Summa: diary (January 27-30, 2026)
January 27 (Tuesday). Holocaust Memorial Day. 6.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studyology. I returned to the text for the 144 Variations album, and prepared it for upload to my online sound site. On May 30, the first of one hundred and forty-four compositions will be released as streamed content.
Ten years after. In February — to inform an auto-review of my sound releases since 2015 — I’ll re-listen to The Aural Bible series (and other material) from beginning to end. Quite apart from the benefits of self-assessment, I need time to enjoy the fruit of my labour. The exercise may also help me plough a furrow in a different direction.
In the ‘fantasy’ version of my career — which I permit myself to indulge only occasionally — I engage activities that don’t occupy my attention in the real world. They’re fulfilling, demanding, and successful. However, their execution presupposes skills that I don’t possess in reality. A mismatch between ambition (clearly) and aptitude (sadly). A dilemma. Curiously, none of the people in the fantasy correspond to anyone I know.
1.30 pm: I returned to the text for the Darkness Covered the Whole Land album. There’s always a way to sharpen a text, say I. But, like the proverbial graphite pencil, if you attenuate the point too much, it’ll break.
January 28 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: Writing and reflection. 9.00 am: Studiology. For the rest of the week, I’ll finalise the remainder of the sound compositions on the 144 Variations album. Next week, I hope to commence the production mix of the Darkness Covered the Whole Land album. Knowing me, this will take an age.
An aside:
‘Are you proud of who you are and what you’ve made?’, they asked, casually. My Protestant-Christian instinct kicked in. ‘Pride’ isn’t an emotional state that sits comfortably with me. ‘The pride of life’, rang like a fire alarm in my head (1 John 2.16). The phrase refers to that distasteful display of vaunted arrogance, self-satisfaction, hubris, and boastfulness about one’s achievements that’s so conspicuous today. In any case, who I am is a mixed bag virtue and vice, discipline and inconsistency, application and laziness, altruism and selfishness, ecstasy and melancholy, and truth and fiction. Who could be proud of that profile?
I don’t dislike anything I’ve done. Which is not to say that I think it’s all good, by any means. But I own it all. And there are some things I’ve done that I like very much.
11.00 am: Sixty compositions down, and I was picking up speed. 2.15 pm: All were completed. Then, it was back to the top for a second ‘final’ review, to tweak some very minor aberrations that I alone can hear because only I am actively listening out for them. Only when I no longer wince at what I hear are the compositions finished to the best of my ability.
4.00 pm: An ambulation at sundown. The sea and sky: like a resplendent woman regarding her reflection.
January 29 (Thursday). 7.00 am: A communion and reflection. 8.00 am: Studiology. I returned to the second ‘final’ pass-over the remaining compositions. 11.00 am: Completed. It remained for me to design the online album cover; upload one track, to test its integrity as streamed content; and write the blurb that’ll accompany each day’s release. Thereafter, the album will be placed in the freezer until the end of May.
I’m one and a half days ahead of schedule. 12.45 pm: My attention now gravitated to the second album about the Aberfan disaster: Darkness Covered the Whole Land. I returned with fresh ears and insights. (This will be the ninth instalment of The Aural Bible series. A tenth is envisaged to accompany the Nothing is Without Sound book.) 1.45 pm: I began with the first track, and will work my way through the other fifteen in order. The ‘fruit of long experience’ (to summon a title by Max Ernst) on the last album is already paying dividends on this present one.
January 30 (Friday). 7.00 am: Domestic tidying and personal reflection. 8.00 am: Looking westward, towards Pen Dinas.
8.45 am: Studiology. Back to: ‘Hymn: The Sinking of the Merthyr Vale Colliery (1869)’. Phase 1 of production: I situate each sound element within the stereo field (either left of centre, or centre, or right of centre; either in the foreground, or the middle-distance, or the background; and anywhere else in between). The soundscape is resolved, micro-second by micro-second, according to the following principles:
- Every element, however small, must pull its weight;
- Every element has a precise place within the whole;
- The virtue of one element should not eclipse that of another;
- All superfluity should be deleted, without prejudice;
- ‘Good’ is not good enough;
- Some sounds serve as words, while others, as punctuation. Both are necessary to form sentences;
- Some sounds serve the requirements of description, while others, of emotion, abstraction, structure, and development.
12.15 pm: Townward, for shoppery and an appointment for a hearing-aid fitting with an audiologist. Further audio tests of the bone-conducting kind needed to be undertaken. Thereafter, the aids were configured to collaborate with and enhance my organic mode of hearing. (They are spectacles for ears.) I was asked to monitor the device’s performance over the next three weeks before attending a further consultation with the ‘practitioner’.
2.00 pm: Studiology. The track was played again and again and again. Each iteration revealed a new and fixable deficit. This is the fruit of tenacity and doggéd perseverance.
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; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice