January 28, 2019

8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: A review of the week ahead, the preparations thereunto, a cull of my inbox, and an adjustment to attitude in anticipation of a return to teaching tomorrow:

A disturbed night’s sleep. There’d been a power cut that’d set of alarms, and powered up the photocopier on its return: a ‘wwhhhhhh r r r r eeeeow’, came from the landing, around 4.00 am. Sleep deserted me after that. I’ve been experiencing dreams about frustrated travel. In the first, I was on a ferry that failed to dock in order for passengers to disembark. In the second, I was running for a train that had no obvious destination. What’s afoot?

10.10 am: Another power cut scuppered my iMac and the work in progress which hadn’t saved. [Sigh!] Why can’t Apple install a back-up battery in their desktop devices, that would cut-in on such occasions? The start of a week is always so bitty – full of staccato movements towards something more substantial.

11.00 am: More tea (and a slice of cake) and studiology. I returned to the modulated samples of the 2 Corinthians, Chapter 10, and verse 4 text, and extracted what sounded useable. Twenty-one, in all.

1.30 pm: After lunch, I began inserting the modified samples, without any expectations that any would fit. I dumped them along the compositional line, arbitrarily, to begin. There’re times when the fortuitous placement proves to be the best ‘undecision’ one can make. It became apparent, very early on, that the voice samples were the background, rather than the foreground, of the composition. They needed to be either barely audible (present, but not noticeable) or else indecipherable, when more prominent. When to the fore and comprehensible, the samples made the composition sound too ‘figurative’. By 4.30 pm, as the sun began to set, ‘Whetstone/Cormorant’ gelled.

At that point, it was worthwhile putting the piece aside in order to begin a new one.

7.30 pm: Back to admin, and preparations for tomorrow’s classes and tutorials, before a return to writing for the final lap of the evening.

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January 26, 2019
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