Summa: diary (August 10-16, 2024)

Some ideals are imaginable, but impossible (for now).
We must each have a strategy for survival.

August 10 (Saturday). 7.45 am: An ambulation.

I saw through the rain droplets on my glasses; I looked towards the horizon, where a bank of mist was gathering over the Irish Sea. By noon, it’d moved inland and erased the hill tops surrounding the town. 10.00 am: Negotiations with a trusted builder and roofer. 10.45 am: I began a wholesale reconfiguration of the rig-table.

August 12 (Monday). 7.30 am: 21°C; 81% humidity; a glowering sky, threatening a storm that would not come today; proof of presence.

8.00 am: A communion. 8.45 am: Correspondence and a review of the week. In the background, I listened to an interpretation of Connie Converse’s songs for piano. The music reminded me of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, and the lyrics, of Emily Dickinson‘s poetry. Copland abandoned composition (or, rather, composition abandoned him) in the 1960s, when he was in his sixth decade. For the remaining thirty years of his life, he dedicated his energies to conducting. Copland had the wisdom to know when his best was behind him.

9.15 am: Studiology. I began the rig-table rebuild. This iteration is ‘smarter’ and more ergonomic. Strand 1 (the turntable and modifiers) was assembled first. 11.30 am: 89% humidity (which is far higher than in Singapore presently (67%)).

Lunchtime, two acquisitions arrived in the same post. One is a modified cassette with a 7-inch tape that runs in a loop, to facilitate audio looping. The other is a 8-inch, 78-rpm record. This size is something of a rarity. It was introduced in the USA, England, and Europe before 1910, and subsequently withdrawn after only a few years in the USA. It appears to have endured longer in the UK. This recording is from 1935, and features Derbyshire’s Creswell Colliery Band playing England’s Favourite Hymns. On September 26, 1950, a fire broke out at the colliery and claimed the lives of 80 coal-miners (some of whom may have played in the band).

3.30 pm: Strand 1 tested and passed. On, then, to strand 2 (the cassette-tape recorders, sampler, and modifiers).

August 13 (Tuesday). 6.45 am: I awoke, startled and shaken, from a nightmare. The horror was caused not by what happened so much as the potential consequences of the events. Fear and anxiety must emerge somewhere. ‘Move on, John!’, the muse consoled. 9.15 am: Studiology. A finalisation of the power management for strand 2. Both strands were tested together and schematised. Throughout the morning, scaffolders in a neighbouring property clanked, clunked, chimed, whirred, and chatted loudly.

2.00 pm: I explored the possibility of routing ancillary effects pedal via the rig-table’s two ‘buffer/loop’ boxes. Adaptability is key. In an ideal system, it should be possible to add, substitute, and remove effectors without disruption to the whole. As anticipated, slotting monophonic devices in a stereophonic pathway inevitably kills one channel. I await stereo-mono, male-female adapters. (I will overcome.) 3.45 pm: Studio tidy-up. An end is in sight. The Einspeilungen project is intended to turnover in the background. It aims to be explorative, improvisatory, and without expectation. As such, I’ll no doubt take more risks and cross into new territory. The pressure to succeed can stifle courage, ambition. and progress.

August 14 (Wednesday). 6.30 am: Arise. I dreamed of preparing for travel. 8.00 am: Studiology. I couldn’t proceed with the rig-table project until the adapters arrived. So I returned to my primary projects: the book, and ‘Malchus’ Ear’ in particular. I’d forgotten how far both had been developed. My (very) provisional plan is to develop the next sound-composition release in parallel with the development of the book and its off-shoots. 10.10 am: Shopping arrived. A shelving and fridging of provisions followed. Breaking into a project pursued in an entirely different medium after a comparatively long hiatus is always a struggle. I’m appalled by the cumbersomeness of my expression. The first task was to discriminate between the draft’s scaffolding and building.

I returned to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut ‘The Betrayal of Christ’ (c.1509). The foundational approach of the book is a triangulation of text, image, and sound. But before I write I have to look, and allow the image to act upon me visually.

Albrecht Dürer, ‘The Small Passion: The Betrayal of Christ’ (c.1509) woodcut, Cleveland Museum of Art (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

4.00 pm: An ambulation.

August 15 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Arise. 6.30 am: Studyiology. Writing. I do not wish to think old thoughts. Inevitably, when you’ve ploughed the same furrow for over forty years, some of the same concepts, questions, and lines of reasoning recur. Which may imply that I’ve not done with them yet. 10.00 am: The scaffolders returned and serviced the front of the neighbouring property. They have a radio on … very loudly. ‘Some people on this street work from home, you know!’, I balled (in my head). And others may be either sick in bed or trying to sleep. And yet others may be grieving. Their thoughtlessness astonished me. 10.45 am: I decamped to the studio.

11.00 am: I began testing the turntable in conjunction with the reverberation and delay effectors, while monitoring the output on headphones and the studio speakers and sub-woofer. The euphonic music of the colliery band played at 33 rpm (rather than at 78 rpm), and at a lower pitch, produces doleful sonorities characteristic of my recorded compositions. This is as good a springboard to somewhere else as I could ask for.

Digital and analogue reverberation is like renaissance perspective. Both create an illusion of a depth, where there is none to be found. In my mind’s-eye (and -ear), I conceive of the sonic field between the left and right speakers in front of me, and the sub-woofer on the floor between them, as a rectangular landscape format with a neutral ‘surface’ — like a cinema screen. ‘Behind’ is an imaginary space of infinite recession. Reverberation permits me to penetrate the ‘surface’, and assign each sound a position either on or ‘behind’ it. Thus, reverberation enables me to arrange sounds in depth.

2.00 pm: The rig-table’s two ‘buffer/loop’ boxes were linked to a Digitech Whammy pitch pedal (linked to strand 1 only); a T C Electronic Nova 1 Reverb effector (linked to strand 2 only); and two T C Electronic Mimiq Doubler effectors, one for each strand. The latter serve to widen the stereo field of each strand by doubling and subtly desynchronising the input signal.

August 16 (Friday). 6.00 am: Arise. 8.00 am: A jaunt in the sunlight to the GP surgery for my prescriptions. 8.30 am: writing. I touched-base with the book’s initial proposal, and the underlying interrogations. There are many. They’re branches. I need to determine the trunk — the overarching question. 11.00 am: Into town, for a haircut and shopping.

At the newsagents, I glanced at the front page of the Daily Star (that bastion of in-depth journalism and rigorous fact checking). This is an example of contemporary popular folklore. The haunted or demon-possessed doll, and ‘accursed object’, are a paranormal topos that goes back to antiquity in European culture and far further in African religious belief. There was no need to read any further. (I knew this story too well.) The newspapers’s website reports that the doll (which was purchased on eBay) was ‘possessed by the spirit of a jilted bride [and] has been hailed the “most haunted” in the world — after attacking 17 men’. Quite a bargain, then.

1.30 pm: Studiology. A review of the rig-table. At the risk of over-complicating an already complex, but economic and efficient, pair of modifying strands, I wondered whether a third strand was conceivable. Only after working with the rig-table for some time will my quandary be satisfied, one way or another. For now, I’m content to root out duplication and inefficiencies in respect to the inputs and the output, and make trial of substitutions.