7.45 pm. I greet each day with expectation. Not that I customarily anticipate the arrival of either a surprising event, welcome news, or good fortune. Rather, it’s in the hope that something might change in me, and for the better: a new realisation, repentance, resolve, or restitution. 9.00 am. First, a review of the work so far. The composition has established a mood that’s appropriately forbidding and uneasy … and an atmosphere (in the scientific sense of them term) that evokes a turbulent miasma.  I’m conscious of seeing, in my mind’s eye, the scene at a great distance, from way above; a God’s-eye view, perhaps. The aim, next, was to construct an ascension motif. I knew what I didn’t want: a sonic construction that sounded like a spaceship taking off in a sci-fi B movie. (Gravitas and dread are my watchwords.) If my perspective is at a remove, then my awareness of Moses’s ascent would be as one of a number of  incidents within the general prospect. Therefore, the motif needed to be fully integrated within, rather than a feature of, the soundscape:

11.30 pm. Having ‘saved’ the composition, I discovered that the last two tracks I’d made (representing the ascent) hadn’t. (Sigh!) But I’ve learned never to curse minor misfortunes of this order. In redoing what is undone, the outcome is often far better. As was the case on this occasion.

There is a short period of silence once the ascension has reached its climax: the silence of a vigil, of awaiting. Returning to Close Encounters of a Third Kind; this absence of incident is reminiscent (and no doubt more than subliminally influenced by) a dramatic interval between the departure of the small alien crafts and the arrival of the mothership on the mountain — one of the most visually and acoustically sublime (in the 19th century aesthetic definition of that word) moments in cinema. Thus ends the first section of the composition. In the next, Moses will have his own close encounter with Yahweh. Bring on the mothership!

1.40 pm. A change of activity. (It’s unproductive to spend too long of any one endeavour.) I returned to the My Heart is Broken in Three project. Having procured me three 10-inch, 78-rpm records, I can now prepare their surfaces to receive the fragments of the broken one:

The centres of the records were then masked in readiness for a ‘spray-job’ in the next few days:

Mid afternoon, I received a review of the R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A (2015) CD by Ed Pinset of The Sound Projector Music and Radio Show. However confident one might be about the integrity of a composition, it’s encouraging, and in this case illuminating, to read the approbation and interpretation of another. (Especially, of someone in the know.)

On and off, during my unmasking activities, I finalised the album (more of EP, really) notes for I saw her Soul Fly Across the Clouds. 5.00 pm. An end to my labours, and the beginning of an evening with my wife.