DECEMBER 30, 2020.

Holidays. I am off from work. Sometimes I did some work on the album though. Not much. But getting some things ready for final mixdown. Fiddling eternally with microscopic mix changes in the meantime.

Today I intended to go to my space to pay its rent and do some renders (I only have my vocal harmonizer plugin on my old old computer there, and there are two songs that involve it) but I woke up too late. It'll have to be tomorrow then.

The work I need to do right now: check on Three Word Phrase in case there's anything I have to re-record at the very last minute, if it's okay, tie it to Hansom Cab. Check on Target (and maybe see if I can find a different version of the project file somewhere, with the 2018 levels????) and maybe do a whole new mix. I should have a contingency plan ready for Knowage.

Then mastering.

And design.

And....... I don't know what else. I did have a whole plan for physical media but....................................................................... I just want to release the album already. It can be digital only for a while. But I don't think the artwork assets I have accumulated would hold up digitally. This is a problem I would've had to confront regardless of physical/digital disbursement times. Dispersement?

Probably the right move at this point would be to hire an artist and send them the music and see what they come up with. But I kind of don't have any direction in mind, even 8 years on. I have a title and the songs. It's the same mindset that always keeps me from completing anything: "I will know when it is perfect, and I will not release it a moment sooner." This is not a productive mindset. I'm afraid to back myself into visuals I don't like.

Plus my visual vocabulary is pretty limited. I'm more collagey and layouty than anything else. I take pictures when I have to but usually that is when I have an idea that must be photographed. I will not draw. I bought some beautiful fonts designed by Laura Worthington (like a year ago) hoping they would get things moving but it didn't really happen.

Okay, let's do a quick brainstorm on themes.

The album is called Sand and other mysteries but there's only one song that says Sand in it and only one song that kind of alludes to a mystery

• The Ultimatum is about music and sacrifice
• Christmas Car Bomb is about music and anxiety and features Christmas and car bombs
• Chemtrail Mist is about conflict and features a goat, a judge, aliens, and chemtrails
• Calico is about identity and malady and experimentation and has some computer gore imagery and some regular medical imagery
• Bagworm is about sequestering and refusing to evolve and features a bug and a mall cop and a cricket and a rabbit
• The Delano is about imagining a rivalry and it features some presidents
• Ripcord is kind of just a brain operation story couched in nightmare terms, with some nautical legend imagery
• Hansom Cab is a song about breaking into the Coca Cola vault, it has a horse in it
• Three Word Phrase is about anxiety and music and alienation, it features a ukulele and a car alarm and some space imagery
• Karma Camel is I guess more of that but it's kinda just a bunch of wordplay koans. Kind of like the idea of Compound Eye put into motion. Some like, American culture panopticon vibes I guess
• Knowage is the one with a detective, investigating things you suspect your own self did that you were not aware of doing, there's more Christmas in this one, hand, eye, light (classic OK Glass nouns)
• Compound Eye is kind of the manifesto because I wrote it after reading McLuhan in college, there are some images I directly stole from him (mind watchdog)
• Countdown is another song about creative anxiety. Like half the songs on this record are about "I am writing this song because I don't want to do X." What's the imagery? Skydiving or basejumping or something? Same as Ripcord kinda, same as 3WP kinda
• Target is... kind of that again. But with cocktails and guns and yachts.
• The Algorithm is about when it seems that the AI is human and has to call you out. The word sand is in it but it's like an Ozymandias reference. Other references to regality, oh, you know what, I wanna redo my chorus vocals on this song.
• Noise Machine is a diss track to the first half of Noise Machine and other songs like that. Sort of quietly suburban, blend of nature and technology, sounds self-hating/self-referential but I assure you I can name the artist I was calling out and you wouldn't even laugh because it is so played now (it was only slightly less so when I wrote it.) It is about a robot. Has the words "garbage," "glass," "moonlight." I originally wanted to tack Lunar Magic onto the end of this album, or even in the space between acts 1 and 2 of Noise Machine, but it didn't happen. if we do physicals I'll put that there.

What are the images that come up most? I mean, unsurprisingly, glass and light, which like, I've kind of done. I do have the advantage(?) of the artist name being OK Glass now (it was not when I wrote this album) so if I want to really hammer that home, I can, especially in a sand-becomes-glass sort of way. If you want to get stupid and introspective and metaphoric, the songs of Sand coalescing together is part of how the project became OK Glass. But that was unintended and I feel trite just typing it. Um, also sort of themes of decaying electronics. Which I have... also done...

I'm afraid this exercise was not as helpful as I hoped