Gas, Prometheus Skips, Migraines

Rather than subsidise gas, the energy crisis is a golden opportunity for the government to provide grants for windmills and solar panels for every business and household and create a truly sustainable economy.

I doubt this will happen.

I completed most of The Bird in Borrowed Feathers yesterday before dashing off to see Deb. I feel exhausted today. In the early hours I lay awake, my mind racing with ideas of how to improve Prometheus again, though it is functional as it is, and I have a million other jobs. In the morning I updated my website with details of the Ty Pawb exhibition, and made a new Fall in Green video live. My mind remains racing strangely and I have trouble focusing on one thing.

I decided to add a new Prometheus feature, or rather upgrade an old one, by making the cursor skips, which occur in ticks, based on the prime factors of the ticks-per-beat. Up until now you could select a skip as a fraction of a beat (eg. 1/4th) but some fractions are not whole (like 1/7th of the default 48 ticks). You can choose any number of ticks-per-beat, this is the timing resolution of the song (in practice, however, I stick with 48, I can't recall any song that doesn't). Following today's upgrade, when setting this, all of the integral factors of this are calculated and these become the skip options; and you can increase the skip by one tick too, making skips larger than one beat possible for the first time.

I have more to do, so much. The music feels barely started, yet I've worked hour after hour, day after day on this for over three weeks. Barely half of the album is complete and only the first track actually ready (the others need vocals, if nothing else). I have upgraded Prometheus a lot, and the new sample library and new ways of using the MODX and MIDI have caused these delays, but improved the quality too.

Now I feel dizzy, shaky, perniciously anxious. I keep seeing flashing lights, and earlier the imposition of this visual migraine was too strong for me to work. I must pause, though must do so briefly. For three weeks, this music has been my only artistic output. I need more, want more, but the music must get done. The Salomé iron is hot.

The Planet's Oracle, Truth Seeker

Two full days working on the Salomé music, it seems that each track takes about three very full days to complete, and no vocals have been added yet. I'm eager to get this over with, but, what must be done must be done.

I spent yesterday refining The Planet's Oracle, building the dark intro pianos and enhancing the mood. There were only relatively small changes, but as in writing or any art, these last tweaks take an awful long time. The track starts with strange clicks, I want to paint a 'Victorian' image, wooden, pacing, the nervous energy of Nietzsche. Then there's a dramatic series of knocks, like fate knocking on the door (these are bangs on the shed outside, I hid the sound recorder inside and banged on the door to time). A final knock booms out and reverses into the piano intro. I spent quite some time on the basic white-noise based boomy/thundery percussion sounds (now called Deep Oracle). Then we enter a room, furious writing to the rhythm of the main theme. Then some guitar solos, one for the frantic chords at the start, and another for the climax which breaks up the mechanical perfection of the sequencer.

This was largely complete, well up to the next step, by lunch. I then worked on Truth Seeker, which was in a draft stage. It needed a solo in the middle. Last time I worked on it I recorded a guitar part for the start on my eternally ugly-sounding Yamaha 700 guitar. This sounded tinny, like an acoustic/electric cross (of course, it is) it didn't work. I started with the solo, which jumps back to the pounding pianos of the intro, and added a wailing organ solo; this was in part inspired by recent listens to Time Of The Season by The Zombies. Despite the jazzy overtones, this seemed to resonate with the church element, the church Salomé fled. This then breaks open to 'outdoors' or a crowd, this is actually a recording of the chatter from the interval during the live performance of Salomé, so it's appropriate on many levels.

I remembered that the title is 'Truth Seeker in a Madding Crowd', and this is the crowd. We have the church, memories of distant Russia, and the busy streets of Zurich, or wherever in Switzerland we are. I played an eerie melody on the MODX using an instrument called Santur which sounded like an exotic string instrument, a zither or Vulcan guitar.

This morning I went back to the intro. Those two parts; distant Russia, memories of the church, break into the crowd. All of this has echoes of the Herr Kasperle music and the German shop. I added a new organ solo for the start, an organ version of the (now deleted) guitar part, an echo of the main 'Truth Seeker' melody. I then recorded 16 layers of Russian-style chanting to use for the church, and mocked up a bell sound by taking two bells and making them loop in each ear, a distant and sonically interesting sound.

Then I made a couple more changes to Prometheus itself, little things, making it more efficient in the modulator auto-name section.

I then heard that my painting 'Love and Wifi' has been selected for the Ty Pawb open in Wrexham. They eccentrically informed me in English and Welsh, perhaps the result of a mix of 'woke' political-correctness and right-wing nationalism, disparate elements which seem to equate to the zeitgeist. I need to frame this, but I have time.

Then I went to work on The Bird in Borrowed Feathers and made a basic backing of sweeping strings, many echoes of Beethoven's 6th and Peer Gynt; perhaps, I thought, this is too clichéd, so I decided to try a synthetic flute that, at times, pretends to be a Theremin (but the bird-like melodies and themes are really flute-like and don't lend themselves to gentle bends).

Very busy, very energetic, very stressful days.

I've been paid by the Lyceum after over 40 days of waiting; anything to do with arts here feels like it goes to the bottom of the pile. I've had my first meagre Steam royalties in months. Money is going to be tight for months, I've no idea where the next thing will come from. I must focus on this music and make it brilliant.

Fan Cabinet

A delightful trip with Deb in the morning to B&Q for some wood for a new cabinet to cover the extractor fan in the kitchen. There were hardly any hinges, an empty wall of no stock. We went to Wickes then, which was well stocked, though B&Q generally has a larger range. I then spent all day making this cabinet, which needs to fit inside an alcove.

The fan opens to the air, and the plastic shutters on the outside have long since broken, their tiny springs rusted away. This is already the second fan, the first had the same problem. This makes the window very cold in winter, so this box can be used to close it off at will. It will open inwards, and have visible hinges on the outside, in 'L' configuration when closed and doubling over when open (this gives the tightest seal when closed), so I needed to work out the curve for the deep doors so that the inside edge has clearance. I've also embedded some magnets in the wood to form a catch. The two doors are gluing overnight. Drilling the wall and fitting the hinges is the hardest part. The space is cramped. I'll mark and drill the wall, then mark and drill the cabinet, all before removing everything before painting.

Deb has heard the first drafts of the new music and thinks it's a leap above what has come before, and I'm happier too, but there are still lots of work and tracks to go.

In Prometheus I've had yet another feature idea, making Set Parameter events for MIDI specific events, the Sustain Pedal, and other controllers (like the MODX Super-Knob, controller 95 by default). These will give me far more control over these than I have with Sekaiju, which is generally limited to editing recordings rather than crafting new music from scratch.

Genie Battle Dream, Set Parameter Programming, and More

You can't move forward, make progress in making something better on your own, progress is moving towards something new, something else, so that new, else, is vital. The best moments of creativity come from clashes of opposites, times of transition, because of this. No change means no progress. Information is change, to stay the same is to inform nothing, to do nothing.

Last night I dreamed of watching battles, as though in a computer game, watching a soldier or lone man finding and dispatching various enemies. I took control of him, and found myself faced by a giant blue Genie, as big as a house. He was on a road, angry like a raging bull, hurling rocks and flaming boulders at me, spewing fire and thunder. I ran backwards in panic. I fired some shots from the rifle I had, then threw the gun at him, then a knife. These had no effect. I then ran to the right and leap on his back, grabbing blue fronds, tentacle-like hair-like objects. I pulled and began to tame him and he changed from blue to white, a furry dragon like Falkor from The Neverending Story. We flew together, and he became a woman.

I think this is all about music, my recent challenges and battles coming to a happy end.

I decided to pause on the music a little and work on music programming. I've rarely used MIDI in Prometheus, usually as an import as guide track to a piano track I've recorded externally. Now, with the MODX, and more timbre options, I feel that more control would be useful. My MIDI exporter/importer always had the option of attaching a Set Parameter event to notes to map the Velocity (volume) of the MIDI notes, but the plethora of those events, one per note, are difficult to edit, as they can be in any MIDI editor. Even in the excellent Sekaiju it's a matter of typing each velocity by hand.

Today I've added a slew of commands to mass process selections of these events. The most interesting is the ability to apply the current modulator (my modulators are short wav files, I find this to be the most flexible solution) to the values, so everything from gentle ramping up/down across a series of notes, to much more complex modulations like this, are now easy:

All processing happens on a selection, and the modulator can be reset at the start of the song, the start of the selection, or span the exact range from first to last event. This was quite complex to work out as the song itself can vary in speed, those events can look regular, but the tempo itself might be being modulated. Well, it seems to be working. This should allow, for the first time, a useful MIDI export, rather than the simplistic guides for external editing my exports used to be.

In other news, my father is now home from the hospital after nearly a week of tests and monitoring; though many of the tests didn't take place. Mum asserts that he became far worse in hospital than at home.

My brother has also been arrested, again, for his zealotistic eco-protesting. As far as I am aware, arrest is and remains one of his primary goals. I remain sceptical that such actions help the environment, though the biosphere certainly needs helping.

The 10%

Thought of a better way to do Entwined in the night, starts with a rolling flow of the piano, gentle steps, like the two minds, remembering that it's two minds talking, romancing. So I got up early and recorded new piano parts, ready to cast aside much of yesterday's sequences. A lot in art is creating a new experiment with great labour, only to throw away 90% of it, but the 10% is usually worth the effort.

I listened to bits of Bjork's utopia. Melodically inspiring in its complexity, but the random 90s-style drum loops were annoying, the same sub-bassy booms and crackles appear in every song sooner or later for no real reason, not even interest, always getting in the way of the natural mood. I'm amazed that so many people worked on the album, it sounds simplistic, if anything.

Entwined Work

A really full day working on Entwined in Infinity. I decided to remove the pianos completely and sequence everything as a virtual orchestra, which creates complex challenges. The workload for even this short sequence is substantial, this will take a lot of crafting.

I also touched upon The Planet's Oracle, this is much more complete; it is simpler, most of the track is fairly monotone piano. One musical change I've made is to cycle the final chord sequence twice and use the last D-minor as the first chord of the second cycle, 15 patterns vs. 16. It sounded too boring to have two Ds in a row.

I've also been programming a bit more of Prometheus, unexpectedly. I thought it would be nice to export a MIDI sequence to make the piano play it, but the MIDI exporter exports in simple beats and measures, so if I vary the tempo in complex ways (or at all) the sequence doesn't vary (I'm not even sure if tempo can be modulated in real time in a MIDI sequence, but ho, my tempo modulations are too complex for that anyway), so I programmed a new MIDI exporter that uses the sample-location for each instrument in the final render. I'm using MIDI more and more, so this will probably be useful. It would allow me, for example, to craft a section in Prometheus and make the MODX (or the P105, or DX, or Microkorg) play it back for recording and inclusion.

Entwined in Infinity Starts, Time, Fate and Language, Prometheus 2.89

A somewhat dreadful and slow day yesterday compared to the full Tuesday. A night of stomach pain meant no sleep until 6am, then waking late.

I read a lot of Time, Fate, and Language in the night, and I think this affected my mood in the day; it's a brilliant but dangerous book. Reading it seemed to make to clear to me, somewhat ironically, the inevitability of David Foster Wallace's suicide, my soul somewhat tainted with a strange analytical darkness. It seemed that Taylor's original essay was more of a challenge than a belief, that he knew its flaws and presented it to the world like a proud puzzle-master. Foster Wallace brilliantly exposes the flaws, at least one of the problems with the Taylor essay, without proving an end to fatalism.

David Foster Wallace is a man who will happily use ten words when one will suffice, but the essence of his argument appears to be that there are differences in truth/false evaluations depending on whether these occur in the past, present, or future, and that evaluations are invalid when they cross tenses; perhaps that what happens today can say nothing about yesterday's possibilities - but I am extending things with that statement. Taylor assumed validity across all tenses, hiding this in weasely words; reasonable for a universal view, but a universal view is impossible without omniscience - an omniscient universal view would necessarily be fatalistic, but the real world is a different matter.

One certainty about the real world is that knowledge is limited, even all agents in the universe connected can't know everything, and each agent is even worse off as it takes time to convey information through this network. It's amazing that we can infer anything from our tiny view. Not so much that I know that I know nothing as I know that I can't know everything, and know that nothing can. All agents in the universe are united by ignorance.

I sketched out the structure of Entwined in Infinity, mostly marking the basic parts in the MIDI sequence, and went for a walk to town, my first in months. Then I added a feature to Prometheus to merge events which are close, sort of a temporal 'median' filter. This is useful mainly to chop down bunches of MIDI notes, less useful musically (I could program it to make the remaining median note an average pitch of those it replaced, would that be useful?).

Next door's children harassed and annoyed me with five ball-over-fence requests in 40 minutes, I was completely unable to work with such interruptions.

I've added a few minor changes to Prometheus, so now it's updated to 2.89. I must get this music done as quickly as possible.

Tempus fugit. Carpe diem.

Truth Seeker

A non-stop day working on Truth Seeker In A Madding Crowd, lots of new melodies in the strings here, and a few guitar parts which may or may not be used. Great progress but a long way to go.

My father remains in hospital for a third night for tests following his stroke.