Artists Don't Die, Prometheus Bug Hunting

Watched the Concert for George (Harrison) on Television. Reminded that artists don't die, they just change medium.

Prometheus crashed for the first time in over a week yesterday, this rare bug is so annoying. I've added a tracker. It

// Error trap: S0
    reportadd("S0");
// This will tell the playing/recording/rendering thread to stop as they operate while(playing)
    playing=0;
    globalerrorinstop=-1;
// Error trap: S1
    reportadd("S1");
// Wait for thread to finish
    if (waitforthreadtofinish)
        while (inplaythread)
            waitforafewmillisecs();
// Error trap: S2
    reportadd("S2");


Oddly, there are times when S0 appears in the report, followed by S2, but not S1. The thread is running at this point, so perhaps priorities in the file saving mean that internal thread called of reportadd are stopping it. The crash occurs between S1 and S2, so it must be in the thread, but oddly almost nothing in the thread seems to be running. My best guess is that the deallocation of the thread itself is causing the crash, so perhaps a memory leak or overrun elsewhere. Lack of stack? That shouldn't ever cause a crash as Windows handles allocation here. The crash only occurs when stopping, never playing, so the internal parts of the thread should be stable.

Recorded some vocals for Hitler in High Heels. Accidentally saved over the take when I clicked on a 'Save Changes?' dialogue. So annoying. SoundForge is great but has some really annoying parts. It creates stereo or mono blank files irrespective of the contents of the copy buffer. It also never remembers the filename of a new, pasted wave, even when saved, always keeps it as unsaved new, so any closing of the files askes for confirmation when they HAVE been saved. This is why accidents occur. Endlessly clicking on unwanted pop-ups.

Always In The Morning, Passive Aggressive Guitars

Awake for most of the night with stomach pain. Started to sequence Always In The Morning, this has a complex staircase of chords which end on the minor version of the major starting point, rather interesting. This will be a long haul. I seem to spend many hours just getting the feeling and notation of the bass-line right. Each part should be a voice, like a person, given generously to and expressing their moment. I will also add more; the music must be bigger, more ambitious, more varied, more personal; clearly and overtly better than before.

I also recorded some guitar parts for Passive Aggressive. So much recording (apart from vocals) is relatively new; I've come a huge way since Burn of God, a mere 18 months ago. I think I need to plan everything in advance and name the parts, this will make the record keeping easier. Of course, it takes time and experience to know what is wanted before experiments. To some extent, experiments do drive creativity, happy accidents, new and exciting things, and this necessarily takes time and is inefficient. In all great artworks a lot is thrown away.

I saw Simon in the afternoon.

I'm tired and feel weak after being unable to eat. May complete watching Cinema Paradiso with Deb tonight.

Emotion in the Creative Process

You need to switch your emotions on very sensitively to analyse your artwork, tell you what is right and wrong. At other times emotions are not useful. Most of the job of making art should be mechanical and based on practicality. The creative process should be broken down into rational steps of what needs doing.

Di-Bla-Oh

Exhausted today, headachey and burning inside with tiredness after a full day working at my sequencer. Have been working on a song called Di-Bla-Oh Di-Bla-Eh, trying to inject feeling and mood into it; this is very time consuming and difficult, but good progress has been made. The days are flying by, my path is measured in bytes accumulated by a careful and difficult crawl.

Passive Aggressive Production, Aesthetic Mana

The days and hours are flying by as I work non-stop on music production and song writing. My songs are taking as much time and work as a painting now, many days each, but they sound better than ever as a result. Recorded music is a strange medium for me to focus on, unprofitable in this epoch of humanity and I have no plans of performing these live (though I could). Still, I'm very pleased with the results and am growing. I wrote a new song in the night, a very simple rock song called Be My Jesus, and today finalised the words to a second song which moved me deeply as I wrote it, called Always In The Morning. At some point I'll have to stop writing new songs and focus on producing the existing ones.

I've spent today transcribing the recent compositions (I typically write words by hand late at night, and record vocal melody snippets, then type these up in the day), then working on the production of Passive Aggressive, which is a fast swung song, but has a very gentle part in the middle on strings (the essential contrast). The timing here is very important. The enemy of feeling is the regularity of the metronome and the sequencer, but everything is a balance. Prometheus gives me a lot of control over timing now, even so much as permitting a manual regular 'tap' throughout the song to set the meter, if I need to do this.

In the night I had an insight into the purpose and goals of art. I considered when art was used in pre-history, by humans untainted by behavioural rules. Costume, dance, body painting, wall painting... making masks and sculptures... all of these were made for magical or spiritual ritualistic reasons. These objects were magical things, special items that connected mankind with the gods and the deeper, hidden, universe. I connected this insight with my feelings about good art having a special and powerful feeling, like the music I mentioned in my last post. It made me think that this certain property, ethereal in description but completely tangible when experienced, was a measure of something like magical power. I assigned the variable of mana for this power, the statistic used for magical energy in Dungeons and Dragons.

Artworks that have this property, that are high in mana, whether a painting, a piece of music or poem, are like rivets in the fabric of the universe, special artefacts that attract attention in an almost magical way. In a way, this can identify masterpieces, things we feel are instantly 'good'. We instrinsically know what is good or bad artistically; the good art moves us... due to it's authenticity, or beauty, or something else... it emits a special energy and this is my concept of aesthetic mana.

This idea also made me aware of the importance of dance as an artform, which is often relegated now. Of course, to ancient peoples, even animals like birds, dance is a very important art. The same with costume, vital to ancient peoples, but now a secondary art to visual arts, music, literature.

My concepts are worthy of a book. It will have to wait.

Song Fire, Passive Aggressive

I'm on creative fire at the moment and writing and producing lots of songs. My goal in all art is to be better than I've done before, and work at things until I manage this. With these songs this is already the case, but they will take many weeks. I work a lot, make a lot, for this reason. The speed of improvement is proportional to the quantity made. I won't compromise and rush things out, unless an urgent deadline demands it.

I've spent a lot of today on the production of the 'Stay Inside Got To Hide' song (it probably won't be called this, there is no hook line despite many good lyrics). The songs uses acoustic guitar so I've played a few more loops and worked on the sound. The panning caused consternation; I decided to pan the guitar quite hard right but have an echo on the far left, but this still sounded a little too strong on the right ear. No vocals recorded for any song so far, but the production on all of them is marching on.

I started the production of a new song called Passive Aggressive which is swung and very bluesy and jazzy. At first the drums were all jazz 3/4 time, but I pulled them back to rock and roll. The general sound of the song is something like Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love, with nods to Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up and that sort of song, but my melody is more minor and sinister. I have an idea of using an acoustic chord on the word 'Passive', and electric chord on 'Aggressive'.

I must remember the dramatic tension and key feeling - this is always the vital element in any artwork: painting, music, poetry. When you experience it, it should move you instantly - you must think 'wow'. Of course, this is every artists' goal. Listening to George Harrison's 'Something' today reminded me that this song has exactly this. Beethoven's 5th Symphony or Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D-minor has it too.

This evening I've written another song, a tribute to Paul McCartney. Perhaps the watching a recent John Lennon documentary of Sky Arts has done this but The Beatles keep coming into my head.

Stay Inside Got To Hide

Very inspured and filled with idas for this music. A sleepless night last night resulted in a few more lyrics - I find the early hours in bed the best time to write these, which are later edited and typed up. I've revived two songs from last year and finished the writing.

I've been working on the full production to one today, a Dylan-esque folk song about the fear of social-media backlash/cancel culture/self-censorship. There are some nods to early Bowie, the Kinks during their Village Green Preservation Society era, and more, but it wasn't directly inspired by any one song. I wrote most of the words last August, but it had no chorus as such, it was largely a long poem with a lot of internal rhyme, like something Edgar Allen Poe might write if he felt like writing a light-hearted folk song. The words will remain enigmatic for now because they need to be seen in full and heard with the music, the working title is Stay Inside Got To Hide.

The production is simple, but wasn't easy because the words were written first and the music expanded to fit, so the overall structure is complex, despite only three chords. The backing consisted of saw waves, but today I recorded acoustic guitar for this as I'd always planned. I much prefer to use my beloved Yamaha F-310 guitar and a plain mic, rather than my electro acoustic. The latter is easier to play and record, but just doesn't sound as good. Most of the song is a simple loop in D-Major and I've banded and compressed it so it sounds modern, more like 90s Bowie than 60s Dylan. At times I was reminded of Telephone and Rubber Band by Penguin Café Orchestra.

The beat is a steady thump at 90 beat-per-minute, a recording of me pounding my desk with my fist.

Music, Competition Results

A steady day yesterday, writing many songs a piece at a time and working on production. Slower progress than I'd like.

I heard that I've not been selected for the Crewe Heritage Wall. I think much of this will come down to expectations and taste of the selectors, or even random chance, sometimes, as my experience as a judge informs me.

I heard today that I've not been selected for the Discerning Eye either, this is more disappointing, but I feel is due to not seeing the works in person, which is important for my work. Digital judgement of art is increasingly common and always a mistake; photography artificially favours acrylics and artificially penalises oils. This decision frees up these paintings to enter elsewhere.

Today, quarterly computer backups and more music work. Have had the first few poems from Write Out Loud for the Nantwich exhibition.