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.
