Hitler in High Heels, and Other Songs

Two busy days of music work. I have four songs in progress which have typically started with fragments of sequences left over from earlier in the year. Nightfood had hints of electronic music and more progressive type music too. I had one pop song, Style Guru Fashion Queen, which I thought of using, but its tone is light and pop-orientated, somewhat frivolous compared to the adult tone of the other songs so I may omit it or use it elsewhere.

After some initial toying with moods in the sequencer I work on the words, trying to keep them good as poems independent of the music, then try to fit these to the music, then back to words, bending both. It's an iterative process and I try to avoid cliché or too much that is instinctive or expected so that there is always some newness to everything. As in poems, there must be a key dramatic point. My experience with poetry has certainly transformed my song writing.

Hitler in High Heels is largely complete. This began as a simple electronic sequence inspired by the drama of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams. The lead synth instrument is an aggressive growl, low in the register, like the deep distorted brassy sound that filled every film trailer from 2005 to 2015. It's unusual to have a deep lead instrument, it quietens down for the verses. It is the powerful mood of this instrument that inspired the imagery which inspired the lyrics (all words should create an image); initially of some sort of dominatrix, then later as a character description. Here are the words so far:

Hitler In High Heels

Hitler in high heels
cracked black and savage,
weapons on the outside
something like a hedgehog.

Do you need their love?
Ache for satin comforts?
Await a princely kiss
to shatter your spines?

Your face is so ugly.
Is that why you whip?
Is it beauty you hate and attack?

Men or women?
Men or women?
Men or women?

Of the other songs, most have words but are incomplete musically and structurally. I'm darting between several songs at once to avoid time wasting and too much focus on each. Everything is taking longer than I would like, but I know that all of the best work, like painting, is a matter of slow accretion.

Sisyphus Canvases

A long day yesterday of working on a full set of Spotify Canvases for The Myth of Sisyphus. I like these little animations and they are easy to make in Argus. All use 240 frames at 30 frames per second, so an 8-second loop, which is the maximum Spotify permits. I based these on the CD version album artwork.

I remade the one for I, Sisyphus, using a black disc which rotated in opposite directions to the skull:

I used the same animation for The Problem of Suicide, but added a larger rotary wobble to the camera, making the Sisyphus character turn in jerking motions as though heaving the rock.

Life in the Mirror and The Spare Bedroom of Reminiscence used the album artwork drawings, sliding, fading and flickering. For Nick Drake, I changed the background from light to dark to emulate the look of the album art.

The Exploratory Farmer used the dark look of the album's rear artwork:

So it continued. All work was done by 18:00. I discovered a bug in Argus, the current modulator count could be -1, when there are no modulators, but this was not updated when one was loaded as part of loading an actor. I will investigate today, as it would be better for it never to be -1 anyway.

It was the first day of the Galleria Balmain pop-up shop too, so a historic day, the opening of my third showing of art in London, and this time by a third party. An email informed me that The Grosvenor Open Exhibition is running soon too. Without Peter Boughton the results will certainly be different.

Eyes of Pity, Hitler in High Heels

Working on some music sequences today, tidying up the rough notes and transforming them into longer songs.

Nowadays I tend to work slowly on songs and focus on the lyrics and music separately at first; both should be good in their own right, then I modify the music and mood to fit the words. If you don't hear or understand the words of a song, the music should evoke them so that you can feel what the words mean and what the song is about. The melody should be catchy enough to hum, and sound pretty when played solo on an old piano. Conversely, the words should be good enough to work as award-winning poems.

In the night I wrote a few words to a very short 3/4 melody, a song called Eyes of Pity. It is very simple musically and structurally, verse/chorus/verse/chorus... it needs more. I've spent today working on this, and music for a second new song called Hitler in High Heels, which is also very simple musically (but at least has a few interesting chords and a beat which fits the mood perfectly).

Here is the first draft of the Eyes of Pity lyrics:

Eyes of Pity

When you look at me
I can only see
your eyes of pity.

I am full of love,
I am full of need,
but you reject me.

And yet you're more damaged than I
All you have is beauty
See how sympathetic I am?

I look at you with my empathetic eyes
and all I see is beauty
yet you still reject me

When your beauty dies
the world will look at you
with eyes of pity,

but I won't do that,
I don't think,
because I'll love you;

and I feel that I'll remember you for the next twenty years
and it will cause me sorrow.
See how romantic I am?

I look at you with my desperate intelligent eyes
but all I see is pity.
Your pity.

Heritage Wall, Music Notes, Tap Repair, Shakespeare

Small jobs yesterday. The final filing of the new Argus and Prometheus, and the Crewe Heritage Wall designs. I've designed three initial designs for this, of course subject to modification and tweaks. Like all artists I abhor art by committee, but sometimes changes are necessary for various reasons. Even Beethoven changed Leonore.

Conflict of Progress:

The Signalman:

Industry to Ecology:

As I've said before, each has an approximate theme of the conflict between the machine age and ecology.

I then started to look at extant music. I've got lots of half-finished, or partially started notes and sequences. I have this in painting too. I try to avoid this; having either finished work, work in progress (moving towards finished), or just abandoned or simply destroy the rest, but sometimes it is good creatively to start things and see how they sound. This seems more common in music, which is more ethereal than art. With my art ideas, in my notebooks, I have a pretty good idea what it is like, so can then decide whether to take things further. With music, more notes seem to be needed to work this out, so I often have partial sequences, and may are used in part, if not totally.

It seems I have quite a lot of electro-pop songs, a left over from the work at the start of the year. These are not so bad, but electro-pop, or pop music in general is often poor. I will work on them. One rule for a good song is good words. The words need image, emotion, story. As words, they should be as powerful as any poem. If not, then the song will be second rate.

Much of yesterday was spent replacing, or trying to replace, the kitchen tap. Years of leaks had sealed the bolt in limestone, making it unmovable. A plumber was called. He said 'You should have just replaced the tap washer, mate' - Ah, that useful 'you should have ...' phrase. Of course, this only makes one despise the idiocy of the utterer. Do such people think this helps?

He used a backnut spanner (which I don't have) with a large bar to twist it. The bolt came out of the tap itself before the nut was loosened, so the nut was indeed welded by limestone. This was costly for the removal of one nut. The plumber put the new tap in, but so badly that it leaked huge quantities and I had to remove it again after he had gone. He spent more time ranting about the excessive taxes he pays as a high earner and how he can't earn a thing on his six properties, than doing the job. Still, we needed his expertise to loosen that nut.

Today, I framed Moon Over Shakespeare. The plastic glazing was as nightmarish as ever, but the painting looks good in its new frame.

This image, like most of the images of my paintings in frames, has had the painting imposed on it later. Without this, the painting would be obscured by reflections of me, see:

Argus v1.12, Spotify Canvases, Printed Bytes

A bad night of hardly any sleep, partly due to stress/anxiety/excitement. I had an awful pain in my jaw last night which Deb informed me was neuralgia. I have not experienced this before. The day of straining at screen images for printing, and the video work, probably contributed to this. I also had a late-night message about a Covid-19 test for the early morning which disturbed my peace. I knew it was nothing to worry about, I am taking part in an Office for National Statistics study into Covid, so have regular tests an interviews.

Despite this, I rose feeling relatively alert. I upgraded Argus and Prometheus first. I added an option to limit modulator noise. See this:

A simple modulator (part of a sine wave, I made this in Sound Forge). I can add noise to it at random, which can be useful. It's more useful for Argus than Prometheus... this irregularity is rarely heard in audio and when it is, it sounds like, well, noise, so isn't always desirable. The old version simply clipped the noise, so today I added an alternative version which detected the highest peak and limited the result, thus:

I also added a few little features; removal of the -0.000 reports (minus zero, never useful to know this).

After that, and the Covid PCR test, it was time for the last of the Spotify Canvases. I pondered You Make Me Happy overnight... what is best for this song? I thought of clouds and blue skies. The tune is also very bouncy, so I thought of a Lego man who jumps to the music. I took two photos; standing and jumping with arms up. It was easy to make him move in Argus:

Here is the modulator for his leap. You'll see how surprisingly complex it is. I wanted a pause on the floor, a quick leap, then holding at the top for a while.

Then Deflexion, which I started yesterday. This one is very sci-fi looking:

It, unusually, uses a 3D object. Most Argus objects are 2D planes with textures wrapped on them. This time I thought I would use the actual Gunstar ship from Gunstorm. The red ring caused a lot of problems. It looked too stark on its own, so I made two, one white and one red glow. The white one flashes like a disco light.

Now I need to find a new creative focus. These Spotify Canvases are fun and easy but how will they last in the great scheme of things? I want to change my will to instruct my heirs to print and publish this blog as a book. A real book for the world's libraries, more stable than the ephemeral internet and its weak magnets and static forces.

In the night I wondered about a simple way to print bytes. Perhaps a byte, in black and white dots, and its inverse below, like DNA, a mirror, then the inverse again; so ABA in a layer. This should be reasonably error proof. Perhaps 24 dots per cm, so three bytes, and 24 bytes per square cm. A 20x29cm page would store 13,920 bytes, and 72 pages would store one megabyte.

Prints, Profile Images, Spotify Canvases for Gunstorm

A busy day, started by ordering some new limited prints in preparation for the opening of First at Last in Shoreditch next Monday. These are expensive but all part of the long term of art, I must be ready if someone wants a print.

Then a took and set some new profile images for my social media, plus some promotion online about the gallery show. I also noticed that the Gunstorm song has had nearly 10,000 listens on Spotify, after a mere 14 years (well, since its release, it's not been on Spotify for 14 years).

Then I decided to work on some new Spotify Canvases in honour of this, and made a quick one for Ultramarine based on the Ultramarine music video. These are so easy in Argus.

After this, I made a one for Gunstorm, based on gentle cyclic movements of various objects; the lettering, some stars. Then one for One Day which was flickery and stormy, which seemed to match the music. Deflexion and You Make Me Happy remain.

Black Hole Topology

In July, I had a glimpse of insight into the differences between how gravity might behave differently between a solid sphere, hollow sphere, null sphere (a convex spherical boundary), and how this might give clues to how gravitational information is stored on a quantum level. I lost the vision of this but have completed the brief notes that I made.

I've written before that I think the event horizon of a black hole represents the edge of the universe because if light cannot escape from something then information cannot escape, and if anything cannot escape then it represents a net loss for the universe as a whole. Converting something to nothing is as invalid as the opposite, because nothing is the exact inverse of infinity. If nothing can spontaneously convert into something then there would be no rules about what or how.

We may think of borders as linear or concave but a convex border, to this 'hole' is still valid. I hypothesize that, when black holes are formed, their contents are pushed just beyond the border, the event horizon, and so these could be thought of as hollow spheres rather solid spheres. This horizon becomes the edge of the universe. There is nothing beyond, and the topology would not permit movement towards the nothing, but a deflection along the edge.

What is the topology of an concave border to the universe? As the space inside the event horizon is an edge to the universe, then existence on this border might appear like a point to local actors rather than the large sphere we imagine from a distance. The 'nothing' is space infinitely bent, so gravitons must be able to store this information, of course not infinitely, but the near-infinity of space's contortion on the horizon. Gravitational information cannot exist inside these spheres, so the objects on the border must do this. These must communicate with neighbours in an almost 2D fashion, with their metaphorical backs to the void.

How is the apparent size of the black hole stored in such a topology? Presumably two black holes of different dimensions have different quantities of matter at their shell.

Does a hollow sphere of mass x behave, in gravitational terms, as a solid sphere of the same mass? In what ways are the two different?

Where is the centre of gravity of a shell-object which contains null space inside, and how are these co-ordinates defined given a perspective that exists only on the surface of the shell?

Prometheus Coding

Spent yesterday morning working on filing. The dates for my paintings, events, films, were stored in Dec 1 (2010) format - or others. I changed all to 1 Dec (2021) for example. The paintings file is 37,000 lines, so this process took several hours.

Then I created some music. Prometheus crashed again when clicking Stop, an old bug which is so rare it's very difficult to track down. It may be several different bugs, or a memory infringement which occurs earlier, and later causes the crash. At one point I tracked it to between waiting for the play thread to finish, and the end of it, somewhere between [A] and [B] here:

[A]
// Wait for thread to finish
    if (waitforthreadtofinish)
        while (inplaythread)
            Sleep(1);
[B]


inplaythread is active when the player thread is running and set to zero at the end (it will reach the end at the end of its loop once then set inplaythread=0). Now, the crash could be in the player thread or caused by something after it, but I thought it was odd that normal playing is very stable. The crash only appears during stop. I wondered if the Sleep(1) was a culprit. Of course, 1 millisecond is very short... perhaps too short anyway. I thought that Sleep was a Windows API function, but it seems to be a C command. This might be the only time I've ever used it...

So I've replaced it with something which waits for 50 millisecs using the certainly stable timeGetTime()

// Wait for 50 millisecs
void waitforafewmillisecs(void)
{
    lword t;
    for (t=timeGetTime()+50; t>timeGetTime(); );
}


Perhaps it is a forlorn hope to blame Sleep. On the next crash I will take steps to add tracers. This is the longest term and most strange of Prometheus bugs.