Had a talk with Nigel Stonier last night; he was speaking with Deb and expressed interest in the album project. He has a track ready and I'd be honoured to have him on the album. He is still very much recovering physically from the Words & Music Festival.
The day began with first receiving Mick Masser's song, then designing a poster for the live music event to be held in Crewe Library. The event is a veritable mish-mash. It was originally the launch of Deborah's new poetry book, but music performances from the Christmas album were added, then an open mic poetry section to draw more of a crowd, and provide an alternative outlet for any musicians who might be unable to perform their songs.
We (as Fall in Green) have performed for the past two winters there, so this is, sort of and in a very loose way, this year's Christmas event, though much more of a group event, which pleases me. These shows are a lot of work.
Then, admin work on the album, filling in Mr Stonier with details, then some Prometheus programming, now to a final v3.23. I decided to add an 'analysis only' option which scans the song but doesn't save it out. This is useful to track the spectrum of a track without saving out its massive wav file. Now I can render 'WAV' (the plain song), 'Stats' (song and statistics file, the classic 'Stats' option), or 'Analyse' which is just the statistics file.
After that, I worked on a lyric video for Christmas Smells. It's a bundle of joy, The whole video bounces and rocks to the music in a manner very like my ancient dream did to the song 'I Love You for Your Money' - the dream song that got me started with song writing 20 years-or-so ago.
One thing I wanted in the video was the next line to be there, waiting to move into place at the right time. As a singer, I want to be ready for the next line, and I remember well the wonderful bouncing ball in the old Ghostbusters game on the Commodore 64 - this was so good! And it too showed the next line. A ball would have been a lot of work, but lining up the next line wasn't too hard, and I made the words dance left and right to the music like see-saws.
The solos are blue-sky flights into snowflakes. I could have perhaps added more snow. It's quite hard to select and process very large numbers of tracks. Even here there are 80 tracks of snowflakes (and so 80 flakes at any one time). They are relatively easy to control but hard to select and view all 80. I wonder if I can somehow 'fold' them together?
The video took about 4 hours, not bad for its complexity, though the amount of work, mental calculation, and typing I had to do made me think that 95% of people simply couldn't do it. Argus might perhaps be just too complex for public use. Then again, Yamaha made the MODX public, and its interface seems to have been designed by paranoid ants.
Tomorrow I'm dropping off paintings to the Macc Art Lounge in Macclesfield, my first foray in visual art in a while. I love painting, but it's almost impossible to make progress as a visual artist, and I'm very socially isolated from the visual arts. I've probably not spoken to another visual artist since I was last in the Macc Lounge two years ago (no - wait! There was David Jewkes, ah and my brilliant but doomed first mural design).
I must urgently practise my live music performances. This was a key monthly goal and I've not done a thing on it.
Onwards to glory we charge.
