Summa: diary (February 9-13, 2026)

The world, the flesh, and the devil. (We make monsters of ourselves.)

February 9 (Monday).

5.30 am: Sleepless since 4.00 am. With ageing comes the loss of Morpheus’s unbroken balm. 6.00 am: Studyology. I would spend one more day on the track texts before returning to mixing the album. I searched through this site for my initial reflections on each of the tracks. They serve as the foundations for further development. The text for the sixteen sections will inform my public lectures on the project. Thus, everything is absorbed into everything else.

An aside:

With apologies for the unconscionable. ‘Say sorry to the work too, for time misspent‘. Burned in the fire, crushed into powder, mixed with water, and drunk. ‘You’re no different!’ Here they were, once again. ‘And the last state of that man is worse than the first’. (Would they need to reveal the past to them one day?) Don’t torment yourself with ideals that you aren’t likely to encounter. The, now, very occasional tricolor still lifts the spirit: inclusion and union connected by peace and hope. (That was in another life, ‘long time passing’).

February 10 (Tuesday). 6.30 am. Breakfast. 7.00 am: A communion. 8.00 am: A review of yesterday’s work before commencing the second track.

9.00 am: An ambulation prior to a haircut. (My hairdresser has been suffering sleepless nights too.) The raking sunlight set against a grey cloud bank. Vitality meets inertia. 10.00 am: Correspondence and studiology. I returned to mixing. Once the production-profile of the opening track is finalised, those that come after tend to follow suit. However, the first can take far longer to resolve than half-a-dozen of the others put together.

1.30 pm: The ideas that I’d conceptualised on February 3, in relation to the opening track, worked well in practice. They may just as well not have. Nevertheless, I suspect that I’m getting better at carrying the sounds around in my head. 3.30 pm: A purposeful visit from my friend, the artist Susan Forster. We discussed the current political scandals arising from the Epstein files, Minimalism and industrial manufacture, the procurement of different types sourdough bread in Aberystwyth, and the vexed question of how much explanation about an artwork an audience requires. 7.30 pm: My weekday evenings are set aside for writing the track texts, during the next few weeks.

February 11 (Wednesday). 7.00 am: A communion. 8.15 am: A family celebration. 8.45 am: Studiology. A review of yesterday’s mix, and the commencement of the second track. Element-by-element, equalisation and volume were adjusted subtly. The aim was to balance individualisation with totality and coherence.

In the background … I’d been tasked to eke out a book on portrait drawing techniques for one of my daughters-in-law. I assiduously avoided any publication that advocated drawing from photographs. Translating a three-dimensional object (such as a head) onto a two-dimensional plane — in contrast to translating a two-dimensional image onto a two-dimensional plane — represents a colossal feat of abstraction and visual processing. It’s so darned hard that you want to give up, sometimes. But if you demand more of yourself than do others, and keep turning up for the challenge daily, then, a command over your means will certainly ensue. Practise! Just practise!

12.00 pm: During a pause (to rest my aching ears), I looked-over routes and accommodation in Ireland, in anticipation of a summer holiday there. I’ve not been to the country since 2017. My first visit was ten years earlier, in 2007, when I presented a paper at a conference hosted by University College Cork. I’d been raised within a Welsh Protestant and Calvinistic mould. While, as I argued in my first book, The Art of Piety: The Visual Culture of Welsh Nonconformity (1995), chapels in Wales weren’t devoid of images and other accessories to worship (as it had been popularly assumed), I wasn’t fully prepared for the extent of Roman Catholicism’s visualization of religion, in churches, wayside shrines, and commercial and domestic windows. Remarkable!

February 12 (Thursday). 6.00 am: A 17th-century Flemish morning.

6.30 am: I value walking in the hours between night and day — that uncertain interlude and antepast to the coming day. From my home, I walked upwards and north-eastwards to the university campus, past the National Library of Wales and Hugh Owen Library, to the halls of residence at Cwrt Mawr (where I lived as a postgraduate student in 1982-3). 7.45 am: A Security team, wearing iridescent ‘hi-visibility’ yellow vests, moved with stealth from block to block, conducting fire drills. Against the staccato nasal blare of the alarm, students dribbled out through the front doors like dozy cattle, still in their pyjamas. For some, anytime before 8.00 am is still nighttime.

8.30 am: Studiology. On with track 4. ‘Pare-down, John!’, the inner-tutor exhorted. Editing sound (or images, for that matter) is not unlike editing text. The word ‘edit’ can be traced back to the Latin ‘editus‘, meaning to ‘bring forth’. Thus, long before the word became associated with revising and preparing a text for publication, it summoned concepts allied to liberation and birth. Editing enables the work’s meaning to be released from the encumbrance that stifles clarity and immediacy. Which is exactly what I’m endeavouring to achieve in regard to ‘Water Music’, this morning.

1.45 pm: Ruthless midwifery was called for: breaking the waters, contracting the elements, labouring to excise, birthing, and severing the new born’s cord from its previous condition.

February 13 (Friday). 7. 15 am:

7.45 am: A re-ambulation to the campus via the cafe at the local hospital, where they offer a more than reasonably-priced hot chocolate and pain au chocolat. On campus, at the side of the Physical Sciences complex, is a mosaic mural about which I can’t (yet) find any definitive information. It’s a striking and very successful example of (I suspect) 1950s-60s Modernist public art. The influence of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings is pronounced. So, too, Naum Gabo’s swirling forms, evoking the pitch and troughs of an oscilloscope’s sine-wave formation in motion. The cosmos and chaos, sound and image, stasis and movement, in reciprocal tension.

9.15 am: Studyology, Writing. 10.00 am: Studiology. Track 5. It, too, is a hymn. Why had I not seen this before? Perhaps because I’d not written about it before. 11.30 am: Track 6. Before finalising track 5, I wanted to contrast, and work on, the two compositions in parallel. The latter is the most doom-laden drone I’ve ever conceived. A very different sound world to that of track 5. Comparing unlike with unlike yields unlikely insights, regarding distinction and complementary. 3.30 pm: I pushed into track 7: ‘The Fall’.

On another shore.

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