7.00 am: Dark morning:

8.30 am: Studiology. I returned to ‘John Williams’ and to the tune that I’d constructed from parts of seventeenth-century Welsh tunes in reverse — a tune that I’d finalised, and of which made a recording on my phone, while walking into the wind down Plas Crug Avenue some days ago. The capture was intended as an aide memoire. However, on playback, the acoustic impress of the surrounding landscape seemed entirely apposite — summoning a vision of the two travellers’ encounter with the voice of John Williams, as it swelled and faded. I bacon-sliced a slowed-down version of the whole to create the building blocks with which the compositional backdrop would be constructed.

12.00 pm: A ‘virtual coffee’ with a fellow sound enthusiast.

1.00 pm: An MA Exam Board Meeting to finalise the the marks for Exhibition 2. The students were commended for the quality and range of the work, and their fortitude in the face of the pandemic.

2.30 pm: Back to the composition. The samples sounded like the string cello and double bass section of an orchestra. The colouration was reminicient of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock films. This was new territory … for me. 4.00 pm: A first draft of the backdrop was complete. I listened again to some of the earlier compositions.

7.30 pm: A spot of resourcing, before attending to the new pedalboard in the making: tuner > boost > fuzz > gain. Simple and essential.