More of a restful day yesterday spent with Deb, a much needed pause from the endless rock-rolling, but I can't afford to pause. I managed to complete the SPDF sheet music, but also started on a possible remaster of the album artwork. I can't even remember if I had original artwork from 2001 or so, but I did burn one or two CD copies, so I must have. If so it would have looked like the 2008 300dpi version I made for the digital release, here:
In 2020 I decided to include my image on more album covers, so created a new cover, the current one at time of writing:
But I rather like the look of the first, so have recreated it in the new standard resolution of 635dpi (the new size requirements of 3000x3000px was one inspiration to create it):
This was rather tricky. The 2008 cover used a procedural texture created by Genetica, but that's lost, so I had to create a new one. This took most of the time. Re-rendering the logo at higher resolution was easier, but it's slightly compressed compared to before. I'm undecided what to do with it yet, but while on the subject of Arcangel, I decided to transcribe the music for the complex title track 'Mnemonic'. This has seven parts at least (I've ignored the drums and orchestral hits, which are musically superficial and easy to add later). Each of those parts play a different arpeggio or melody, but the track is musically extremely simple; all A-minor, G-Major, F-Major. My standard chords of the day.
I may transcribe the other few tracks soon (and will certainly do so eventually, this is a primary goal). It seems that the MED export will work fine.
One other job today was creating a full-screen video of a simple loop for YouTube, a sort of analogue of the Spotify Canvases. If this works then I'll do it for all of the We Robot tracks, as it's quite easy to do once the Spotify loops are done. Those may be time consuming as I've no graphical material to draw upon. Unlike The Golden Age, I've not created a full suite of album artwork.
Now I'm tired and feel ever beaten by the galley drummer, the whip of the guards ever driving, but I remain full of a deeper energy. I want to complete so much, both neaten and re-record older albums, now that I can massively improve their quality. My skills are better than ever before. New art would be wonderful, and represents the ultimate goal of every artist, but I must also both promote existing art, and file and enhance existing art - that latter requirement a new one for the music age. Painters never really 'improve' their old canvases.
I have sheet music to transcribe, and older albums to remaster or re-record. The remasters of Synaesthesia and The Infinite Forest were superb, huge improvements over the old versions and were easily worth it. The remasters of Animalia and Tree Of Keys were less useful. The Dusty Mirror is but 3 years old yet I can do (sing, and produce vocals in particular) far better now... but even so, it might be better to wait rather than rush-in there. Next for me, is work on Cycles & Shadows. I've made a lot of technical improvements since 2017.
I'm aware that my time, my life, my money, everything I have, is running out. When I pause I feel the cold breath of approaching doom, but I must do my best and work quickly and efficiently; hard and indefatigably, and doing the best I can, to make everything the best it can be. On we march. On we charge.
