An uneven night’s sleep; the house had been buffeted by gales and rain until the early hours. 9.00 am: Into the archive. I was looking for a date that I couldn’t recall:

The archive began in 1991, following my father’s sudden death (several years after my mother passed away). As an only child with very few extant relatives, I realised that the history of the family rested on only two shoulders: those of my paternal second cousin (who has compiled an illustrated family history of her side of the family) and my own. The file boxes contain letters, postcards, certificates, leaflets, newspaper cuttings, among other types of material culture – the vestigial presence of my parents’ life and death, and of my childhood and early adulthood. The artefacts have no connecting narrative (other than the one that I speak in my head as I review them), and look as fresh as on the day they were deposited. (Our possessions endure intact, even while we perish.):

My father’s ration book (1953-4)

Ration books seem, now, wonderfully arcane. I remember Dad first showing me this when I was about seven years of age, and the thrill that I experienced not only on touching and seeing something from an age that preceded my own existence but also of incomprehension and delight in the face of the design. With hindsight, its disposition of letters within a grid anticipated artworks that I’d make over forty-years later:

X (Mal. 4.4) (2007) alkyd on board, 100 × 100 cm (King James Version)

Incomprehension has always been, for me, an aesthetic pleasure.

9.20 am: Studiology. The mixdown of the sermon overlay was processed through a compressor/equaliser in order to prepare the recording for public broadcast in the chapel. (In the background, I and II Chronicles were on the turntable deck, and on their way to becoming 0s and 1s.) I returned to the question to which my successful response of late was the wrong answer. (Conversely, it was the right answer to the wrong question.) This project was not intended to absorb a great deal of my time. However, the work had a very different timetable in mind. I shrugged my shoulders and submitted to it. (It would have been unwise not to.) Nevertheless, this prolonged engagement has enabled me to find solutions to ‘The Talking Bible’ project that may not have presented themselves so readily had I been searching within that framework alone. (We sometimes see the solutions to our own problems evinced in the lives of others.)

10.30 am: I took up, once more, the looped sample extracts of the ‘silences’. Can I make a sufficiently engaging composition with this material only? The answer would come only in the doing. With all the loops calibrated at 4 seconds, eliding, superimposing, and transitioning the samples would be, I envisaged, relatively straightforward. I constructed a crude fade in/fade out ‘proof’ to test the hypothesis.

1.45 pm: The initial findings were promising. I extended the the length of the samples to 20-minutes duration, provisionally. How long should a sound composition be? How large should a painting be? The answer is always determined by, on the one hand, the requirements of the content, process, method, and context of manufacture and display, and, on the other hand, the perceptual effect and affect that the artist aims to create. The largest painting that I’ve ever made was just over 3-metres long:

‘My God it’s Full of Stars’ (Ps. 136) (2000) oil on board, 120 × 305 cm (King James Version)

Its size (the artwork was made as two, abutting panels) was dictated by the scale of the circular masks used to make the monochromatic ‘star’ discs, the dimensions of my studio, and my determination to create an extensive and enveloping ‘star-field’:

Whereas, customarily, the visual artist has to fix the size of the support prior to beginning to paint, the sound artist can defer the decision and allow the work to direct its own duration as the composition develops. But there’re limitations; for example, an audio CD can accommodate no more than eighty minutes of sound.

3.30 pm: I returned to my ‘hum’ extraction software and, on this occasion, removed from the recordings only the 50mHz (8 harmonics) content, to serve as the underlying drone for the ‘silences’ composition. This strategy represented the right answer to the right question … at last.

6.30 pm: Practise session. 7.30 pm: Never been content too soon. I repeated the afternoon’s strategy using the full overlaid sermon file, in contrast with the ‘sermon 2’ file only, which had served as the basis of the first attempt. There was no rationale for using one, as opposed to all, of the sermons for this purpose. Rigour is time consuming. The seventh side of I and II Chronicles went round and round in the background:

8.00 pm: I began the process of composition in earnest.