8.30 am. Facebookery. One of our MA Fine Art alumni had responded generously to the Strictly No Admittance composition, thus:

I thought that was excellent. I was listening carefully on headphones and I particularly liked how the layers of sound filled the frequency range so well. The high guitar part had a real Robert Fripp feel to it, and it added more to the whole than I might have expected from its relatively small part(s). Lovely sustained overdrive sound too. While I was listening I could picture the exhibition well, but I did find the ending a bit abrupt.

My return:

Thanks … for your encouraging review. Sonically, I had to do much with very little … as Sandra had done in her painting. The abruptness of the end was predicated on two rationale: first, I wanted to include an sound analogy for the uncompromising boundary, or termination, which is the edge or enclosing frame of the canvas support; secondly, the work was premeasured, at 6 minutes, much in the way that painters preordain the measure of their painting when they construct the stretcher frame. (For example, some dimensions of Sandra’s works are 6 feet.) You’re right about modern CD players. They are now so laden with anti skip devices that glitching is almost impossible. (Do you know the work of Yasunao Tone?)

The abrupt end is also anticipated by the guitar drone that cuts off in mid flight at 04:22 into the composition. That dramatic moment in the part needed a response in the whole. There’s always a logic in an artwork to which the maker must succumb.

9.15 am. Slowed by a cold, I dragged myself to the computer and pressed forward with  a small grant application, aided by periodic, hot lubrication:

It always seems so obvious why others should throw vast quantities of money at a project. (Delusional thinking.) Rarely do potential funders see it that way.

Is there a missing element in the ‘Image and Inscription’ artwork as it’s currently conceived? Possibly. In the trialogue of text, sound, and image that informs the composition, ‘image’ is present in absentia only (under prohibition). However, pictures of Moses on Mount Sinai (for example, an engraving of him receiving the commandment that forbade Israel from making a graven mage) could be integrated into the soundscape, sonically, via the process of databending, which I’d dallied with in ‘The Wounded Heart Ministries’:

Lanfranco Giovvani (sculp.), Moses Receiving the Commandments on Mount Sinai, from the series of etchings Biblical Scenes, after the frescoes by Raphael in the Vatican Loggia (1607) (Courtesy of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco)

5.00 pm. Some tasks take all day, and this was one. My eyes burn, throat rasps, cough persists, limbs ache, and head tingles. Enough for today. 6.30 pm. An evening with my (reduced) family.