Marius Proof

The Marius book is now complete, my plan is that it will cost £8 without the CD, £8 for a plain CD (the same price as a download), and £20 for the book and CD combined when ordered from me.

The final job is to finalise the music and I've re-recorded the Life Beyond Mars vocals today, these are much better than before. There are many pitch inaccuracies and cringe-worthy parts in the vocals, but monitoring this can be seen as a sign of progress. It is the emotional expression that matters. I've recorded a few takes of the vocals for Two Kinds of Animals but the first take with its gentle, story-telling tone still sounds best of all. I must avoid Sibeliusness and move on rather than waste so much time on trifles.

I feel ill with my usual stomach pain and the stress of endless jobs, the joyous desire to do so much yet not having enough time or space. Now I must try to master the music and order the discs. If this format works artistically I will probably make more albums like it. I already have two ideas in mind and already in progress.

The next job of the month must be to start on my clown/circus poetry book.

London tomorrow to collect work from the Mall Galleries. I will put on a suit and visit to the Science Museum afterwards to wow visitors with my art.

Stockport and Discerning Eye

Back from collecting So, How Have You Been? from Stockport. Notified that none of my four entries for the Discerning Eye were selected. Disappointed, but I know I won't be alone, that there were many entries and that there are large elements of chance in any competition. Here is Home Life, one of the entries.

For me, more emotional and detailed than the Napoleon painting which was chosen in a past year. I have slowed down substantially in painting in recent years, yet I feel more able, a better painter and more filled with new ideas than ever. This year I've painted the Ekphrastic Triptych and a commission in the 'symphonic' style, that's all. Perhaps painting holds less appeal when I have so much existent work around me.

It's odd how different and imperfect this old work looks to me. I really need to paint endlessly, overtake the old work with startling and staggeringly better work, but I need more time and space for this, and perhaps a greater incentive than to merely up the average quality of my back catalogue.

Music Progress and Old CDs

Lots of little jobs yesterday, finalising the images and layout of the book. Here's one of the last images I created, taken in the daylight and manipulated:

The final stages seem to take forever and there's often an emotional lull as a project nears completion. What usually fills this vacuum is the excitement of future things and I'm already feeling inspired with new ideas. There's so much music itself I could do, or other book work, or paintings. One of the problems with art can be its freedom.

One other of yesterday's jobs was to modify my website to allow several products on sale per page. For example, each album or painting has an option to buy, but this project might have the normal jewel cased CD for sale, plus a plain CD without any packaging, plus the book with CD included, so that's three things. My paintings sometimes have separate prints, so there's already some functionality for more than one item per thing, but it's a bit clunky. A database that covers paintings, music, and books will always have some degrees of overlap. The key is to make it as neat and flexible as possible without making it too difficult to understand.

I made those changes yesterday, and also listed a few old CD albums for sale on there. I have one or two copies left of these old albums. I can't exactly remember selling any, but I seem to have got through them. I noticed that The End and The Beginning is selling for £25 or so on Discogs. This album was/is a limited print run of 20, like most of my pre-Love-Symphony releases, so these CD-R albums are rarities. The newer, commercially replicated, albums are better in quality. The earliest albums; The Arcangel Soundtrack, Synaesthesia, The Incredible Journey, The Spiral Staircase (2002), Animalia and Flatspace, had a single-sided A4 sheet as insert, so had only one and a half pages to its 'booklet'. After that, I printed the tray and 4-page booklet commercially but used a CD-R for the music: The Spiral Staircase (2008), Stupid Computer Music, The End And The Beginning, The Twelve Seasons, The Infinite Forest. Pi and Flatspace II have never had CD versions (like a few other albums to date, like Tree of Keys). After The Love Symphony, all of the albums are professionally replicated and printed. This year's Music of Poetic Objects is the first with an 8-page booklet and I'll probably use those from now on because, as I've always done, I want the best quality I can, and to include as much artistic content as possible.

I'm also organising the next ArtSwarm Live event, for September 28th. There have already been a few cancellations due to various factors. I hope that I can find the required 20 people to pay for the room, but if not this will be the last such event. So much has been learned from this, and the regular setting up of a big sound system, control of stage lighting, the skills of performing and of putting on a show; these are really useful.

A lot of this month is delivering or collecting art, as the summer exhibition season draws to a close. I really need some sort of regular place to show my paintings, something which, in 15 years of painting, I've rarely had; just 18 months or so with my work in a small Chester gallery called Silver Star. My paintings did well enough there. Today, collecting from the Stockport Open.

I'm eager to finish this book and music. I'm thinking of calling the result a 'folio album'. There needs to be some new name for it I think, rather than just 'book'. I've also made a start on my circus/clown poems.

Onward.

The Games Played As Children

The words to the Marius Fate B-Side, a poem.

The games played as children that bend the pipes of our minds into strange contortions of curious agony, setting the maze of knots for our mice to run, searching for comfort.

More Book Work

A good day in London delivering work to the Discerning Eye on Friday. Spent yesterday working on the Marius Fate book, developing lots of new graphics for it. Most of the tracks have an image, so I've needed to make up lots of new images. Here is the image for 'Beginnings'.

Have also recorded more vocals for 'Looking For A Lover', which I'm happier with. The key element is to tell a story. Here, the voice is like a shady character in an alley or something, at first, then explodes into something more impassioned.

Have spent most of today filming a video for 'Corridors of Nothing Menopause' from Cycles & Shadows. I had the idea of a simple black and white video in a smoky room, with me playing piano. It didn't quite work out that way as the piano is very complex and unpredictable on that track. It's also very difficult to get the lighting right without a camera person.

The other main job today was preparing ArtSwarm. Filming for that will take place tomorrow. Seven videos are in this Children's Games episode. I'm pleased with my contributions here and will aim to make my best work for the remaining three episodes.

Slow Day

A slow and low day, feels like a tired retreat from summer, not helped by the turmoil in the country caused by the politicians. We are intelligent beings at the mercy of idiots. Only the Lords seem to exhibit any sense. Their eternal heredity should be restored at once, with the odd reform.

Have started the Marius Fate book but I feel I need more content, more artistic content. I'll at least include some imagery. I've been investigating the best way to include a CD. Most of today was spent on little admin duties: a few words about a book for a forthcoming publication by Oxford University Press, some new game graphics now required by Steam, train ticket collection.

I'm unhappy with the music and must keep working on the vocals. Looking For a Lover varies from my favourite to least favourite track. I must keep trying. Nothing is perfect, and our own judgement isn't either. Future work will always tend to get better. I must remember Sibelius; his 20 years of working on his 8th symphony only to burn it (it was probably fine). Do my best and push on.

I invented a cocktail the other day: one part Chambord, one part Rose's lime cordial, three parts soda water, and ice. It's called an ice pop because it tastes exactly like one.

Tonight I had an idea for a new version of A Christmas Carol and the idea excites me.

Off to London tomorrow to deliver paintings for judgement at the Discerning Eye. The marvelous Tim Rice is apparently a judge this year.

Music and Poetry, and Art Attack

Onwards I must charge! I'm feeling that this music is completed, but I know that no matter how good I think it is, or how happy or unhappy I am with it, it is the world I must convince to give it a try, which is always the hard part. First; here is the final cover. I needed to change the Marius Fate text so I signed his name in ink and converted it to a spline form using Inkscape.

I feel I'm getting to the end of this long project, and this means a withdrawal and sadness. The hard work is over, and I'm starting to think "what is this all for?" but then, isn't that the case with all art? I love art because it is the ultimate challenge: social, technical, mental, spiritual, physical. Artist is the ultimate profession because it is you alone and your abilities, however great, however small, doing your best at any subject you choose, and normally doing something rejected by the rest of society. It is the very abstract nature, the very freedom, of it that gives us the chance to prove and do something extraordinary, something that nobody has thought of doing, or that nobody would ever consider doing. The best of art is what others consider mad, strange, obscure, pointless, and it is this very factor that makes it magical, because we have chosen to excel at something unique.

Art is the ideal training of mind, soul, body, and will, because all of these things are needed. To be creative we must be alone, because creativity is necessarily individual. We must have discipline and conviction; enough humility to improve ourselves, but enough empathy to do something that others will see truth in. Truth, yes, it is our truth in our work, and this personal honesty that is the vital ingredient. The only morality is honesty, and this is the target of every artist: to prove this honesty, and in craft this is done by putting in a seemingly ridiculous amount of time, effort and care into something. It is perhaps for this reason that art is like prayer, a meditation on being and the fundamental purpose of life itself. Like a quest for a supreme god; art is a quest for an abstract perfection.

The Modern Game is nearly complete, and now I'm working on a book for it. In this digital world it is physical things that are special. It's also time I put together my circus themed poetry collection. Poetry is truly the hardest art form. All poets seems to think that they are the truest of all artists, being a poet is almost an egomaniacal disease, but perhaps this is because poetry appears to be so easy when it is this very accessibility that makes it the hardest of all art forms. The best poets I know don't rate their work, the poets that talk the most are the worst. I want my poetry collection to push some boundaries, but won't spend too much life essence on it. Greater masterpieces are at hand.

My art seems to be a clutter of old work; old, poor things that I need to clear out to move on. I know I can do so much better now, in all fields, than ever before. I must, and will do this, carefully and with due focus.

The Trees and Modern Game Music

A few busy days. First, listed Masculinity Two on my website and Cornutopia Music, and updated the main pages to highlight these, then sent the music plus a short bio to Manchester-based Tariff Street Radio, submitted the track to BBC Introducing, created a listing for the single on Musicbrainz, then registered the track with the PPL database. All of this is part of the necessary paperwork for music registration.

Then, more work on some of the remaining music on the album. I've not listened to it in weeks, and the break was really useful in pulling the 'bandages of false' hearing off, allowing me to hear the music afresh again. A few more changes were needed. First I decided to try some new vocoder sections to Lookin' For A Lover which gives the track a wonderful 70s disco feeling. I really love this track now. It was always one of my favourite tracks, and a good candidate for a second single, or video highlight.

The track that needed and needs the most work was The Trees. It was always a strange track, with a mood of fear, something very rare in music. It follows a structure of four parts; a slow glowing in chords that cycle through complex fifths, yet the drone-like lead vocals fixate on G, making everything sound strange and discordant, angular like a lost child stuck in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This builds up to a climax and a powerful chorus in G-major. This was originally the finale, but this dis off to a quiet piano solo, as though we fall asleep to drift among the trees, lost in some comforting dream. After a minute or so, the solo fades away to repeat the climactic part again, but the music now overwhelms the screaming vocals, suffocating them with many melodies like a tangle of branches. The song ends with a second climax, a dead stop inspired by Sheer Heart Attack by Queen.

The Trees is the most complex track on the album, and one of the least like pop music, perhaps because it is the least overtly pleasant. Other tracks like the minimalist The Stars or Notes From Space are also rather unconventional, but still rather pleasant and the sound fits with the rest of the album more neatly than The Trees.

The Trees has been a challenge to put together, taking many months and many revisions, all because of the strange combination of changing, naturalistic mood and tempo; a lead melody that doesn't match any tempo or backing melody at all, and all sorts of reasons. I'm not really sure if this track is finished yet. This is the one track that persuaded me to pull the original recording of the album and re-record it. At some point, I'll have to say 'enough!' and move on. It is now the last bit of music left to do.

One other thing I've done over the weekend is convert and upload two new videos to the Mark Sheeky Music channel, converting Sabine Kussmaul's videos for The Anatomy of Emotions to accompany some music from that album. The track I liked most from the original performance was called The Stars (named Starscape on the album), but I've chosen the two opening tracks for videos; Passages of Movement (which has been combined with Tim Watson's vocals) and Memory. Both will premiere on the channel over coming weeks. All premieres take place at 8pm on Thursdays.