December 19, 2017

8.15 am: A communion. It’s not given to us to understand all things at all times. More often than not, we have to be content with witnessing only the stirrings on the surface of the water. And what’s apparent may not be decisive. Beneath, there’s an undertow that moves in the contrary direction to the surface current – a return flow that compensates for, rather than contradicts, what’s evident: ‘Judge not according to appearance’. Any sailor worth their salt would say ‘Amen!’ to that. Therefore, we ought not to be too discouraged when things appear go wrong and, likewise, too optimistic when things seem to go right. Few things in life are straightforward. And in that there’s hope.

Yesterday evening’s glorious sunset gave way to an unalloyed and uneventful greyness and faint rain today – appropriate for the day of a funeral:

9.00 am: I listened again to the composition that I’d worked on yesterday, as Jeremiah was digitised in the background. Small adjustments were made to the stereo field, and to the volume and apparent loudness of levels within and between tracks. The introduction was too abrupt. There needed to be as quiet a passage at the beginning, as there was at the end. These passages represent (not a word I’m entirely comfortable with), in the context of dementia, moments of calm and lucidity in between bouts of angry disorientation. 12.00 pm: I mixed down the composition for review later in the day. How do I package and release this suite of compositions? I’m reluctant to include it on The Talking Bible, The Aural Bible III, album because the source material doesn’t derive from the Scourby recordings. The suite may need to be presented as a discrete, small, and streamable album under the Royal Commission’s banner.

12.30 pm: I walked to Holy Trinity Church for the first of two funerals this week, each for one of our members:

Eulogies reveal a richness, uniqueness, and complexity to people whom you thought you knew, but clearly didn’t. There was a considerable turnout. One measure of a person’s good character is the number of people who still hold them in their affections after they’ve gone. Most loved are often those who loved most.

2.30 pm: I reviewed the morning’s work and the ‘Bartimaeus’ [working title] track from the developing The Talking Bible set. This track works effortlessly as the spoken word alone. It requires no addition. The only other composition that has succeeded as economically is ‘Double Talk’, from The Bible in Translation album. I returned to the morning’s composition armed with a strategy for further simplification and clarification (which is always the outcome of the former):

7.30 pm: My website needed updating. Some Petula Clark in the background. There’s a certain melancholic frame of mind that finds solace only in love songs from the 1960s – the music that played on Rediffusion radio when I played in front of the fire as a child. Since Mr and Mrs Fripp had sent me their Christmas greetings today, I played his and Brian Eno’s An Index of Metals (1975) to close the evening.

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