Wednesday 31 August 2011

I’m in bureaucracy land this week, and reconfiguring computers so that I can eventually get on with some work. Thank you in particular to ProTools for reminding me what computing in the 1990s was like, with a non-functioning dongle: a piece of technology that serves no purpose to the user other than to waste their time. I don’t really need any more of those.

It’s quite important to form your own opinions of your work early, even if you allow them to change over time. This allows you to read reviews without feeling too vulnerable to whatever the critic has to say: they probably had an urgent deadline to meet rather than an initial desire to engage with your work. But it’s still genuinely encouraging to get good reviews from intelligent people, like this very enthusiastic report of our Revenge CD from Norman Lebrecht that appeared last month. He admits to not knowing what a nyckelharpa sounds like, but was under too much pressure of time to spend 10 seconds on wikipedia finding out. See what I mean about deadlines?