9.00 am: Can’t get warm! Some wearisome admin to dispatch before orientating my mind studioward. Oh! New cables! (I’m too excitable.) I reviewed the Bethel compositions with an ear to quality control. Am I fully persuaded? What jars? What doesn’t fit? What fails to impress? Why does a particular work fall short of the best that I’ve done? And what, then, are the attributes of my best work? After some technical manoeuvring with microphones and channel routing on the digital interface (all necessary extensions of the knowledge base), I got down to something creative: pairing back, shrinking, and allowing sounds to do their work unadulterated.

11.00 am: The ‘chaos’ composition had to be undone before it could be reconceived in simpler terms. The making of art is not for the squeamish. On with the cans, for a closer scrutiny. In the background, the Esther to Job discs were being digitised. I’m aiming to complete the whole Bible by the end of the Christmas vacation. Once the whole composition had been reconfigured, I worked my way backwards from its end to the beginning, optimising each component sample along the way. (An artwork need not be the best you’ve ever made, but it must be the best it can be.) As a result, the whole was made more brutal and confrontational.

Thereafter, I reviewed the ‘Psalm 23 collage’ [working title] ‘musicality’ [working], and ‘Intervals’ compositions.

2.00 pm: Its useful to play compositions that were designed to be a part of a suite in different orders relative to one another. That way, I’m able to hear the connecting tissue that binds them together (or not, as the case may be). I made a compressed version of the ‘chaos’ mix in order to push its aggressiveness to an audible limit, and to enhance its presence over all. I wasn’t sure of the outcome … which I always consider to be an intriguing and challenged response. The work may now be at the boundary of my aesthetic. One should sometimes venture to the edge of the known world.

Sundown:

I cut the ‘Psalm 23 collage’ to the first line only: ‘The Lord is my shepherd’. This was an example of radical action. There’re few things sweeter than succinctness. Emboldened by the result, I vowed that nothing that was good– as opposed to either very good or excellent – was safe from the chop. ‘Good’ is rarely good enough.

7.30 pm: I completed the intercessions for Sunday morning’s Holy Communion service. Then, I took the MacMillan’s 1-minute read reading of Psalm 23 and cut it up into sixty 1-second segments. This enabled me to reconfigure or disrupt sense into a discontinuous ‘nonsense’. I drew the order from sixty-numbered playing cards, and assembled the fragments in their new relations on the editing software:

9.45 pm: Cease!