slower day than yesterday, starting with filing all of yesterday's work. I've updated Radioactive a version today, the only important change is making the Desktop resolution the default for the game, but lots of small bugs have been addressed (bugs that are only a problem if things go wrong, such as start-up files not being found, no keyboard or mouse detected etc.)

I've remade the speech audio using SayIt for a classic 1980s/1990s style of spoken audio and created a demo version where one can watch the computer play, as a technical test for those worried about compatibility. I've also explored increasing my prices. Future Snooker/Pool/Radioactive were all $11.99 at launch, later reduced to $8.99, but my cut at $8.99 can be under $1, and the cost of living has increased since. Around the world, some prices are 50% higher in USD than before. I'll wait until after the next major sale and increase prices.

I've had to create a Steam Demo product, and have lots of admin on that front. I won't actually update the game for users for a few weeks to avoid a pile of announcements all at the same time.

Flatspace Updates, Cabbage Licencing

A full day of updating Flatspace IIk, largely spent working on four new music tracks for the new Golden Age Music Pack. I knew I wanted to add the mysterious Nature Morte music, but wasn't sure about the rest. In the end I added edits of the songs (without words) to Welcome to My Gallery, Cotán, and Tych Brahe. The technical upgrades were fun. I almost feel like making Flatspace 3.

One problem is that the program is so complicated than balancing things is increasingly difficult. Originally I wanted a game that was as deep as a roguelike, but as easy to play as an arcade game. Over the course of development, more and more controls and options were added making it as complex as a roguelike, and as deep, with arcade elements. Well, there are many things I could do to improve the game, many ideas that fill me with joy and zeal, but I'm always crushed by the sadness that my years of working on games were wasted ones and that the money is just too poor to risk it. Taskforce took me 18 months or-so work at the time, plus about two months back in 2020, and yet it's still sold less than 15 copies. Flatspace is more popular, but not quite popular enough to gamble for financial reasons, so my motivations would be artistic. In some ways, my games were training in doing things for artistic reasons.

One thing I would love to do is update my older games and list those on Steam, but again, I need at least $100 per game. This, again, must remain an aspiration.

I've asked for permission to use images for the Cotán painting 'Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber', but the fees are a ridiculously unrealistic £195 for 5-years for use in a video. How many internet videos last 5-years? None. I expect that nobody licences under these terms. Every other museum with a 'Golden Age' painting has allowed the use of the work for free. Even The Mauritshuis, who own the Girl with the Pearl Earring, one of the most famous (and lucrative for the museum) paintings in the world, makes the image free to use in return for a credit; yet the practically unknown Cotán painting of cabbages costs an amount equivalent to about 20-years of streaming royalties.

The image is hardly vital, and I'm at least a good a painter as Cotán. I could probably paint a copy from life and do a better job, but a camera is even cheaper. I hardly need to use the actual image, or indeed any, but it would have been nice to create a video with Cotán's actual vegetables (a phrase few have ever typed!).

Programming is on my mind again. I'll start work on a Radioactive update next. A sale of three games starts tomorrow and I need some sales. Life is a struggle and a battle, as it is for so many.

Onwards!

Admin, Flatspace IIk v1.06

A few things done today. Made my paintings the main entry point and front page on my website, and looked into ways of using Fictive to create interactive books. It would be great if this could be a widely used tool for authors, but how to do this?

I spent most of the day updating Flatspace IIk and getting it working and compiled under Steam on this new PC; I'd not even installed Steam or run any of my games so far, so I was relieved that it worked first time. I've fixed lots of small errors with the help of Code Analysis, perhaps 20 or so small bugs, but mainly made the program load in-game music as needed rather than loading all of the tracks upon startup. This allows the addition of much more in-game music, up to 100 tracks, without any extra memory burden.

It would be good if I could add more DLC, and not necessarily music. It's easy enough. Part of me thinks that I could revive the project, this, my most successful game.

Music admin is being delayed. I was persuaded to submit a track to a dodgy looking website and apart from it barely working, and now being unable to either progress or delete my account, I'm now swamped with music promotion spam. I wonder if big pop stars get assailed by this sort of rubbish? Perhaps. 'All I can do is block' is a good title for a song.

Onwards I roll my rock. Onwards I charge. Onwards I stoicly crawl through the harsh winter of this world.

ArtSwarm Videos

A busy day, starting with more music admin and research into a future Flatspace IIk Music Pack, then completion of the ArtSwarm filing, the final tweaks to a new intro/extro sequence for the ArtSwarm Live videos, plus editing 6 together. I'm somewhat disappointed that my work doesn't feature, but this is an incentive for me to do better next time.

Music Admin, ArtSwarm

A tiring, dispiriting day. Lots of work done on the music admin side, listing the album with various music and licencing authorities, preparing for the Golden Age release on my Bandcamp page. This work generally takes a day. Each site needs track titles, lengths, ISRC codes, studio personnel and lots of things like that, a great deal of form filling in the hope of future royalties. I've had only 2p in royalties from PPL in 15 years, but I want to do things correctly.

In the afternoon I started on some video idents for the live ArtSwarm events, though I feel in two minds about all of ArtSwarm. I don't really enjoy them, and was only frustrated at the last event with my brief and poor performance (though I have made notes on how to improve). I have a new album coming up, but no opportunity to perform that, merely showcase pointless rubbish akin to the Kenny Everett characters or Muppet Acts, but with no audience, and losing money in the process.

I used Argus for this animation, thus making it the first 1920x1080 resolution animation for ArtSwarm, and I used FFMpeg to assemble the frames, so even on this low day, I've learned something new, even if it's only for my own benefit. I must try to regain some spirit. This lung-burning infection and my general weakness is not helping my mood today.

But, I've kept working. Each day I will do the best I can. I think of suicide constantly, as my Sisyphus says, but death is too much admin work to contemplate seriously. My living works must be taken care of, and then there are still new things to create. It's clear that my works have got, and are still getting, better and better over time. Oh for some security and the chance to actually work on them. These days are as worryful as Rembrandt's. I must work harder at everything.

ArtSwarm and Golden Age Lyric Readings

A busy day! Despite being sore with a cold, the Boxes event yesterday went well. I decided to use the light weight amplifiers, though, of course, it still took a couple of hours to set up and take down. Nick Ferenczy was particularly annoying, insisting on the projector being moved to his specification and not sending me the videos in advance, thus making the projections for the whole show generally a bit like a school slideshow or Alan Partridge presentation, not slick. I aim to be flexible and accommodating, but in future I will not yield on this. I wasn't happy with my performances, but they were not bad considering my illness and it was a nice, if not lovely, night with the opportunity to meet a few friends and fellows. There were some firsts: Andrew showed a video remotely, and many acts were filmed. More on this later. I've had no time at all today to file ArtSwarm.

After the pandemic years, many social gatherings and events have popped up as before, but most are poorly attended. Nine people came yesterday, which is perhaps only a little below the average anyway, but 14 are needed to break-even on the hall hire. I'm unsure whether to continue with the events or stop, but I expect that an event in the warmer and lighter parts of the year will be better attended.

Today has been manically busy as I catch up on many days of music admin. Today, editing some Lyric Reading videos for The Golden Age, the first of which is live now. These were filmed in about 90 minutes yesterday morning by Deborah - a joy! She saved me so much time woith her attentive camera work and sound monitoring. She is a good technician on every level. Editing and conversion is a lot faster than before, partly due to this new PC but also because I'm using the script-based ffmpeg for video conversion rather than the old (and buggy) Freemake. The only downside is that I can't encode to the reliable H264 format in a way that Media Player or the projector will play, but XVID will, so from today XVID is my main video codec.

I have lots more basic music admin to do tomorrow, the general filing and listing of work around the internet, rather than promotion. This will take all day. I'll also schedule the lyric images, then later in the week start work on the Spotify Canvases and lyric videos... and possibly music videos too. I have days of work to catch up with.

Break, and Box Preparations

A day in Chester, then Market Drayton. Not productive, but relatively restful, and a chance to catch up with the ever delightful and eloquent David Lawton.

Today, a vast pile of jobs await me. I have contracted a cold and feel weak and sore, but this morning Deb's been the camera operator for a series of lyric videos - all new retakes. I've got to grips with FFmpeg but almost no codecs will play in Media Player or on my projector, only XVid, but one is all I need. It's an ArtSwarm Live performance today. I'd rather cancel the event given my poor health and the exhausting amount of physical work involved with these dates, but these events are fun, and some good performance ideas are planned, from a new interpretation of Hendrix Foxy Lady (so new, the words AND the music are different), a box quiz and a song and video by Andrew.

I aim to film all of the acts for the first time, so from now on all ArtSwarm Live events will be video events too. Far more people will see them online than in real life. The bigger audience will incentivise everyone, but most importantly, performance art means nothing without being recorded. I've made typed notes on every show I've taken part in, back down to the MASH events, but video is better. I have, though, had less time to prepare and am out of practise with the organisation and promotion aspect. Plus, participation is low and the hall is now more expensive.

Dreams, Videos, Anxiety

A long and tiring day. I feel I've worked non-stop, always banging my head against some wall, usually a technological one. Each wall gave way slightly.

It began with a many vivid dreams, which at least involved inventing an acrylic plastic laser-cut jigsaw (I remarked in the dream that jigsaws are names after the tool used to cut them, and that the blade was quite wide). I reasoned though that people would pay £30-£40 for a top of the range 3D jigsaw, but not more, even for a transparent acrylic plastic one.

The dreams after that became more vivid, hy head pounding with a strange feeling, and my self leaving my bed-bound body as often troubles me. I dreamt of a young woman, and perhaps her family or mother, with a small white horse, walking down a main street at night, on her way home. The horse was tired and rotted to some extent, it was ill and had a foul smelling wound. I passed her and went to a lit garage, where my mother, looking old, was there, and Cat, my beloved (now dead) companion. In another part of the dream I explored deserted city streets, again at night. There were a few young people with skateboards, or playing or gathering on various corners. Gates swung on old hinges. I entered an empty shopping centre.

The portents are not good.

Then I had to catch a train to a holiday destination, with Deborah, or my mother, and brother, though the people were not quite right. At some point my mother turned into an afro-Carribean woman. We rushed to make the train, we were late, I knew it would be close, but we missed it. I hoped for a bus replacement, or other train, and we went to sit in a waiting room. Suddenly, it moved and we were on a train again, but going somewhere else.

The day started with tidying the upper room, the filming room. This alone too over an hour, and I prepared some folders to record some lyric videos for The Golden Age. I then started to record, but this was so difficult due to the wig, which I wanted because it matched the general look of the album art, something I've aimed to do on each album and set of videos. In the end, I re-took each video at least twice, but up to 5 times, and I am still unsure of the look.

This was only the start of the problems. Freemake started to crash and make the CPU fan spin to crazy levels, blasting air from the back. The conversion was unreliable, then Avisynth refused to play the files, and I needed to install both the latest K-Like Codec pack and the XVid codec. Video is so idiotic on computers. Almost nothing plays or can be edited without installing tons of codecs. This is fine, but Windows doesn't seem to care or make this easy; some software still won't load videos correctly, and even seeing what codec a video is encoded with is almost impossible.

In the end I installed and learned to use 'ffmpeg essentials', a brilliant command line video converter that's better than almost any, but the x264 conversions refuse to play in Windows Media Player. It's hardly a surprise as Windows-anything tends to be rubbish, but YouTube and everything else I use (even Irfanview) process these fine, so this will do.

So everything I've done today has gone wrong, and I've slowly found a fix for it, but after 8 hours, not one video is made or even half complete.

My anxiety is becoming overwhelming, a constant stinging, my heart constantly fluttering. This has not happened for many years, and was devastating then. Half is worry, half energy for new ideas, an overwhelm of what I need and want to do. For now, I must pause. We have two days of trips. ArtSwarm is Saturday, and many people have cancelled, so we will see how many come. Onwards.

Golden Admin, Argus Frame Rates

The album is now being processed and set for release on April 14th, available for re-order on March 3rd. I've spent some of today working on admin; preparing the sheet music release, making the CD archive copy, filing the album artwork as an image to make it available via RedBubble, and other things. There is more to do once the compositions are registered, and I need to make some videos. I've never had an album art sale via RedBubble, which, somewhat ironically, makes the art on there my rarest and most collectable. I've sold a small number of non-music related clothing designs there.

I've also updated Argus. It does an odd thing, look at this:

// Start
    currenttime=timeGetTime();
// This is called every frame
    if (currenttime-gamerefreshtime>=fliptime)
    {
        gamerefreshtime=currenttime;
        ...     }


This should create a situation where the instructions in the bracket operate at 'fliptime' millisecs, so for 30 frames per second, and 33.333ms, the animation will play at the correct speed (ignore floats and remainders, I have dealt with that but not shown that bit). Yet, I need to use fliptime=25, on both my old PC and this 4x faster new one, to play at 30 frames per second. This same 75% ratio applies to 24 and 25 frames per second too. Most odd.

The coding is a bit of a distraction. I want to make Spotify videos and a few other 'basic' videos for promotion but the work seems to be endless for crumbs, crumbs from the food of hope and the manna of art, a sentiment matched in the music. Life is no better for artists than it was in Rembrandt's or Vermeer's or van Gogh's time, though we now have mre artists than ever. This time is, or was, a new Golden Age for art. 2023 feels like a Rampjaar.

Album Submission

The Golden Age is submitted and set for release. I feel overwhelmed with jobs and things to do, I could spend the next 4 months solely promoting the album; and what would be the result of this? Perhaps and with hope, 1% or 2% more popularity than the previous release, which would be good enough, though I'd prefer a smash hit. I could spend time making more music, more art. I have painting competitions I could enter, so much I could do, so much to do, yet I must promote this too, possibly make a few music videos. Oh for a collaborator or helper! Today I put together some lyric sheets for the songs, eg:

I also typed up the score for the instrumental Nature Morte. For a track that's over 2 minutes long, the score is only 19 bars, so I've fitted it all on one of the lyric sheets - a first for me!

I'm awaiting confirmation of the acceptance of the album, then I can complete more of the great deal of administration work.

Final Draft of The Golden Age

Another full day. The album is, I think, complete! I've adjusted the cover a little:

Those red lines seem to be needed to give the image some framing, the balance between organic and inorganic, order/chaos, wasn't quite right. I've designed eight other print-quality pages for the artwork, but they are all quite simple. Here is the CD rear (if and when I made a CD):

With the final track list. I was in two minds about the capitalisation of "Welcome to my Gallery". Most songs capitalise "My". It looks visually neater with a small "my" but I'll use a capital, to be more technically correct. I also checked the lyrics, listened to the streams right through to proof them, and typed up the lyrics book. I noticed that I'd called Frans Hals Franz Hals, or even Franz Halz, throughout development (and over the past 13 years!) so I fixed that today.

I've also finalised the scores for the 12 songs, although the score for the instrumental Nature Morte (which was a live improvisation on the synth, it really captured the mood of the evening) isn't done. That will take another couple of hours.

I've made a tick list of what to do, and my there is a LOT of work on each release. My release plan grows with each release. In the past I've made all the artwork, and the tracks, and lyric videso (myself reading the lyrics on YouTube) as well as one or two music videos for highlight tracks. Now I make lyric pages, and the full score, and will schedule releases on BandCamp... but ideally I need read-lyrics videos, plus lyric videos which pop up the words, and as many actual artistic music videos as possible. I also need to make looping Spotify animations.

The workload is massive, and I have to do every part myself, be a master of music composing and the poetry of lyrics, singing and piano and guitar playing; recording, mixing and mastering; DSP programming; video editing; as well as graphic art, and a host of other things... I'm fortunate that I can do all of this, but it means that everything takes a long time.

Deb is on holiday next week which means less time for work.

Thought For The Day

You can't be exceptional and do what everyone else does. My motto has always been do what others don't, or won't, or can't.

More Golden Filing, Live Performance

I listened to the full album in detail yesterday and I really like it, it's certainly by best work to date on many technical levels. Whether the best on an artistic level is anyone's choice. I had to make a few small changes to volume levels, but that's all, so made those today. This step takes an age, these final tweaks to an album and endless listens.

I'm still working on the cover, and on the music notation. I've notated a few more tracks today. I feel full of power regarding making music. I feel I've reached a technical plateau where I am finally capable of making really good quality work. The past few years have been a deliberate learning experience, making lots of work of different sorts to train from. One could argue that I've been doing this for decades but it's only since 2020 or so that I decided to take the production and performance side of music seriously.

Of the jobs for this final stage; I must notate one older album (Cycles, done), but perhaps another as I have to many to do. I must notate this, and create Spotify Canvas animations. These many be simpler this time because the source material for the cover art is only my 'Art of Painting' painting, and Vermeer and Cotán images, which I'm hesitant to use in a video without explicit permission. All of this plus the normal registration process for new works.

If I were a signed professional artist, I'd now be on a treadmill of planning a tour, and other publicity extravagances, but I hate the idea of publicity for my work. I've performed one or two of my works live in my life (of course, many times in Fall in Green) and generally they sound at least as good, if not better live than recorded, but I'd need a reasonably large backing band for these works and, perhaps worse, I don't particularly like performing live. For me, it's hard lugging work, the 'roadie' work of carrying and connecting equipment, which I hate and find exhausting and nerve racking. This is my most disliked aspect of live performance. The performing act is one of self monitoring and self criticism to give one's best; not a pleasure, it's a matter of doing things correctly, pushing yourself to the limits in a live arena like a gladiator. I'm not so averse to performing as Glenn Gould, and the feelings during a show can be thrilling, but generally speaking, it's not something I like.

This is a pity, as this album would lend itself to a theatrical performance, and I can already imagine my costume and the extravagant staging plans (now these aspects I love!).

Alas, today, the only money to be made from music is in performing, however. My music will probably be unheard and unnoticed, yet, my recent albums (since and including The Modern Game) have been partly because I didn't want to promote them. I knew that they were training works and not as good as they could, or one day will, be. This album though, I'm pleased enough with, as I am with our Fall in Green albums, so I may do more with it.

As well as this filing of my music, I am full of ideas for new albums and works, I feel that anything is possible. When anything is possible, what is the best course of action? That's the rub for any artist. I hope to paint something for the Ruth Borchard competition (my Self Portrait as Tripod should be ideal, but they might consider that too weird), and perhaps something for the New Light competition. There doesn't seem to be money in any of this, but my zeal for creating new works is strong, and I feel empowered and confident in my abilities, if not my financial situation.

Three people can't attend next week's ArtSwarm event, six are 'maybe', with only one confirmed. If less than 14 people (the break-even point for the hall hire) come then it will be the last event. It's nice to meet my friends and fellow artists, but the other aspects, the organising and promoting, the lugging and plugging of equipment is so difficult and exhausting, and of course, with no reward except for the sake of art. This is the sort of public experimental arts event that should be government funded. I would happily do it for nothing, but at the moment I'm paying to do it and risking and wasting my expensive equipment on it. I'm sure Beethoven had the same problems in his day, with his self-organised concerts which barely broke even, vs his charity benefits which were well attended but for no money.

Album Tweaks Continue

More work on The Golden Age today. Rendered the final tracks and updated my Cathedral Limiter. Now it can be easily switched on or off, so on only to give a track a final boost for mastering, but at a 'normal' (sub-clipping) level during normal work. I also recorded some more backing vocals for Rembrandt, some pretty choirs for the word Saskia.

I also spent some time trying to generate some noise for a possible ITR-468 volume monitor. I had the idea of creating some Analysis Engines, these would detect certain statistics and could send the data back to the program via a pointer in the Song structure, so things like spectrum analysis or volume levels. This is currently done separately, not using plugins.

Also, work on finalising track names, lengths etc., and more work on the cover. I'm not happy with the noise level of the main image, but it's hard to do much about it... the main option is to add more noise of a certain sort. Work finalising the cover is starting to delay progress. I've scored two more tracks too today, so 5 of the 13 Golden tracks are scored.

The first draft of the album is complete. Now, to listen to it and check everything. I can't spend much time on it and I'm keen to move on.

Golden Endings

More work on the final stages of The Golden Age. I put together 5 scores yesterday for 3 of the songs, and Peter came for his piano lesson. My mum asked if he could sing, that maybe he could become my vocalist - what a cheek! Such unwelcome and spontaneous commentary is usual for those known as my parents. It would be presumptuous, if not selfish to want to be loved or appreciated by one's family, who cares about that! As a child all I wanted was to be left alone, avoid their attacks. I spend and have spent great efforts in concealing everything I've done and do from them, an attitude that has irrevocably affected the way I deal with all other humans (my first art club used to hold it against me that I was hesitant to share my work with them, when hiding my work was purely due to shame and modesty, my deisre not to show off), but still they spy on my work to volunteer some critique. I console myself with the expectation that this is common, that no father would congratulate a son on a D.I.Y. job well done; a parent's raison d'etre is to point out flaws. I'm amazed that anyone could like their parents.

Today I've recorded the vocals for the last track, Rembrandt. It may benefit from some extra layers. I hate and will never use (and never have used!) any form of 'pitch correction' or 'auto-tune'. This (hopefully) makes my songs more emotionally expressive than the awful music I hear on the radio and television and, by and large, cannot stand. Real vocals benefit from lots of layers. I've tended not to like those either because they also mask emotional rawness, but there are many vocals in this album.

Today was mostly spent mastering, finalising the volumes. Generally I render everything to the first peak. This leads to music at about -16dB LUFS. LUFS is an odd standard of loudness. For this calculation, the bass of the song is cut off 37.5hz, frequencies over 1500hz are turned up, and the result measured. It seems to pay no attention to psychoacoustic effects, Fletcher–Munson curves etc. I've turned up my base volumes by 20% to bring them into the -14dB range, which is the Spotify standard and a nice level without being too harsh like the awful Bjork Utopia, or the less bad but still too-loud Blackstar by Bowie; but this is louder than most of my albums.

I've found and used a free LUFS meter, but I'll probably program my own at some point; not an LUFS meter but a better volume analyser just for me.

One other aspect of mastering is checking the overall EQ. Prometheus has an Spectrum Analysis option and I've made a 'standard candle' sort of set of levels which can be compared with my mix, to note if any frequencies are obscenely lacking or present. My ears aren't perfect and I check things though many speakers, as well as visually using tools like this and a separate spectrogram too. I've also made some tweaks to the cover art, which is now this...

With a bit more contrast and some dots. These final stages of an album take an age, but things are moving on. I'm full of ideas for albums, and need to make some other art. Time is short. Money is shorter at the moment. Blessings must be counted.

The Golden Age Tweaks

A better night, though woke late. A day of more tweaks and finalising work on The Golden Age. At these times of intense focus on one measly album I get frustrated, impatient and wonder why I'm doing it. The benefit is, partly, already conferred. There is no chance that the music will produce a 'hit' or make a big impact on the world, but some people will hear it, some may like the odd tune. These are the social rewards for art, but for me, the rewards are in learning new skills and in the very act of producing new work, which is the primary duty of all artists.

I'm pleased with many aspects of the album, however imperfect other aspects are. The project began because at the start of 2008 I wrote a few zany surrealistic songs about 17th century paintings, and I thought it was time to realise some of these rather than forever say that I'd written some once. That task is done.

The final details of mixing and mastering are to me the most tedious and anxious. It's easy to chase ghosts, unsure of what one wants. I listen to similar songs - balance this like that, but really, that's not right either, as each new work is its own. Recorded music has many standards to make it sound 'the same' but perhaps this restricts the art.

I'll keep tweaking and workin on it. even today, I added a few vocals to the Tycho Brahe song, and Rembrandt. Here is the track list (timings for the CD version, this is mostly like the stream one, but a few tracks segue into each other):

1. Welcome to my Gallery (03:59)
2. Franz Halz (03:11)
3. The Laughing Cavalier (01:48)
4. Girl Reading a Letter (02:29)
5. Autumn's Shadow (03:47)
6. Nature Morte (02:16)
7. Cotán (03:16)
8. Tycho Brahe the Noseless Astronomer (04:20)
9. The Lace Maker (01:36)
10. The Girl with the Pearl Earring (02:22)
11. Rembrandt (03:19)
12. The Legend of Zurbarán (03:56)
13. Art For Me (03:04)

Feeling Raw, Prometheus v3.06

Awoke late, very tired and feeling sore inside my throat and chest, this regular seasonal malaise. Is this exhaustion, or some infection? It started in April 2010 and then lasted for a devastating 18 months. It returns periodically, but I'm never sure if it's a physical or psychological condition; but then, to some extent, both are linked, so it makes little difference. Here, as with all illnesses, I prefer to eat normally and as healthily as possible, try to stay fit, relaxed, focused, and take no medications or indulgences. Medications can cause more harm than good and I'm suspicious of all of them and of all doctors, though of course I believe wholly in science and reject all new-age mumbo jumbo. Foul herbs and slimy, acidy moulds are not my idea of healthy food.

Anyway, I spent much of today upgrading Prometheus a little. One change I felt I had to make before mastering The Golden Age was a 'Render Hold' feature. This renders the song but holds off saving it for a while, cutting off the first x of time. This is useful because the Cathedral Limiter plugin is look-ahead, so imparts a gap (say 500ms) at the start of the song which normally needs chopping off. I added a few other features:

1. Delete instruments using/not using current instrument now deletes Tone events following the instrument too.
2. A new option to set all notes in a track to Middle C, useful for tidying click tracks (or percussion).
3. New Simple Modulator expand/contract in addition to the old Interpolated type. Interpolated interpolates: Abc to A?b?c. Simple simply doubles up (like 'nearest neighbour' image sampling): Abc to AAbbcc. Same with downsampling. Abcdef to AAccee or Abcde to AAcc, as the length is a simple half division. This is useful for 16/32/64 long modulators for noise or specific song tempo modulators.
4. Fix to song length millisecond calculation (which has been wrong for months/years).
5. A toggle to see latest vs previous render stats.

And lots of Code Analysis fixes of minor importance. I also published the Cycles & Shadows scores on itch.

I'm full of anxiety and energy, almost a desperation to do.

Shadows Scores, C++ Skeleton

An anxious night, full of energy and goals. I'd love to do moth this year, remaster albums like Cycles, which I can mix much more professionally these days. Plus, I'd love to remaster and release all of my old PC games! Arcangel, Roton, Martian Rover Patrol, Trax, Bool, Gunstorm, Gunstorm II, Firefly... I feel I can do it all but just this paragraph of ideas might take me all year!

I awoke late, already exhausted and my throat burning. I had hoped to do more work on The Golden Age, but started work on the remaining Shadows scores. I started with the String Quartet at the End of the Universe and added slurs to the strings.

Then to Flight of the Phoenix where I made two versions, an ensemble version for 10 parts, and one for a quintet. There's no markings for tempo, expression or slurs, but the notes are all there. I did have to make some adjustments, moving the occasional note up or down an octave to accommodate the 'real' instruments - the original was written for synthetic orchestra.

Then work on the remaining piano pieces: Doorways, Requiem for a Million Skin Cells, and Corridors of Nothing Menopause. These were first converted from MIDI sequence, and 'regimented' up in Prometheus, the hand edited in Sekaiju which was an essential step for lining up the notes into the correct groups. Then I split the sequence into two MIDI parts: low and high for the left and right hands, this made it much easier to import into MuseScore. All in all it's an efficient way to convert these very expressive (and very syncopated) piano pieces.

The timing is so odd, I wondered if there is a magical way that I could line them up with the bars, but it seems to be impossible without rewriting the music. Requiem for a Million Skin Cells is quite an amazing piece for this, it almost sounds latin/Cuban in its rhythm.

All of the tracks are now scored, 23 scores complete. I also found time to update my C++ game 'Skeleton' for Visual Studio 2022. This should make it easier to upgrade those old games... I want to but the workload is huge and the rewards almost zero - except that the games are now nowhere and vanished, and if that were to remain the case then they would be lost from the world and culture forever, and my years spent working on them for nothing. An artists job is making and showing artwork, but also documenting it and recording it in a secure manner because, sometimes, only that aspect will remain. Thus the documentation is part of the art itself, and sometimes the only part. Van Gogh's letters are as much his art as his paintings.

Any material reward for this work is as irrelevant as any other concerning art. Life's fundamental purpose is ordering and preserving information, and this principle is burned into the core of my being.

Cantus in Memoriam Score, ArtSwarm Boxes

Bah and sigh! A tedious and excruciating day scoring the piano part to Cantus in Memoriam Childhood from Shadows, but I've completed it in the end. The music is an odd mix of complex and simple, seemingly so simple (well, it was all improvised at the time) but the MIDI transcription was a complex gaggle of notes, and nothing, of course, was to time, so converting this involved a lot of juggling between Prometheus, then Sekaiju, then MuseScore, but, in the end, the basic notes were all notated. It will be an easier task to, if ever needed, add the strings and other parts. For a 10-year old track that's going nowhere, a full day of work is probably overkill, but I do ideally want to score all of my work, and this is good training for scoring other works.

I've generally like and have liked the Cycles & Shadows music, but listening now I can hear only the boominess and flaws in the mixing, as well as the haphazard production which, to my modern ears seems to have buried all of the best bits of the melody; but I remember that the whole process was a bold experiment at the time. The Love Symphony was earlier, and certainly more symphonic, but that was 100% sequenced, and this had a lot of live play. If the work of the past appears poor, it's because we have progressed. I can always and with ease remaster or re-record Cycles, and make it all much better, but new work must, of course, take priority.

I may pause with the scoring now to complete The Golden Age, and perhaps score that. As well as Cycles, I may tackle another, simpler, album too, perhaps The Modern Game.

In other news, I did some work on the next ArtSwarm event, making a poster and sending out initial invites. No response yet. It's odd that after my birthday event people were keen and excited for more, yet, a mere 6 weeks later and the response is decidedly muted. But, it's early days.

Cycles Scores

A full day of scoring the Cycles music. It's amazing how different some of the original live piano pieces were from the recorded versions, and I'm sure there were elements of improvisation making each performance unique and different from any score anyway. At least two of the six pieces are different tunes live vs. recorded, but the complexity varies wildly for the others. Now, I'm unsure which I prefer. Scoring Cycles VI took a lot of work, often staring at the MIDI notes and working note-by-note. This took about 6 hours to transcribe the 6 minutes of music. I knew this would be one of the most difficult.

There's a wild bit near the end I'll not bother notating; consider it a cadenza, but here it is for posterity:

So now I have scores for the six Cycles tracks, the recorded versions, and my original piano versions. Should I make those public too? I've nothing to lose, but a public publication needs to look good, be up to a certain standard, use the correct terms etc., in contrast to the scores I use and read, which can be any old thing just for me.

An odd thing happened to the computer. When sleeping and waking, it forgot to reactivate the USB sound card, which happens sometimes, but, unusually, I didn't restart the PC, but just slept it again. Later, on the second wake, it reactivated.

Another thing I did today was connect the MODX to re-record one of the new The Golden Age tracks, called Nature Mort, this is actually a live MIDI recording made during the Remembrance Service sessions. When I connected the USB I suddenly had new sound devices to record from and play to, too. One of the things that now 'works' on this new PC (the old one didn't).

There are a lot more tracks on Cycles & Shadows, so I'll start notating those. Shadows will be tricky to some extent, but these tunes are broadly unstructured and improvisatory, so I hope and will assume that automatic conversion will suffice.

I can't afford to waste months of my life notating my music, but it feels good to have some firm copies, and I will, when I legitimise my media empire, publish it all correctly. This process makes me appreciate it more, even the music seems old, simplistic, and too easy, to me now.

Cycles Notation

A super-busy day of notation for the Cycles album. One odd thing about this is that the recorded version not as good as the live piano version, party because my technology back then was different. I'd been playing live piano more and more and this was my most sophisticated performance to date, a veritable piano sonata of six movements, yet I'd not recorded much piano. The Anatomy of Emotions was captured live and plan, but I wanted more for this, adding strings, making more of a concerto sound. I had to program lots of new MIDI code into Prometheus, and over the 10 years since have made a lot of changes and improvements to it. The more recent Music of Poetic Objects album was a step forwards, but to some extent, the first good album using the piano plus 'virtual orchestra' technique was Salomé which I've just completed.

Anyway today I looked again at the piano music and have noted it, both the actual piano versions I played live, and piano versions of the recorded versions. Often, the composition was better on the recordings, but not always... I think Cycles IV (Decay, originally called Nightrest) was better.

Today I completed the scores for Cycles I. This involved a flute/strings section which was scored with the help of a Prometheus export. Then Cycles III, which was largely complete. Then Cycles IV, both version. Cycles II, however, was an improvisation, not much like the actual live version, which could vary wildly. I've programmed a few tools for transcribing this gaggle of MIDI data, look:

The 6 lowest tracks, the scatter of red dots, are the actual piano notes. The upper track of red has the same notes merged, and the orange track is merged a bit to group any chords together. Then I manually type the orange dots. They should form a 'regular' timing, to tell the sequencer where the beats are. After that, I pull the notes to the closest orange dot, then 'regiment' the notes, like shoving them all to the left to make them regular.

It doesn't work completely, but it can be used to notate some very complex and freely expressive music in a way that would take hours by hand and ear. It still takes hours, but fewer hours.

February Filing, Album Tweaks

A first of the month, so a monthly backup day. Then, more album work with harmony vocals for The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but generally the album feels close to complete.

I've started work on the digital lyrics book, and will start tomorrow on notating Cycles & Shadows. For each new album I aim to notate one or two older ones plus the new one. The workload of notating and publishing the music would be too high for most musicians in my situation, but my programming skills allow me to export the music directly from Prometheus and import it into MuseScore, though of course, there's little value in this work in the short term, but for me, record keeping is a key part of life and of art.

The money situation looks rather bleak this month and this year, but this only makes art more important and each hour of each day more precious.

I've been thinking today on my older songs too. I have The Joey Deacon Song, The Incomplete Version of the Writer, Written on Rice, and perhaps 15 other songs from 10 years or more ago which are 90% sequenced and easy to finish and release; but what to do with these old creatures which bare no resemblance to my current work? I listened to a Kate Bush track yesterday called The Empty Bullring which sounded like a song from her earliest years, a Kick Inside-era demo which is a delightful era and style, and perhaps this B-side was just that. I'm reminded how useful the B-Side is, or was.