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Dean View Drop Down
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 08 2016 at 04:11
bits - 2005

th-th-th-that's all folks


After the first year of creating music as the cacophony of light I produced a sampler album comprising of tracks from each of the albums I'd released in the previous year. This compilation I called some because it was some of the music I had written. The following year saw the creation of more albums and most of those contained long tracks that had to be edited to squeeze onto the previous year sampler, this album I called more because it was some more music. 

In January 2005 I looked back to 2004 and realised that having released 25 albums of 102 tunes covering over 24 hours of music producing a sampler album from that would require a bit of creativity. The solution I came up with was mix excerpts of all the albums into one larger piece of music, like a musical patchwork quilt. This album I called bits because it was some more bits of music. [The 2005 sampler was going to be a similar rewritten and re-recorded medley called done as it was some more bits done, but the ennui that caused me to stop writing music in 2006 also affected the production of that album so (amusingly) it never got 'done'.]

So bits seamlessly welds together a years' worth of music into  a single 75 minute epic piece of continuous music. [Re-splitting this into shorter tracks for Bandcamp isn't going to happen]. The 3-minute excerpts are arranged thusly:

00:00:00.00 00:02:45.00 (a bit of) geometric
00:02:45.00 00:05:45.00 (a bit of) derivative
00:05:45.00 00:08:45.00 (a bit of) quantify
00:08:45.00 00:11:45.00 (a bit of) reflects
00:11:45.00 00:14:45.00 (a bit of) rookery
00:14:45.00 00:17:45.00 (a bit of) ffrantic
00:17:45.00 00:20:45.00 (a bit of) ambivalent
00:20:45.00 00:23:45.20 (a bit of) kinesis
00:23:45.20 00:26:45.00 (a bit of) masks
00:26:45.00 00:29:45.00 (a bit of) shadows
00:29:45.00 00:32:45.00 (a bit of) benign
00:32:45.00 00:35:45.00 (a bit of) impasse
00:35:45.00 00:38:52.22 (a bit of) humdrum
00:38:52.22 00:41:45.00 (a bit of) untitled
00:41:45.00 00:44:45.00 (a bit of) carousel
00:44:45.00 00:47:45.00 (a bit of) laze
00:47:45.00 00:50:55.00 (a bit of) omni
00:50:55.00 00:53:45.00 (a bit of) nonentity
00:53:45.00 00:56:45.00 (a bit of) trilithon
00:56:45.00 00:59:51.00 (a bit of) voracious
00:59:51.00 01:02:45.02 (a bit of) xolotl
01:02:45.02 01:05:45.00 (a bit of) yaponcha
01:05:45.00 01:08:45.00 (a bit of) zephyrus
01:08:45.00 01:11:44.24 (a bit of) fluidic
01:11:44.24 01:15:00.00 (a bit of) landscapes


download: SOD2004COMP - bits: www.mediafire.com/?17ida9625i96rzf  - 99Mb



Edited by Dean - January 08 2016 at 04:17
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 17 2016 at 04:12
And here it is:   the-cacophony-of-light.bandcamp.com/
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Points: 7951 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 17 2016 at 13:37
I just downloaded your album, Pilgrim, and am listening to it now. Have gotten through to The Valley of Humiliation so far. It sounds really fabulous. Nice ambient textures, very classy; matches the tastefulness and impact of your album covers. No track that I've disliked. The Wicket Gate was my fave so far; looking forward to a second listen later.

Whoa, I'm now up to Valley of the Shadow of Death. It really has some nice transitions at about 2:00 into it.
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Points: 20844 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 18 2016 at 11:03
Listening to Edge now, nice stuff, well done.
Ian

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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 25 2016 at 09:02
Just receive a proof copy of 'edge' from Amazon:

Which all looks rather spiffing.

It's strange. While I've heard this (literally) hundreds of times, I've never really listened to it as a 'listener' until today. 

Understandably I have listened to tracks and sections of this album rather a lot over the years but mostly through headphones and rarely from beginning to end in one sitting. When you're producing an album you tend to focus on the detail and don't really take in the whole thing until the final mix and mastering. Yet even there you home-in on detail such as the EQ and balance, the seamless transitions between tracks and all those other nuances that differentiate "a finished album" from a random collection of tracks. And you never get that "hearing it for the first time" feeling you get with listening to other people's albums.

Yet now I sit here writing this post while "edge" blasts out of my hi-fi speakers and it is like hearing it afresh for the first time. And I really like it. Not in a "I like this music I've made" kind of way, but in a "oh, I actually like it even though I made it" kind of way...if you get what I mean. (do other people get this with their own music?)....



...anyhoo...



...I don't know yet whether I'll publish this album on Createspace or not yet as to get Amazon to sell it (at zero profit for me) requires giving them my tax details and (frankly) I'm not interested in doing that. (at zero-profit they'd sell for $9.00, all of which Amazon pockets, and that seems a little expensive to me).

I am however considering getting 50 copies duplicated by one of the many online dupe-houses instead, they'll make 50 Digipaks for around £130, which works out at £2.60 each  ($3.70 or 3.50€)... at those prices I can afford to give copies away to anyone who is prepared to pay for the postage... (or I can hide them away in the back of a wardrobe for prosperity).
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Points: 67407 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 25 2016 at 17:14
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

And here it is:   the-cacophony-of-light.bandcamp.com/

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Points: 367 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2016 at 00:12
Dean - I went looking for (and found!) your stuff on Soundcloud (because I prefer that format), and was again looking at the striking images you have as album covers.  You may have already answered this at some point, but do you do all the artwork yourself?  It's so professional-looking.

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Yet now I sit here writing this post while "edge" blasts out of my hi-fi speakers and it is like hearing it afresh for the first time. And I really like it. Not in a "I like this music I've made" kind of way, but in a "oh, I actually like it even though I made it" kind of way...if you get what I mean. (do other people get this with their own music?)....


Yes very much so.  I think I would like my own music better if I hadn't made it.  I'm in too deep.
https://www.facebook.com/JamieKernMusic
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2016 at 01:46
Originally posted by Star_Song_Age_Less Star_Song_Age_Less wrote:

Dean - I went looking for (and found!) your stuff on Soundcloud (because I prefer that format), and was again looking at the striking images you have as album covers.  You may have already answered this at some point, but do you do all the artwork yourself?  It's so professional-looking.
Hi Jamie,

Yes, I produce all my own artwork, and I approach producing album cover art in more or less the same way as I do in producing an album of music - which is equal measures of creativity, ingenuity, technique and technical know-how. Sometimes I enjoyed making the cover more than the album itself, sometimes the cover was closely linked to the music and sometimes it wasn't.

I also produced a few non-Cacophony of Light album covers where I didn't have complete artistic control. Here is one I just happened to have the various development stages lying around for. The following is adapted from a page on my old Silence of Darqness website:

Anatomy of an Album Cover - A Tear Away From Sadness


The band in question had an EP of recordings and wanted some artwork. They had a number of disparate ideas of their own and wanted me to pull them all together into cohesive theme that reflected their music. Some years before I had bought some glass-fronted boxes from Ikea that I distressed & painted then filled with found and made objects:
And they quite liked the idea of using that box on each page of the booklet, filled with various images and pieces of memorabilia, so I photoshopped it down to a square format and produced this:
For the cover itself they wanted a picture of keyboardist splashing around in river (don't ask), not wanting to photograph a wet-clothed 18-yo young lady myself I sent her and her boyfriend off to the river with my camera and awaited the results. Unfortunately the many attempts at this they tried just looked silly so the idea was abandoned. However, I quite liked a close-up shot from one of the photographs:
That I then tinted red and added to the box:
But the whole "head in a box" thing looked wrong, and the young lady's nose-ring looked like a dribble of snot...

So I discarded the box, changed format to gate-fold cover, cropped her face even closer and mirrored it, airbrushed out the nose-ring and then superimposed the river over the whole thing:

Finally, the original box was re-added (though more subtly), various pieces of memorabilia and snippets of song lyrics added, and the image darkened even more:
...the low-quality of that doesn't do justice to the detail in the artwork, so here is a close-up:
and this is the final folded cover complete with an old version of the band logo:


(note: this was effectively "Try 4" as getting 7 people to agree on album cover is a trial of Sisyphusian proportion - they even got me to change this again for the 2nd pressing of the EP, but I prefer this one).

The box idea was used more successfully for the lyric sheet:



Edited by Dean - June 02 2016 at 02:01
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Points: 367 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2016 at 20:29
^Really cool, Dean.  I like both final products, particularly the lyric sheet, but also very much the level of texture on the cover.
https://www.facebook.com/JamieKernMusic
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Points: 16913 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2016 at 21:06
Having just an inkling of how demanding your job is, based on what you've told me, where do you find the time for so much detailed artwork on top of 52 albums, car fetishes, building turntables, and the family?   Do you sleep?  Have a source for great cocaine?  Asgard technology?*



* Asgard Time Dilation Device - The Asgard have mastered technology for the alteration of time. Their devices are quite sophisticated, capable of slowing time down to a factor of 10,000 at a radius of 0.16 light years. (Approx. 938,511,360,000 miles. In total surface area of the distortion it would be 2,767,126,034,079,528,074,241,638.4 square miles.) Replicators made modifications to the Asgard device, intended to contain the Replicator species for several years, to speed up time by a factor of 100. The device consisted of a large boxy shaped object, composed of neutronium. Another time dialation device (Unknown if Asgard or not, it's design was radically different that the first.) was gifted by the Tau'ri by Kvasir in order to seal off a distortion that was sending alternate members of SG-1 to an alternate reality. This device consisted of a silver sphere around one foot in diameter, supported by four silver spindly legs at right angles around it. It was never used as intended, and was most likely returned to the Asgard. 








Edited by Finnforest - June 03 2016 at 21:07
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Points: 35762 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2016 at 21:32
It takes amazing talent, creativity and brilliance.

I'm listening to Edge now and loving it.
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Points: 65249 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2016 at 21:48
Oligarch on here, great stuff -
"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."   -- John F. Kennedy
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2016 at 04:46
Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:

Having just an inkling of how demanding your job is, based on what you've told me, where do you find the time for so much detailed artwork on top of 52 albums, car fetishes, building turntables, and the family?   Do you sleep?  Have a source for great cocaine?  Asgard technology?*
LOL The trick is to not do them simultaneously. I haven't touched the turntable for over a year because I was converting the carport to a covered outdoor eating area and generally making the house presentable in preparation for Alex's wedding last summer, since then I've built a summerhouse and repainted three sheds, the carport inside and out, and painted the summerhouse. Every month or so I think, right - the turntable, but there's always something else that needs to be done. My new Novation keyboard is still in the box it came in 6 months ago...

But yes, I sleep, but not in the conventional sense - I have two short sleeps - I doze for an hour or so in front of the TV, then wake for a couple of hours where I do computing and writing type things, and then between 2 and 3 am go to bed for between three to four hours. If I cannot shut-down I will stay up all night but that only happens occasionally. I used to think this peculiar behaviour unusual but it seems it isn't, it's a combination of three things - having a night-owl circadian rhythm, having a segmented sleep pattern, (which is apparently more natural than an 8-hour single sleep), and having to conform to the 'standard' 8-5 working day imposed on me by those irritatingly up-beat, annoyingly bright-eyed "morning-people"... the selfish fascist bCensoredds. 

But either way I'm rubbish first thing in the morning so if anyone wants to "put one over on me" then that's the time to do it (but bear in mind that dullness is relative and I will only get sharper as the day progresses). Wink


btw, here is the 2nd edition cover for A Tear Away From Sadness:
...the band didn't think "red" was suitable for a metal album (they really really baulked at my earlier suggestion of making it washed-out white ...) so wanted me to make it more "gothic" - I still think they were wrong but the customer gets what the customer wants, even when it's wrong.


[There is currently a crow, a rook, a magpie and a jay in my garden ... I imagine that in Hampshire folklore this marks the presage to some superstitious nonsense but it looks more like 'Reservoir Corvidae' from my first novel Darqlands, it just needs a raven and a chough to turn up - oh, wait - a woodpecker's arrived... damn, my camera's on the telescope. mutter-mutter-mutter]


...the thought of a brain like mine on drugs is probably the scariest thing I can imagine. As you can probably tell, I don't need drugs and I have no desire to get out of my head, (it's the best place I know to be). I don't even get drunk now because I hate the slowing effect it has on my thought processes.


Edited by Dean - June 04 2016 at 06:47
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Points: 16913 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2016 at 10:20
< Note to self:  Dean most vulnerable in very early AM.  >    LOL


I quite agree about the Red, I like it much better personally.  I would also remove the text and make the band name smaller if it was my band.  Not a fan of text on my cool album covers as it distracts from the full impact of the image(s).  It really is a gorgeous work. 

The birds are quite active around here as well, we have a pair of hawks in the hood and have named them Myrtle and Mosely. 
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2016 at 11:43
^ I managed a small victory in not having the album title on the cover (I put it in the clear side-window of the tray - still visible from the front but not actually part of the cover), but could do nothing about the logo. It was hard enough to read the size it was so making it smaller was out of the question (and it took me 4 years to get them to change it to something less "black metal"). I regarded the lyric text as part of the design so it doesn't detract for me.




...we have a pair of buzzards that I occasionally see rising on thermals (these are the hawk-like European ones - not those turkey vulture things you have)
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Points: 367 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 12 2016 at 22:26
You have more hours in a day if you're not sleeping 1/3 of it away (a pattern which I also follow), but what you manage to accomplish in those hours is still astounding.  I suspect that I personally need more complete down-time than you (where I do nothing useful, but am also not asleep).

I also agree - the original red was better.  But considering what they asked you to do, I think it's about as good as it could get.
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