Yesterday, dropped off the 20x20 paintings to Castle Park. I discovered that the paltry £20 sales were handled on a first-come first-served basis and that work would be taken off the wall as soon as sold, explicitly due to the laziness of the volunteer accountant who cannot be bothered with the workload of processing sales at the end if the exhibition! This is an awful situation. Not only forced to sell for a ridiculously cheap amount (anyone who bought a painting could instantly resell it online for double or five times as much) and then denied the chance to show them off. They may not even be on the walls for the artist's preview evening, which is two days after the opening date. Sigh - well I'm happy to have painted the works, even if nobody sees them. I was hoping that my parents might visit to exhibition and see them, as they haven't seen these yet. The Castle Park volunteers did make it clear that this was a first, experimental, exhibition and that the terms will evolve and may change in future.
The volunteers were friendly and helpful, I must stress. They were trying to persuade me to join the Northwich art group, though I have no way of getting there, never mind being an active part of a group based there. I've been to the Northwich VAC at least once with Lindsey, but I've probably only been to Northwich a couple times in my life due to the poor transport connections. The backwards economy of Britain is primarily due to it's exceptionally poor transport system. Even today, in the 21st century, it's impossible to go from major rail-hub Crewe to major city Manchester in the evening and hope to find a single train back. The trains are probably as bad as, or worse than, they were in the days of steam, and the buses are probably worse now than in 1925 too.
Today, have done more admin on The End And The Beginning album, including finalising the sheet music, preparing to add the album to my website, preparing the catalogue entry etc. Then work on The Flatspace Soundtrack remaster. This is relatively simple musically, primarily a matter of bass balancing.
One problem is that it includes about 25% of The Spiral Staircase, in this case the old 2002 version. This means I can now replace it with the 2008 version, but that I have to remaster that too. One problem here is that the original sequences were coded as one giant track, when I really should have numbered them one number per track, as with any other album. So my first task was to recode those 15 sequences, and update The Spiral Staircase filing to match. Apart from this, the differences between the old version and the remaster is that bass balancing, 24-bits vs. 16-bit undithered for the originals, adjustment of final volume levels, and good quality limiting rather than hard clipping. Those old reverbs had no bass cut, the whole of the old album was 'boomy' compared to my new mixes, but generally the difference is not particularly audible for this remaster.
My next step is to create the sheet music for these, which I will start on immediately. Time is short. Vita brevis.
