8.15 am. I continued mastering tracks for upload onto the bonus materials album. Having been made aware of the 2dB imbalance between the sound files’ left hand and right hand channels, it’s now painfully obvious to my ears. My hearing has been tutored. By 10.30 am, the tracks I’d prepared were migrated to their new home. Once the task was completed, the tracks’ trial versions were deleted from the Sound website, which now features only unpublished works:

As TATA Steel put the sale of the Port Talbot plant on hold — in response to rising steel prices globally and government initiatives — I began a series of focal reflections on the forthcoming SteelWorks project. What makes this next project the logical successor to the last (‘Image and Inscription’, that is)? What connects them? Visually, sonically, and viscerally, Mount Sinai (at the time the commandments were given) and the Port Talbot Steelworks are, alike, places of light, heat, deafening noise, dark clouds, and foreboding. When early nineteenth-century topographic artists first attempted to render a visual conception of industry in the age of iron, they were struck by the utter otherness of the new landscape: the theatre of blazing furnaces, billowing plumes of acrid smoke, and the gargantuan machinery of extraction and manufacture:

Thomas Horner, Rolling Mills Near Dowlais (c.1816)

12.15 pm. Off to School to attend a meeting with Professor Meyrick about the new work-allocation model:

All academic staff are working in excess of their allocated hours for teaching. (My commitment is almost double what it should be.) No surprises there. The model will also point-up some significant disparities between departments in this respect. On one level, most monitoring of this nature is entirely fatuous; it either bears little resemblance to the reality that it seeks to depict or else, worse, twists reality to fit its parameters.

2.00 pm. Back at homebase, I decided that one further track should be added to the bonus material: ‘Le Petit Excorcisme’. The website text was then copied to the booklet’s text. I’m anticipating that the record company will be able to install a pdf of the booklet on one of the audio CDs. This will be accessible when the CD is read by a computer.

Evening. Practise session 1.  Back at my sound desk, I ran through the bonus materials website time after time after time in order to assure myself that all the tracks were equally loud, balanced within the stereo field, and without glitch, blip, boop, or sizz. I will continue to experiment with some of the tracks — pushing them towards an extreme, forcing them to collapse in on themselves, and then pulling back towards resolution — tomorrow.

9.30 pm. Practise session 2.