8.15 am. I wrote emails, related to several undertakings this week, and aimed at keeping collaborators and facilitators in the loop. 8.45 am. After a little postgraduate admin and further shameless self-promotion on Twitter, I headed for the sound studio to test the equipment that I’ll be using this afternoon to record. My other task this morning was to remix the three circuit-bending tracks, collectively titled Open (which I’d composed in 2014), and commute them from my Studium site to the ‘John Harvey: Sound’ domain:

I did the same with the TestDrones series, while fielding more postgraduate admin and overdue responses to research correspondence. 12.30 pm. An early lunch.

1.30 pm. A Research Committee, sub-committee meeting to confirm the research postgraduate report forms. Fiddly bits remain. 2.20 pm. Off to the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales to set up my recording equipment in their sound-proof booth:

Mr Timothy Cutts read the Second Commandment from the King James Version of the Bible, and Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, from the William Morgan version. The recordings took only a short time to complete. The booth holds several technological curiosities from the history of sound recording:

4.15 pm. Home and dry. Now, I need to ensure that the recordings are up to scratch, and also to equalise and compress the capture in readiness for its transfer to vinyl. One of the two recordings needed to be stretched, temporally, in order to be exactly the same length as the other. Thereafter, both recordings were synchronously looped and their stereo field, widened:

6.20 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. The finalisation of three tracks for transfer: synchronous loop, Welsh voice loop, and English voice loop. 8.00 pm. The schematic for the toggle-switches and potentiometers for the Custom RF Stealth Custom arrived from Crimson Guitars this afternoon …

… and so did the Revox A77 Mk IV:

There’s much to learn. When I was 17-years old, manipulating a device like this was second nature to me. Now, I look at it quizzically. It’s as much a piece of engineering as it is of electronics. And, all that tape to spin, spew, and tangle. It’ll be Joe 90 all over again.