March 11, 2019

7.15 am: Downstairs for breakfast, with Enid – and her twin sister Ethel on the corridor’s opposite wall – ever wakeful and looking down, imperiously:

8.00 am: A communion. In between appointments at Saturday’s busy and demanding Visiting Day at the School, I published an extended blog on my sound exploits and forthcoming album: ‘The Biblical Record: Converting Scripture into Sound’. 8.30 am: I returned to the School to send an email that’d remained unsaved on my office desktop.

There was a time when vacated shoes weren’t a feature of the landscape. From whence has this phenomenon arisen? Each incident implies a story that cannot be heard:

8.45 am: Back at homebase, I reviewed the week and settled to a morning of studiology. The composition cannot be planned or pursued from start to finish. It’s far too unwieldy; that’s the nature of the beast. I was running blind. By 10.30 am: I’d developed a very pared-back conglomerate of seven versions derived from the first part. I may yet use none of it.

On to part 2. Each of the four parts would undergo the same process. Out with the OTO Biscuit bit-crusher. It was merciless:

My approach, on this occasion, was to explore smaller changes over longer periods of time. Nothing had emerged that was particularly persuasive so far. But the solution would not lie outside the process of trying and failing. Do nothing, and you’ll achieve just that.

After lunch, I continued throwing anything I could muster at the source sound. The answer may lie in the process of overlaying the multiple passes to create something that cannot be perceived in a single modulation. I needed to hear something that I’d not heard before. ‘Take me somewhere! Anywhere but here!’

I returned to the low-frequency drones for the four parts and worked through their relationships one to another, in the absence of any other set of modulations. This was akin to painting-out everything other than the picture’s dominant shapes. It was a sure way of hearing the whole once more.

7.30 pm: I made a second and last pass over the fourth part. More versions would not make for a better outcome. Rather, it’s the judicious deployment of a few of the best elements that makes an engaging work possible. While I began to arrange the modulated tracks in the DAW session, I rerouted tomorrow’s tutorial in order to carve-out time for other activities, and responded to incoming mail.

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March 8, 2019
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March 12, 2019

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