Tuesday 29th

Yes, that's right folks. Haven't I been working hard? Well, yes, kinda. I've spent about 5 hours tonight taking down the cube, putting up the vocal booth of doom (recipe below) and recording Schrodinger's Cat. The title is an injoke that only I get, so far. We'll see if anyone else works it out. Anyway, the track was finished at 3am. While you were all probably cosy and sleeping, musicians were working through the night to try to give you good music to listen to on the tube, in passing at parties, and in the background while you're trying to get laid. Remember them.

For those of you who're interested, the track is /probably/ the least personal on the album (I say probably, because it upsets me more than some of them, so maybe it's very personal and I just haven't noticed yet...) and was semi inspired by this photograph, which has been stuck in my head since I read up on the siege of Sarajevo:

Vedran Smailovic plays in the partial ruins of the National Library

The song isn't about Sarajevo, I hasten to add. But it's definitely about that image. I suppose it's dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, really.


The vocal booth is particularly unstable today. As a domestic goddess, I feel i should supply you with the recipe for your very own Leni-brand homemade (less salt!) vocal booth:. You take 36 square acoustic tiles, three room screens with solid linen partitions and a couple of cans of strong spray adhesive. Mix them all up in a garage over several hours, try not to get glue everywhere (you should remember to wear gloves. I didnt, and that stuff really hurts) and make sure they're pretty much solid once dry. DO NOT, repeat NOT, run out of super strong good glue and thing glue from a DIY shop will do it. It wont. And the tiles on that screen will continuously fall off for the rest of time. Usually at a crucial moment in a take. Once dry, assemble into various shapes in your live room and cover with a heavy double duvet, using a mic stand as a central tent peg. Not recommended for anyone taller or wider than me, because it is officially impossible for them to fit into that kind of space. I know. It's been tried. Boyfriend peering in at me through the gap (which I've assured him is a /door/ not an air vent for tiny people) always makes me feel like a gnome living in a hole in a tree trunk.

I'm officially in love with the chorus of the next track (is that 11 or 12? No idea) but I currently have no other ideas for the rest of it. Which means it's a case of sitting in the studio hacking away at it for hours and hours and hours over the coming week. Which is fine. I just haven't done it in a while. It's currently called "Stand up", but you know me. It'll most likely change.

Monday 28th

I promise my subjects will get more interesting soon. I just don't have much time to put thought into them atm. Following hot on the heels of the disaster of a recording session yesterday, a new song has poked its head above the parapet. Brave little thing. Mind you, it's got some serious teeth, so I can understand why it's not scared. So far I only have a synth part, a strings part, a mean drum beat and a chorus melody/lyric, but it'll come. Boyfriend is taking me out for food and brain space (much needed after 5 hours of this chorus over and over again, and after three days where I basically forgot to eat. Looking skinny in the rib area this morning).

The "B side" i abandoned in disgust yesterday has refused to go away. It's been stuck in my head all morning. I think I may rerecord it, stripped down, and see what I think. Over-production can be a fatal mistake. Oh, and it's been renamed "Schrodinger's Cat". I like it.

Sunday 27th

Track 10/13/15 has been recorded - it's a very simple piece, didn't take long - and I think it's a Bside. Yes, another one. Which makes it officially track 15, not 10. Maybe my heart's not really in this right now. Maybe my head's not. I've been awake for 10 hours and I'm ready to just go to bed now.

Sunday 27th

It's 3am and I am supposed to be asleep, but I was phoned by Boyfriend and am now waaay too awake. And also finding typing in bed at this angle to be tricky. I..m so close to the screen with my glasses off I'm actually noticing the little black criss-cross pattern the gaps between pixels make. Aaah.

Quite a fun day. Assembled a whole new configuration of the Cube in order to write a vague idea I had in my head and wrote something totally different instead, using about a quarter of the equipment I'd set up. Saved me tuning the harp though. It all sort of came out in one go, like Catechisms, and is called "The Day That I Died" and will be track 10/13/15, depending on what you're counting as tracks at this point. To be honest, even I'm confused. I think it makes it track 10, but it doesnt sound like anything else on the album so far. Except maybe The Wall, a bit, and the Catechisms + hidden track suite. Sorry to ruin the surprise there, but the hidden track is listed on the web and gets referred to all the time and you'll notice the super long last track as soon as you put it in the CD player/drive anyway.

I also used both my piano stools (actually, I only have my old harpsichord stool, officially the most uncomfortable stool in the universe, and a drum throne, but close enough) either for sitting on or as rudimentary keyboard stands in the cube, so I've been playing the piano sitting on one of my guitar amps. It's way too short and it makes me feel like a five year old learning on this big, big, big instrument. I wish I'd had a piano as a child. We would have been friends.

Looks like there are going to be posters. I wasnt planning to get then done just yet, because it seems extremely presumptuous that someone might give up their wall space for me, but I've had requests. And not just from my mother. Apparently she wants this in her office. Everyone else wants a copy of this. :D

Right, gonna go sleep briefly and then get to work recording the new track. So long.

Saturday 26th

Dear Felix,

Some years ago, before I moved to Derby, but after Boyfriend moved here, he gave me a copy of the Sandman magazine. In it, somewhere near the back, was a review of a demo of yours, recorded in your bedroom, that was so enthusiastic and heartfelt, I googled everywhere trying to find you, with no luck. "Felix" is a hard name to google. You didn't seem to have a myspace, or at least not one I could find. The next Sandman I was given by my long distance lover had your picture on the cover. Still, I couldn't find you on the big wide web. But I didn't forget.

I built up your music in my head based on that first review. It was astounding. Really. A little Godspeed, a little chemolimo, a little bit of everything good and quiet I'd heard and something else besides. I never seemed to think about you near a computer though - always out walking, or near railways. Somewhere your music would have seemed just right.

Tonight, I found you. I realise I'm a little late to the game. You didn't sound the way i'd pictured you, but you didnt disappoint me. What I learned from TV is astounding.

Thank you for being real after all.

Leni

PS Sorry if this is a bit weird.

http://www.myspace.com/mybeautifulfelix

Friday 25th

I didn't rebuild the borg cube today. And I didn't write anything new. I did, however, finish all the art work AND did a whole bunch of promo shots, which I think are absolutely gorgeous. I'll put a couple at the bottom of this entry, to prove it.

God, I love my camera. Both of them, actually. I took my film one out today, because it was the first proper winter day we've had this year and there is nothing like the clarity of light you get on a cold cold crisp sunny winter's day. It's my favourite kind of light. So I filled up the rest of a film, and I'll develop it over the next few days and up the mini print count. We're only at 50. Need another 50. Couple more night's work in the dark room. much longer trying to track down the right images. Running out of places locally to go. Might need to stage a few things. Maybe I'll drown some more stuff. I like drowning things. (Non-animate things. Not kittens.)

Things I have discovered today:

1. When doing something intricate which you are really focused on, albums seem really short. Think I went through at least 6 tonight. With big gaps between. Must ensure mine isn't so short...

2. Spending ludicrous amounts of money on Proper Studio Photo Backdrops is unnecessary. What you need is a long strip of crepe paper blu-tacked over an amp, sitting on a piano stool, and a bunch of black towels and coats. And a good image editor. Much much cheaper, and pretty good.

3. Digital collages are both hard and frustrating. Especially when the program crashes and loses all your very hard work which you'd saved in the wrong format. Sigh.

4. Seashore and firefox do not like each other. Having both running at once causes at least one to crash. At least.

5. I don't look so ridiculously young without glasses. Actually, I don't look as bad as I thought I did.

6. If you have the ball from your BCR inside your nose and forget to clean it, it gets well ming. Well well well ming.

7. Far too many albums are front loaded.

8. Just because it doesn't look muddy, that doesn't mean it isn't.

9. If you chalk slogans on the side of your house and take photos of them, your neighbours probably WILL think you're crazy. Ah, well. I think they already suspected because of the poi anyway. Especially the LED ones. And the fact that i get so hot doing it that I'll go out in sub zero temperatures in just a vest top. And jeans, obviously.

I think that's it. I will endeavor to get back to the music tomorrow. Once it's February, things will Start Getting A Bit Tight, time-wise. Not that it's anything but a self-imposed time limit. I'm not going to let it affect the quality, don't worry. Just need a motivator for this last stretch.

And, as promised, a photo. I've put the rest in the My Photos section. Oh, and the new artwork designs are up. Beautiful. But we all know what this means. Thats right. Yet another website redesign. Sigh.

Promo shot from tonight.

Thursday 24th

Just isnt the same as "dear diary", no matter how far the technology has come. Diaries are comforting and safe and welcoming. Blog sounds far too clinical. Maybe that's just my skewed judgement. I feel the need for this to be a diary right now.

Last night was full of drama, and not the fun kind. Ended up getting back home at about 6am and was then inundated by texts from 7am onwards from people telling me about Heath Ledger's death, which I'd already read about in the early hours. Heath was always my celebrity male. You know? Girls have a male actor who is their favourite. He was mine. I was kind of touched that people remembered that, and also creeped out that people would instantly focus their sympathies on someone with no actual, real life knowledge of the man. No, that wasn't the drama. I'm not going in to it.

Anyway, means I had about 4 hours of broken sleep before giving up, getting up and going into town to search for items Boyfriend and I had discussed to try to disassociate ourselves from the drama. Sorry for using the word drama so much. I'll try to switch to shenanigans from here.

When it comes down to it, I aint happy with the artwork. Yes, still. So I've scrapped the whole concept in favour of something far less me-naked-in-a-bath. Breathe a sigh of relief Grandma, and all of the rest of you too. I hunted down the items today (took a WHILE) and then took the pictures tonight. Here's a preview of the cover:

Official front cover

Neat, eh?

I should be really tired, but I'm not. I forgot to eat between getting up and about 10pm. I think my body's losing the plot. Gonna tuck it up in bed tonight, and then get it up, feed it porridge and get back to writing some new material. Oh yes. I havent forgotten.

Goodnight, diary.

Tuesday 22nd

Everyone is being very nice to me suddenly, which is in no way a complaint. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has managed to pull me well and truly out of my funk of the last few days and made the last 48 hours totally awesome. Even the mixing was fun, with more than a soupcon of harsh mockery. "So, what's your problem with this mix?" "Well, mostly that it sucks." And so on and so forth. We have our own fun.

The tour is starting to be booked, artwork is pretty much done (keep forgetting to take that final image for the CD! *writes on list of "things to do"). I intend to take another roll of black and white film over the coming week, so I can spend Friday night developing. Friday night is the best Radio 4 night. I know, sad. My Heart and Not Up To It have been mixed properly (My Heart caused a LOT of arguments) which leaves The Wall, Power Cut 84, Blank Space (fixing one issue), Can't Be Won't Be (fixing a couple of issues) and Burn to redo

Best of all, I've ordered my badges! I love having badges. Merch in general pretty much rocks my world, really. :D I may even order stickers. I'll throw in one of each with the ltd edtn version of the album.

In the meantime, my database of reviewers and internet radio is getting pretty big. It's even on a spreadsheet and everything. Yeah. That means it's serious. I'm dying to crack on with the touring/release/promo but obviously I can't do that until the record's done. So, back to the borg cube I go!

Monday 21st

Today is apparently the most depressing day of the year. I think I got there a little early, and am thus a bit ahead of getting past it. Plus, my copy of Inferno is due back tomorrow, so I'll *have* to spend most of the day finishing it. Damn.

Spent a lot of yesterday trying to start something new. Didnt really work. My grand "do a track totally upstairs, you havent done one of them in a while" plan didn't work. Which means it's time to bring out the borg cube again. Whoop. When I wrote "My Heart" I was actually trying to write "a little choral piece", which I may well attempt again. Basically, I really wanted to write Rose Kemp's "Tiny Flower", but without ripping it off, obviously.

In the meantime I've been doing the "dull" "practical" side of this job. You know, designing badges, sorting possible reviewers into spreadsheets, finding venues that'll put on a vaguely weird act like mine without making me bring a minibus of handcuffed friends, etc, etc. And inevitably listening to a whole range of new music along the way, some of which has been totally awesome. Which is nice.

Tomorrow is mixing session number two, if engineer manages to wake up early enough and I dont get cranky. Burn needs redoing because I decided to totally change the structure of the ending (oops). And then it's The Wall and Power Cut 84. Both of which could be either incredibly easy or totally fucking ridiculous. I did very very quick mixdowns of them t'other day so I could hear the "album" so far and try to work out what's missing. So far the answer has been "more songs". My subconscious is so helpful. *roll eyes*

Plus, I'm assured that there will be chai tea in my near future. Dante and chai tea. What could improve upon this?

Pee Es: I got so frustrated with the lack of musical inspiration last night that I headed down to the rock/metal/punk/ska club Boyfriend works at at 1am. Walked in to find him reading the book I'd leant him. As a couple, we're so rock it hurts.

Pee Pee Ess: Myspace's database is lame and doesnt appear to have Sean O'Brien's excellent translation of Inferno listed. If you don't know Sean's work, check it out.

Saturday 19th

Yesterday was not a fun day in Leniland. My mood just seriously crashed. Lack of faith in self and work and so on. Having spent a few hours of the early morning giving myself a stern talking to, I'm back on form today.

Engineer wasn't available after all on Thursday, so boyfriend came over instead and we danced around to Ben Folds and went to ASDA at 1 in the morning. And as I've just discovered that one of Boyfriend's housemates reads this: yes, he was dancing too. And singing. Whilst wearing a dress.

Spent all of yesterday researching possible venues for the big long tour post-album release. It's been a while since I did any gig booking, so it all currently seems a bit intimidating. I'll get over it.

Today so far I've finished the mix of My Heart (and will be replacing the mix that's up this afternoon) and have done very very basic mix downs of all the other tracks so I can put the whole album on my ipod and listen to it through properly.

I also set up a facebook band page:

Leni Ward Facebook!

And if you want to preorder the album, you can click this button:

Preorders are 6 including postage for the limited edition package. This will include 12 art cards, a charm and a unique black and white print made by me in the dark room. To be honest, the preorders are only up in case someone has specific requests for a charm or image so I can put them aside for you.

Tuesday 15th

That's right - the fruits of the epic mixing session (number one - second is scheduled for thursday) are now up to listen to. Unless myspace is still having the brain fart it seems to have been having all day and wont play anything. Maybe it's me.

Anyway, I realised yesterday that I forgot to show you what a mixing desk covered in tiny envelopes looks like. Voila:

Mini Envelopes on a Mixing Desk.

Monday 14th

My body is having a temper tantrum. Yesterday I was woken up by my unconscious fist punching me right in the nose. Ow. To be fair, it was extremely effective in getting me up. Nothing else is really working properly either. It'll pull itself together.

The artwork is totally kicking my ass. I have a beautiful set of designs for everything EXCEPT the front cover. And I have no idea what that's going to look like. It's getting really frustrating. Art cards are complete though. And I spent a few hours this afternoon folding and gluing tiny envelopes for the charms in the Welcome Pack.

Engineer came over and we did about 6 hours of mixing. Very few punches were thrown, but not none. We got two tracks done, or at least one done and another one mostly done. But the mostly done one was a complete bitch, and was most likely the most problematic on the record so far. Should mean the other ones go easier. So that's 4 tracks totally finished to my satisfaction. Nine/Ten to go.

Doing the mixing, working with the equipment again, I started to feel the pull back towards writing more music. Also felt the overwhelming terror of the huge task looming on the horizon. I really really hope this works out. I hope you guys like what I've done.

Sunday 13th

Yes, yes, updates are getting a bit sparse. But honestly, I have very little to report on a daily basis, so I'm hitting you with it all at once. I have entirely redesigned the website, which is basically me sitting in my live room for four days or so eating, coding and watching random tv shows. Finally finished and uploaded it last night, and then spent a couple of days this afternoon fixing all the bits I'd got wrong. Mostly on the charms page. I then spent about 8 hours today designing the motifs for the backs of the art cards and amusing myself by buying an assortment of tiiiny jars of jam. I like tiny things. And giant things. Tiny things are more practical. Selfridges sell a tiny tiny version of tobasco sauce and I keep stopping myself from buying them.

I've also done a whole load more black and white prints in the darkroom - I now have 50 prints I'm happy to hand out, so only another 50 to go. Plus, the milk bath images have been edited, and now look much more abstract and prettier than the originals do. Originals which will never see the light of day. Except when I forget to delete them off the card on my camera, and Boyfriend finds them and laughs. Taking aerial pictures of yourself in a bath of milk is hard, and lends itself to indignities. I think that must be my tip of the day.

In amongst all the visual art, I've had a wonderful day and a half with Boyfriend. We stayed up til 6am talking about all kinds of things and then I got up at 8am to take the car in for its MOT and service. And I wasn't tired. Who needs sleep these days anyway? I was hoping it'd reset my sleeping pattern but, considering it's nearly 3am now, seemingly not.

Engineer and I are planning some massive mixing sessions over the next week, which means I can't really record anything new. So tomorrow will probably be more work on the art cards and possibly heading out into the world to take more pics for later development. I know, thrilling, right? January is a grey grey month, and I am hibernating.

Saturday 5th

How many pints of semi-skimmed does it take to make a nice opaque bath? 12. Guess what I was doing this afternoon. Don't worry, I've not come over all cleopatra-like. I was trying to capture the front cover image I've had in my head and, though it's not exactly the way I'd pictured it, it's pretty close. I have sent it to some people for second opinions, so we'll see. New artwork also means *dah dah dah daaah* new website design, so I'll be working on that some time over the next few days too, no doubt.

I spent all of yesterday photoing too. 879 self portraits on the new digital SLR, a few hours going through them and altering a couple (as you can see from the new icon - if you're reading this well in the future and i've changed it, it's the one with the red hand wrapped in piano keys). Then it was off to the dark room for 5 hours or so, developing a couple of films and then printing images. I did close to 70 b&w prints last night, and listened to radio 4 until it shut off. Then I listened to the world service. Then I decided I should probably get some sleep at some point.

On an unnecessarily personal front, I got my nose pierced on New Year's Eve. My very first ever piercing and something I'd vowed never to do. I blame the album. Just before the last one came out (which we're pretending it never did, ok?) I dreaded my hair. Now that I can see this one coming together, I had this overwhelming urge to do something else to my poor, mistreated head. I might dye my hair black yet. Who knows?

Thursday 3rd

Very little progress again today, so I've revved up the progress on the art package. Trying to get to grip with this new fangled digital business whilst also getting the dark room set up again. I have promo shot ideas coming out of my ears, but getting the ingredients for them is proving time consuming. Wasted a lot of time today trying (and failing) to work out why my mac doesnt have X11 and refuses to install it when I download it. I want my GIMP back.

Hm, my macbook appears to be totally fucked. While I've been writing this, the screen has zoomed in about 300% and is now scrolling around whenever I move the mouse. Restart away.

Wednesday 2nd

This blog's a day late, but yesterday got unexpectedly busy in a totally non-useful but fun way. December's been a lot of that in general. Not that I haven't been working on all this, but I've loosened the leash for a while. The time has come to put it back on properly and I'm having a little bit of trouble getting back into the swing of it. Brain has switched from aural to visual, for one, which is not the most helpful. Did a bit of experimentation today, but it's one of those days where concentrating on a sound source makes my head feel like its going to explode. I'm making lists and plans by candlelight instead, and I may well be decadent later and finish my book.

I think 2007 went pretty well, all told. I'm genuinely excited for 2008, far more than I was this time last year. I'm slowly amassing images, ideas and time scales in my head, and if it all comes off the way I hope it will it's going to be some fun (tiring) times.