A good and full day. The final volume setting stage of finishing the album audio, the angst over the mixing now over. I'm so pleased to have developed my Cathedral Limiter! It makes this stage painless, if not actually joyful. Volume levels are something of a contentious issue. A level of -14dB LUFS is a de-facto standard, as the giant Spotify imposes this. Many CDs have louder levels, though a plain analogue recording limited to a simple peak, like classical music, like a CD from the 1980s or early 1990s would be a quiet -19dB or so. My beloved (again) Hounds Of Love is around this. I can't say I've ever noticed or cared, and I generally prefer the sound of these older discs. Music that's too loud or flat bothers me more. As I've said my times, I can't bear to listen to Björk's Utopia as it's mastered so badly.
I've made my music about 14dB or a little louder. One other reason for limiting is 'headroom', giving some space between the highest peaks and a technical maximum. It's possible for volumes to go over the max during playback, so headroom can actually improve sound quality, depending on the quality of the playback equipment. My Cathedral keeps everything sounding great.
Anyway it was enjoyable to set the final levels. I listened to each track and checked the lyrics too. One query I had was about the phrase "A.I." - and how to write it. Is seems that 'AI' is normal, as with CD for Compact Disc. CD has almost become a word in itself, but one pronounced as though it were initials. I suspect that if CD or AI were pronounceable, they would be words by now. Anyway, this means that my final tracks, for the CD version, are:
1. Do You Know Where Your Heart Is? (03:09)
2. We Are the Damaged (04:00)
3. Joy from a Machine Code Perspective (01:11)
4. Robot (02:45)
5. AI and Celebrity (04:57)
6. My Baby’s Non-Binary (03:46)
7. Fake Plastic Lies (03:11)
8. Mothmoon (02:42)
9. Life as a Robot Guard (02:03)
10. P-L-Astic (02:49)
11. I Think You Love Me (03:38)
12. Where Is Love? (03:46)
13. Flight Over Rust City (03:49)
14. Silicon Carbon Genesis (03:07)
15. Android Heaven (01:16)
16. Someone Else’s AI (01:22)
The lettering in P-L-Astic was an issue too. Should it be "P L Astic"? or "P. L. Astic"? In the end I was inspired by Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and kept the hyphens which were part of the title.
For the art, it's mostly done, but I've decided, unusually, not to create the full 8-10 pages of CD booklet artwork, not until I need to print a CD. I can use the time to work on videos or the sheet music, the lyric boxes etc.
This is my best album from a technical perspective, and from a performance perspective, and as good as any other from an art perspective. I feel empowered and ready to create more, thought this has taken me months of ups and downs and is likely to be as obscure and ignored as all of my music work is at this time. I know that this is the usual case for art, though, at most stages of most artists' careers, historically. Lack of attention doesn't make the artwork less valid, but more important. Still, many of these songs have hit potential. If, one day, I'm a music superstar, rememeber this obscure blog post and know that it all started here (well, 24 years ago, then here).
On we charge!
