Track Count

As of just over an hour ago, the completed track count stands at six, with two verses and a chorus's worth of vocals to do on the seventh track. Album looks like this:

Cant be wont be
Mary
Delay
Blank Space
Power Cut
These are my catechisms
Suburban Paranoia


Blank Space was finished this evening, brand spanking new (the very first note is only 5 days old) and Power Cut is a produced version of a solo piano piece I wrote some time ago (18 months, maybe?) which I broke my personal best with by recording and producing in the space of 2 and a half days, with pretty much no sleep or food.

I am knackered.

Current listening: Homogenic - Bjork.

Track 5

That's what I'm up to, for those of you who are convinced that I must have been slacking. Partly, you're right - I've had a few weeks off in the last 3 months due to illness/depression/general laziness, but I've also been working. Finished track 4 yesterday, and am currently reworking Mary, which I'd already recorded and hated, which will be track 5. The album currently looks like this:

Can't Be Won't Be
[Mary]
Comfort
These Are My Catechisms
Suburban Paranoia


I've also done my first live performance of the new material, which went extremely well. I'll be doing anoher on July 9th at The Vic Inn in Derby, alongside longtime pals The Carter Manoeuvre.

From now on I shall endeavour to update you briefly, with what I'm working on that day adn which album I'm setting things up to (mic placement, dahling).

Today:

Mary [Version 2] & DVD backups of completed work (taking aaages)
CD in the HIFI: Frou Frou ~ Details

i havent forgotten you

i'm just taking some time to think.

in the meantime, i'm joining in with the book reading competition. remember, i believe there are more works of great literature outside the 19th century 'classics' than there are within them.

Bold for ones I've read
Underline for ones I've read part of
Italic for ones I want to read

Top 100 Overall

1. Pride and prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings , JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockinbird, Harper Lee
6. Bible - i reckon i've read all of it over the years.
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (8th equal)
9. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (8th equal)
10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
11. Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
19. The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenneger - just purchased this
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll - Blegh.
30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S Lewis
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.Lewis
37. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh, A A Milne
41. Animal Farm, George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
45. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
47. Far from the Maddening Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
50. Atonement, Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
52. Dune, Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikrem Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
62. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
66. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses, James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal, Emil Zola
79. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession, A S Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Alborn
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
94. Watership Down, Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Happy New Year

Tonight, I discovered My So-Called Life. Thanks to youtube, I'll be investigating the other 18 episodes over the coming week or so.

Limbo Ponderings

My left ear continues to be bloked and has also begun to swell up quite considerably whilst itching like a mother. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might well be infected (shock!). Fortunately, I'm seeing th nurse for the syringing tomorrow, so it should get sorted.

Meanwhile, I have discovered how much of my life rotates around my hearing and I'm so bored I'm crawling out of my skin. There's only so many DVDs I can watch.

However, I was thinking today about something so I thought I'd share it:

I once read a Tori Amos interview which said that she fell in love with her husband when he came in to engineer the recording of Boys For Pele, which is a record all about her breakup with her former boyfriend (Eric Rosse) whom she was with for seven years. Assuming this is true (there seem to be a lot of Tori inconsistencies in interviews), I find the concept of Marcus (the engineer) falling in love with this woman whilst spending every day wading through her passion for someone else quite bizarre. But I love the image.

The Challenge: Officially on hold

So, I havent really updated properly since Tuesday. I have a very good reason. I haven't been working. Because I've gone deaf.

Now, this really really freaks me out, but I'm fairly certain it's temporary. I've been undergoing treatments leading up to an ear canal irrigation procedure on Monday 18th, and last Monday my requirements changed from warmed olive oil to ear drops. They seem to be causing some residual blockages in both ears, which make hearing things in depth (and in crowded atmospheres) difficult. However, today, I got a really itchy left ear and accidentally managed to push the newly soft wax deeper into my ear and am now totally deaf in my left ear. I'm kicking myself, and not realy enjoying the experience.

However, it means I can't trust my hearing for mixing or setting up mics, so I'm taking a fairly obligatory break. :( Hopefully the procedure on Monday will fix everything completely. I'm terrified of being stuck like this.

The Challenge: Day Nine

As I've finished for the day, I thought I'd update on the actual challenge day, rather than tomorrow. I have spent 5 hours trying to get a good piano take, fairly unsuccessfully due to a number of stupid things I have done, the worst of which was probably neglecting to eat at the right time. The others include recording 12 minutes of nothing because I forgot to switch from playback to record on the desk and, I've just realised, mic'ing the hammers and wondering why I get an annoying clicking noise during the quiet moments.

I'm still pretty pissed about what happened on Sunday, but I'm fighting the urge to just give up and am currently listening to the track (which I really should start referring to by its name at some point). I have decided that the instrumental mix is a bit weak, but it was my first attempt at any mix ever, so I'm not holding it against me. I actually suspected this on Saturday, but couldnt face spending another 10 hours remixing it. I think that's what I foretell for my future tomorrow.

So much for not being time consuming.

The candles I bought which I only burn when working on this track are about 5/6 gone, which constitutes, according to the packaging, just under 40 hours. I'm betting they'll be gone before I finish mixing this.

The Challenge: Day Eight

I wake up still fairly upset over the mistreatment of both myself and my work from the previous day, as well as totally knackered due to very late night, as previously mentioned. My irrational emotional side cannot face working on, or even listening to, the track I'd been working on, so I resolve to do something else entirely. I used my time to hunt down some more mix stands with which to record piano more effectively (I hoped) and do some much needed piano practice. Not, I might hasten to add, because I needed to /practice/ but because playing the piano is the only way for me to get through any kind of emotinoal trouble, especially the kind caused by previously mentioned persons.

Monday is my film night, so I go out and relax with some truely atrocious independent short films and, fortunately, some good ones.