More work on The Dusty Mirror scores today. A humbling experience today. Working on 'I'm Falling Apart Again', 'The Escape Angels', and 'Cherries' - all of which I rather liked a the time, today only reminds me how much better I am at singing now and how these need re-recording; but I know this, and such realisations are good. Sometimes we look back on our achievements only to see how far we've come. Four years is a long time.
These were a lot of work, partly because of the free-form nature of the playing, which was not to time and difficult to map. I'd sequence these differently now, starting with control, then loosening things later; this partly because of lessons learnt during this scoring process; there's no inherent flaw in free-form recording, but it massively hinders scoring and control can aid the structure of a composition. It is no coincidence that Bach made the most sophisticated structures, it was because of the constraints of the scoring process and 'emotionless' instruments (harpsichord and pipe-organ and their lack of expressive quality).
I've re-written several parts and the sheer tunelessness of the vocals became stark. Perhaps this is fine when freely invented on the spot, anything, one could say, is 'correct' in improvisation, but there are times when a melody is needed, and even improvisations can be scored. My improvised piano tunes were scored, and often were surprisingly well structured. This is not the case with these vocals because my pitch tracking and sense was not good enough, this is not instinctive in the way it is for me with an instrument. For some, like those in 'The Escape Angels', the vocals are more like acting or spoken; this is fine.
If (when?) I re-record these, I'll have a lot of work on these unstructured tracks to try to make them neat, and I'll probably completely remake Falling Apart. The tunes with regular rhythm, the pop-like ones, will be much easier.
Only one track left, 'The Fingers of Evil'. This will be another difficult one.
