Summa: diary (January 27-31, 2025)
Some closed the door; some turned their back; some walked away; some never replied; some smiled goodbye. And I never either saw or heard from them again.

January 27 (Monday). Holocaust Memorial Day. 6.15 am: Thunder rumbled in the far distance. Then came that rain. 8.15 am: An ambulation, returning via the pharmacy. 9.15 am: Correspondence. 10.00 am: Studiology, and a return to the ‘Where We’re from …’. Inch-by-inch; element-by-element, progress was made. This year’s 80th anniversary of the liberation the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is a particularly sobering reminder of what happens when extreme-righting totalitarianism thinks the unthinkable and commits to it. America, Europe, and Israel in particular have shifted significantly towards the conditions and rhetoric associated with this obscenity. Could the Holocaust happen again? Yes. But the technology of industrial murder would be different, the atrocity would be televised, and the world wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop it. As thousands of displaced Gazans return to their homeland today, we’re struck by the irony.

January 28 (Tuesday). A night of inconstant sleep due, I suspect, to drinking tea after 1.00 pm (which is my beverage curfew). 6.00 am: Writing and correspondence.
Yesterday, one of my former PhD Fine Art tutees sent me the photography below. It shows Steve Whitehead and I discussing our MA Visual Art exhibition, which was held at Aberystwyth Art Centre in 1983. We were the only two postgraduates in the, then, Visual Art Department of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, that year. Steve was (and remains) an accomplished photo-realist painter and a good jazz clarinetist. For my part, I worked at the opposite end of the spectrum in a semi-abstract mode.

8.30 am: I began drafting a description of the ‘Where We’re from …’ track. 9.00 am: Studiology. A review of the mix so far. The adjustments are now minor and local. The logic of the composition was resolved. I can only think and work like a painter. Some of the most effective compositional interventions are being made close to the end of the process of composition: they are so self-evident and persuasive, that I can’t for the life of me understand why I didn’t think of them earlier. 12.15 pm: There’s, now, nothing more that I can either be excluded or added without undermining the work’s integrity . It has achieved pareto optimality.
1.45 pm: The task now is to listen to the mix on different pairs of monitors at different distances, and over a variety of headphones. I returned to the track’s descriptive text, and plundered my photo archive for an album image. The one selected was taken in a darkroom at the School of Art. It shows a a red-coloured strip-light in an otherwise blackened space. This was my ‘Red Room’ (an allusion to the Black Lodge in Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks (1990)). The darkroom was a place where, in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries spirits, supposedly, appeared on glass-plate negatives. (This was a subject I dealt with in my book Photography and Spirit (2007).) Spiritualist mediums often used ‘ruby’ light to illuminate the seance room where a seance was held. The color, it was said, helped attract spirits.

4.00 pm: An ambulation. The high wind blew the seagulls off course. The starling murmuration had to circle several times, like commercial aircraft, before being able to land safely under the pier.

January 29 (Wednesday). Chinese New Year 春節.
新年快樂 Sun Nin Fai Lok

6.15 am: Writing. My aim was to complete a substantial draft of the track descriptor by the close of the morning. Failed. the task extended into the afternoon, albeit punctuated with visits to the studio to hear the mix on near-field monitors and a woofer for the first time. The decision to begin the mix with the mid-field pair and then move to the near- and far-field monitors has proved dividends. After this phase, I’ll hear the mix on a variety of headphones from the cheap and rudimentary to the expensive and sophisticated. 4.00 pm: Track descriptor completed, I returned to the mix.

January 30 (Thursday). A restless night. I awoke remembering a TV programmer I’d watched, as a child, in the early 1970s. It was called Screen Test (I think). It was a competition for the most part. But there was a section that invited young would-be filmmakers to submit a short super-8 film. While shot and edited on rudimentary equipment, the results were sometimes astonishingly sophisticated, ambitious, and disciplined. There was often a mature consciousness about the medium and its malleability. Collage, superimposition, and fast and idiosyncratic editing, were in evidence. A few contributors went on to become directors and cinematographers of note.
6.00 am: Writing and correspondence. 9.00 am: Studiology. I continued making minor adjustments to the mix in response to the alternative monitors and sub-woofer. It’s not wide of the mark. By the close of the day, it was as good as it could be within that acoustic context. Tomorrow, I’ll hear my efforts over the a pair of far-field monitors and a sub-woofer, as well as headphones. 7.15 pm: An evening of administration.
January 31 (Friday). 6.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s mix. I made micro-changes to the volume dynamics of the constituent elements that, possibly, only I would appreciate. These nuances are discernible when you’re inside of a composition.
11.00 am: An overdue coffee and a confab at Aberystwyth Arts Centre with the artist and educator Saoirse Morgan. landscape, collage, an island, photography, and selling work on the internet, were the subjects of our agenda.

12.30 pm and for the remainder of afternoon, I continued making small adjustments to the relative volume of elements, as well as removing the low tones shared by two paired elements. Subduing frequencies below 160 KHz in one element serves to remove muddiness and clarify distinctions. The sum of small changes is a huge improvement.



See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice