Well the day had flown. I've worked since 8:30 and yet don't feel like I've done much. I started by buying some potential accoutrements for future music performances - costume is a key part of all live performance; then looked up video sizes and notated the current standards for various platforms in my video text index. I made a (very) short edit of Christmas Smells for one of these videos, but haven't done a thing on the actual video.
Then I looked up my paintings of the year and added them to my website, but their poor look reminded me why my painting in 2023 ground to a halt. The image quality is just not good enough, the colours garish and odd. It was this that made me spend 2 or 3 months making a new lighting rig which I've still not used. My paintings from 2022 and 2023 really need re-photographing. This should only take a week, however.
I then deleted the now dead links to my digital art as listed on Society6. They have changed their 'plan' and now only 10 images are permitted. This means that about 90 images, almost all of my digital art, have been deleted and are now no longer available to purchase as prints or posters. Nobody purchased any, but had they done so, they would now have a digital rarity. This fact made me feel ignored by the world; but then, people generally are, and even the famous are forgotten in a flash. Florence Lawrence was once the world's most famous person. Now she is as anonymous as most of the Roman Emperors, never mind the serfs.
My big job of the day was preparation for my live music events, a main monthly goal, so I created some single-sheet scores. I decided to have only one 'live' score for each work. I've made a few before, but these often evolve into highly redacted mnemonics. As I learn a piece better and better, I only need fragments, but I don't want to keep all of the steps along the way, so I decided to keep copies in each 'event' folder, but just one best copy in the scores folder, otherwise I'll have lots of 'Live' scores, which are only ever intended for temporary personal use.
So, I cut down the music for the songs I am to perform, then created some test instruments on the MODX, an interminable task. It took an absolute age to design an instrument for 'Do You Know Where Your Heart Is?', but I managed that and performed the song once, then performed 'Silicon-Carbon Genesis' too, which was fun and relatively easy to play on piano. AI and Celebrity, however, was as complex and nightmarish as ever. It can be played to piano in a slow and moody way, but I think, for the Macclesfield show, I'll largely sing it to a fill backing track, play an intro and the solo only, thus duplicating the method used for Christmas Smells.
Then I listed the Artistic Echoes event, and the Crewe Library event on Songkick.
Nigel Stonier sent his music track this evening too, a lovely song. I also listened to Mick Masser's last single release, Nothing Matters, which is also a lovely song, and could easily be a big hit, if, for example, it should appear in an advert.
I'm entering a quieter time, the work on this album is closing. I need a better plan for 2024. Success is dynamism, a roller-coaster, and I need to add some more ups.
One last job of today was looking at the We Robot album art. This is my first album in over a decade where I've made 4 pages rather than 8 for the 'CD booklet', but I may actually press some CDs. I feel I must at some point. I'll certainly press some of the 2024 Cycles & Shadows remaster, of course, and make a new video for the new Cycles III recording. That is a certain part of early 2024.
