6.45 am. If I wake anytime after 6.00 am, there’s absolutely no chance that I’ll fall asleep again until 7.00 am. So, I redeemed the time by pushing on with the PowerPoint for the sample art history lecture, which will be delivered on Saturday. I continued on that path until 10.45 am:

Then, a jaunt to the School — returning via town — on a ‘courier’ mission. Aberystwyth is at its worst on days like this. The bland grey pall extinguishes both saturation and contrast:

11.15 am. Back at homebase, I completed the sample lecture’s PowerPoint by the beginning of the afternoon session. I suspect that there’ll be few in the audience, however.

2.00 pm. One must makes one’s own contrasts in life. Thus, in the afternoon, I moved from image work to sound work. Rather than push on immediately with the ‘Image and Inscription’ composition, I returned to the I Saw Her Soul Fly Across the Clouds project. The latter is not a present priority; nevertheless, my instinct told me that I’d find solutions to the former in the process. (A case of aiming at one target while firing at another also.) I built a manual loop from a sample of one of the reversed strings sections. It sounded like the close from either a Mahler symphony or Richard Strauss lieder:

6.30 pm Practise session 1:

7.30 pm. Having fused long and small samples and their iterations together, I bounced them down into an integrated unit. This I did two more times. After which, I had three substantial units of melody (which reminded me of large blocks of granite) that I could manoeuvre unencumbered and with precision. Question: Is this one composition in three parts or three sequential pieces? By 9.30 pm, I’d disentangled the three, one from another. These are the simplest and most elegant statements that I can make with this material. And for that reason, they shall remain so.