8.15 am: Proof of presence:

9.00 am: The day was set aside for parts and for wholes, as well as recording new material for processing next week. Having experienced one day of lucid composition, I didn’t presume that another would follow on its heals. Therefore, adjustments were made to the work-in-progress only if I was clear in my mind about what needed to be done. One small mistake can undo a great deal of good. (A lesson in life as in art.) 11.00 am: The rain came:

I returned to ‘Sweet Bells Ringing’, which has only two parts. So, there’d be little to undo if I fouled up. The hardest determination regarding this composition concerned the volume or loudness of the sound. Should it be positioned close to the boundary of inaudibility? To make only two parts do more than the sum of those parts demands a great deal. There’s a logic and potentiality implicit in the source material (and, as a consequence, in the composition of it) that must be found — worked for. These attributes are not self-evident; rather, they emerge from the imposition of the creative imagination.

1.30 pm: After lunch, I recorded myself reading part of the text below, derived from Edmund Jones’s A Geographical, Historical, and Religious Account of the Parish of Aberystruth (1779). The River Usk ran parallel to my art school in Newport, Gwent. The Ebbw Fach river, which flowed through my home town of Abertillery, is one of its tributaries. While the phenomenon of the firey stones was entirely natural, all of Creation was, for Jones, suffused with spiritual metaphor. Here, he talks about the ecology of the river too. Early industry’s capacity to pollute was recognised. No doubt after the rain, today and tomorrow, the Usk will carry a great abundance of water once again:

The reading and an image-to-sound conversion of the above text-image together provided the source material from which to construct the sound of rushing water.

4.30 pm: ‘Eject.’