'Romance is not a basic skill'
--
In April 2004, these three Flash Madrigals - Bobbio, Lugnano and Opi - were published as my first distribution on the internet.
At the time, video editing was cumbersome, file sizes engulfed hard drives, processors burnt hot and web distribution was expensive
in bandwidth and storage. Macromedia Flash was an efficient alternative based around vector graphics and a programmable timeline. The
real attraction was integration with Macromedia's child of Aldus Freehand, the first application I encountered in 1992.
On the Mac Classic, I had more problems understanding folder structure and saving than I did grasping Freehand.
Within a few years of publication of these Madrigals, both Flash and Freehand were retired by Adobe. Today, it's an archival nightmare to access Flash
projector files. The new presentation is re-scanned from an LCD monitor off a VGA port of a 2004 ibook and re-published at 640 x 480.
Freehand, I still enjoy to this day
The audio was composited in Opcode Studio Vision, again same story as Freehand - retired by the new owner. The music was composed on an ARP Odyssey and a Marion Systems ProSynth - with a voltage scaler and a remarkable software feature respectively, I was able to tune these instruments to 19 tones per octave temperament. My history with microtonality goes back again to the beginning of the 1990s and my devouring Bill Sethares's first edition of 'Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale'.
The prose narrated by James Thornton is in a light romantic language referring to the Madrigal form. This was later developed in 'L'avricola di Frescobaldi' in 2010 with further drama, humour and recited in italian.
Of the images - the interior drawing of Bobbio belongs to my continual obsession with the pragmatic realism and opulence of a subset
of English life in the 1970s and was further amplified by visiting a Ruhlmann exhibition Musée des Années 30, Boulogne-Billancourt in 2001.
The oak trees of Lugnano are from my first foray into Suffolk where, twenty years later, I now reside.
The photography of Opi is from
a bench in St.James's Square, SW1 - on checking in September 2024 the Pampas grass alcove and bench have long disappeared into history.