Yup, having settled on “Lucky Dip” as a name, and not having heard back from the owners of the Flickr image I wanted to use, I decided to draw my own, using the photo as a rough model. I drew the blackboard outline, a little bit of shadow on the back legs, the fringed border and the board itself in charcoal on half a sheet of A2 paper (I’ve been caught out by A2 paper before – far too big to fit on the scanner!), then pulled the scanned image (after cleaning up in Photoshop) over to the iPad to add colour and text. The final layout I did in Photoshop, after sending the coloured image back to the computer again.

I may tweak it later but as a first draft, I’m pretty pleased and I’ve put it up as the album image on SoundCloud.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any drawing, and longer still since I did any with actual paper rather than just the iPad, so this was a really fun project. The whole album’s feeling really real too now – there’s only one more track to come in, with two possible replacement tracks. Guess I should think about what order I want them all to go in too. At the moment they’re just in the order the recordings came in, but I’m thinking that shuffling them around might be more effective.

Today I received Kim Hickey’s recording of her piece, Flit, for flute. I am just amazed at all the great performances I’ve been getting for these pieces – so little time to prepare them and yet everyone’s done a really good job of capturing their piece and getting it recorded. I haven’t had to put on a stern face & tell anybody to try harder, nothing’s turned up sounding like it was recorded underwater in a bathtub in 1902. A couple of pieces have needed a touch of reverb to really bring out the tone of the instrument, and Kim’s recording needed a tiny bit of hiss reduced, but that’s been it, which has been both wondrous and a great relief because I’m no skilled recording engineer.

But I digress, here’s Kim’s piece:

I also posted an update of Alun’s tango – the original for some reason came through very very soft, so he’s adjusted his recording slightly and sent me a slightly louder one, which really makes a difference. It’s still fairly quiet, but there’s a bunch of tiny details in there which eluded me in the previous version.

Sam also sent me copies of some of his rejected takes for I Want It To Kill People. I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to the various approaches. They’re all good, but somehow the final take he settled on just interacts with the tape part a little more effectively than the other versions of the graphic score. What was particularly interesting was to hear the take on which he improvised, without the graphic score – that’s a really interesting piece. It’s not the piece that I Want It To Kill People became, but something else. It’s more enmeshed in the tape part – he’s taken some of the gritty sounds and used them as inspiration for the guitar part – whereas my vision of the piece was that the guitar was this soft and lovely thing with depths of aggression, Sam’s version is more like watching the soft and lovely guitar be corrupted by the aggressive tape part. Really fascinating. He’s also sent me just the guitar recording from the final version and I really think I will have a go at tweaking the tape part – there’s a blob of notes about a third of the way into the piece that really feel like a stumbling block, so I’m going to see if I can make them less intrusive.

So that’s RPM for today. No, the harp piece hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow. Today was full of client work and physiotherapist and – at the end – half of a wonderful concert by Joby Burgess at Wigmore Hall and a lovely chat with @stevegisby and his girlfriend. I managed to get there for the end of it (thank you, Central Line – not!) and got to hear Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘Fanta’ from Import/Export and Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, movements II and III played on a MIDI xylophone, which was interesting, although I think I prefer the electric guitar version I have on CD in Sydney. Very much enjoyed the Prokofiev piece though – inventive, fun and very much a serious piece of music, in spite of the amusement factor of being played on glass bottles of Fanta. I did wonder, though, how long it’ll still be able to be played for – what happens when they no longer manufacture glass bottles of drink??? I guess it’s just a piece that embraces its own ephemerality.

I seem to have come out of the day with a Proper Job too. And the best sort of proper job – mobile web dev, working from home, for about a week, for a client who used to be a colleague when I was at LBi and who has now set up her own UX business for financial services companies. Really looking forward to this one.

One day to go. One recording to come in. This time tomorrow night, RPM 2012 will be complete!

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And another one! Yesterday I was really struggling. I knew Jen was going to be in London with her recorder today and I really wanted to have something for her to play. I wrote something, but I really thought it wasn’t terribly good. I was trying to get the sound of the recorder into my head – so very different than a flute or clarinet or anything I usually write for (coming to the conclusion that writing for recorder is more like writing for really flexible brass than orchestral woodwinds) – but it didn’t seem to be sticking and everything felt wrong and blech. Then I woke up this morning and was completely convinced it was rubbish and I’d have to start again, but as I’d put so many extended techniques into it – flutter-tonguing, multiphonics, singing into the recorder, quarter tones – I figured I might as well see what she made of it and hear what these effects really sounded like.

Well, knock me down with a feather. She started to play, and it all coalesced! We needed to do some tweaking on the third of the group (she gets a tiny triptych) but the first two are pretty much as they were when I first wrote them last night. And while it’s an odd piece, it grew on us as she played through it more and now I think I’m rather fond of it. And that’s number 5!

Right now I’m waiting for Windows to fire up so I can scan the multiphonics fingering page out of Walter van Hauwe’s The Modern Recorder Player (Vol. III) to send to Jen with the score. This has been a really useful book, for the multiphonics in particular – lovely strong, clear sounds. It’s a real joy to use them. There’s loads of composer-friendly info in there, and while it’s aimed at performers who want to play these effects, it’s also really useful for working out what’s possible for writing them. The other resource I found really helpful for getting me started was Australian composer & recorder-player Ben Thorn’s quick introduction on the Orpheus Music site.

I sent a quick update out to the performers today. Seeing as people seem to be enjoying their pieces, even when they’re bewildered by them, I’m going to compile them all into a single volume and send out a hard-copy to the performers to thank them for their hard work. After all, I just have to write the stuff (and, obviously, choose the fonts. Very important, that) – they’re the ones who need to play it and get it to a decent-enough standard to go out into the world with their name on it! So I thought it would be a nice thing to get them properly printed and bound up, all as a group.

And now it’s half-past twelve and I’m not quite ready for sleep. My Da’s gone into hospital in Australia tonight for ‘tests’. God knows what they’ll find. Hopefully something easily fixable, but sleep’s a tricky thing under these circumstances, so it’s back to  more work on the slide guitar piece. Graphic score, I will subdue you!

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Well, this is all very stop-start. And time is pressing on. I’m getting a bit worried about my own personal deadline, to tell the truth. My plan was to have all pieces written and sent out before my friend arrives next Thursday, so all the performers would have a full week or more with their pieces, and I’d be able to have a lovely chilled time with my friend. And if I could get back the week I spent concussed, I’d be calm. As it is I’m a little stressed, but I’m just going to go full speed ahead, and see what happens.

This evening I’ve been back at work on Sam’s graphic score for the slide guitar piece. I think I’m sensing a pattern here – the last piece I wrote for real instruments + tape took me forever to do the score too and I think it’s because I really don’t like transcribing random sounds and hoping I note them in the right place and that others can interpret my squiggles for what they are. Yes, procrastination has been hard at work here.

However, this evening I’ve finally got a rough first draft down of the tape part. I’ve tried to keep it pretty simple, noting mostly where notable things happen. I think I’ll need to put in time markings too, to give some context, then I need to work on the guitar bit, which I kind of have in my head but just need to get down on paper/iPad. This initial version I’ve done on iPad because rubbing out is easy when I get it wrong I need to work out a neater way of dealing with the audible text moments though, in particular. But just so you can see that this piece isn’t actually a myth, here’s the work-in-progress snap:

There’s a chance I may need to cut it up a bit and spread it out some more, but I just needed to get something down. Mostly spreading it out would allow for more detail in the guitar part, so I need to think a bit about how much detail I want to put in there. This is mostly new territory for me, both technically and stylistically. I guess that’s why it’s taking so long.

The other exciting development today is that Jenni sent me her preliminary recordings of her oboe piece, Nest! SO exciting to hear the piece taking shape. I don’t think I’ve ever had real performer feedback on a piece while it’s still so fresh from the writing, so this is fantastic.

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Well, GOSH. What a lot I have to talk about today. Yesterday was kind of unproductive for the most part, so it didn’t seem worth blogging. Today has been the exact opposite and now I almost have too much to bore you with!

So, yesterday. I was feeling kind of floundering, not knowing which piece to work on next after finishing Charles’ bass-baritone song. So I looked at my list and realised I needed to spend some more time getting to grips with what Alun’s bass guitar can do, so I bought myself his album If (after checking with him which of the many I should start with) and listened to it on my marathon accidentally-4km walk to and from Waitrose. Not ideal listening conditions, I’ll grant you, but it was a fair start. What I discovered was that it’s not about what Alun’s bass guitar can do, it’s about what it *can’t* do which – it seems – is very little. I had no idea a bass guitar was capable of so much! So now my challenge there is that much bigger and I really need to do some heavy-duty thinking and tinkering very soon. Have a listen for yourself:

I did spend a significant amount of time doing battle with technology yesterday, though, which eventually resulted in a happy conclusion: I can once again doodle about on my (digital) piano and have Finale record my meanderings so I don’t need to panic about not having enough fingers to hold down notes AND write down what they are. It may seem a small thing, but oh no it’s not.

Today I wrote a flute piece. Start to finish. And sent it off to Kim. The flute piece was a bit of an accident – I had decided I was going to do Jen’s piece for singing recorder player. Fished out my copy of Walter van Hauwe’s book on extended recorder techniques (Volume III of The Modern Recorder Player if you really want to know the gory details), then pulled out my flute and wrote a flute piece. Whoops. But huzzah too, because that’s No. 3 done and I hadn’t even planned any of it.

The no-planning led to a momentary crisis of what to call it, but once I realised that it’s stylistically similar to Nest which I wrote for Jenni Pinnock back at the start of the project (for oboe, with option on flute and piccolo and possibly clarinet although the range might not be great for that) and so Kim’s piece has become Flit. I’m thinking I may do a third piece to go with them once all this is over and have them as an actual whole thing for flute (or flute + piccolo) or oboe.

And this evening I’ve been back at Sam’s slide guitar piece. The tyrannosaurus timpani sounds were really bugging me. The pitch was OK but the textures far too thick and it was all getting a bit overwhelming, so I deleted that whole track and am much happier with it now. I got the AC-7 control surface app (iPAD) hooked up to Logic which has made recording automation data MUCH easier and I think there probably won’t be any more major changes to the tape part after this. Possibly some more small volume tweaks, to allow a bit more space for the guitar, but nothing big.

I also took the first steps towards getting the graphic score done for the slide guitar. I’m a bit at sixes and sevens with this. Not quite sure how to approach it although I have a visualisation in my head. I’m starting by mapping it out on the iPad, but may end up doing it by hand, or a combination of the two. I kind of want to use coloured pencil for it. I love coloured pencil – the tones are so vibrant and the transitions can be so subtle – but I know that if I sit down with pen & pencils it could take days, so I’m hoping to convince my brain that it would be just as happy with SketchBook Pro.

So this one’s definitely “the iPad piece” for the project! It was a bit inadvertent but it was something that had been at the back of my mind that I wanted to use the iPad for something in this, so it’s great to be able to use different aspects of it in the one piece – from putting in the first track using Pianist Pro over wireless MIDI, to controlling Logic with it and creating the score. Great fun.

Oh! And I had a most delightful email this morning from Charles about his song in which he remarked that “the whole thing is very well made” along with other lovely comments about it. Super-chuffed that he likes it so much and hoping I can keep up the standard!

(And amongst all this, I made 2 loaves of some of the best bread I’ve ever made.)

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Yup, the second commission piece has been finished and sent. And no, it’s not Sam’s slide guitar piece (have a feeling that one’s going to creep on at a snail’s pace until the last minute, then be such a horrible travesty that I’ll need to promise to write him something nice later this year to compensate!), it’s the song for bass-baritone for Charles Turner which I started having a bash at the other night at 2 in the morning with not-terribly-satisfactory results.

Well, today I sat down with the version that was ‘merely embarrassing’ and tinkered about with it and began to see how it might be resuscitated into something that was actually halfway decent. Mostly this involved messing about with the rhythm, stretching things, inserting pauses, corrupting the basic structure of the poem a little so it was a bit less tum-ti-tum (I have a longstanding issue with rhymed poetry that I’ve been struggling to get over for aaages). It was still lacking a certain something though, and occasional notes were a little hard to pitch without an additional reference point, so I was thinking about a piano accompaniment (Charles has a tame pianist and his request was for an ‘unaccompanied or lightly accompanied’ song) and how to keep that supportive and interesting but unobtrusive. And while I was doing this, I remembered talking to Stuart Russell on the weekend about Howard Skempton’s piano pieces. Many of these are extremely slim in texture and very beautiful. Often just held chords. So I nicked Skempton’s idea and created an accompaniment out of a series of pianissimo 2-note chords. Each chord is held up until the point of changing to the next chord, which with the longer phrases will probably mean that some of these will die away before the next chord is reached. Which then gave me another idea: What about sympathetic resonance?

So I waved at Twitter and Twitter waved back (thanks, Jenni!) with marvellous info about sympathetic resonance. It’s hard to tell if it will actually work with what I’ve written – there’s a lot of open 5ths or 3rds in the piano part which aren’t actually doubling the note being sung, but it may, so I’ve put it into the score and we’ll see what happens with the recording. Unfortunately I don’t have a real piano, only a digital one, which suits most purposes but, alas, not arcane acoustic effects.

Oh, and the text? That’s by Robert Herrick, the 17th century English poet. It’s a tiny poem called ‘To FORTUNE’:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet ;
Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a fear’d infection ;
Yet, scare-crow-like, I’ll walk as one
Neglecting thy derision.

So that’s the big news of the day. I haven’t got back to Sam’s piece at all today, although last night I bought the AC-7 Core app for my iPad, which is supposed to let me control Logic as if from a mixer board, using the touchscreen.I thought this might help with getting smoother changes in volume and other automation data but of course as I’ve spent all day in Finale and at the piano prodding at ‘real notes’ it hasn’t had a play yet. Tomorrow… tomorrow.

So what’s next? I’m not sure. Shana’s going to send me part two of her lovely miniature treatise on writing for the lever harp, which will contain the mysteries of how to use the octatonic scale on it, which should be fun, so I should try to start thinking octatonically again for that – it’s been a while! I’m also thinking I should maybe build on the brief foray into miniature pianism from today and tackle the piano piece. Hmm. Or I could just see what I feel like in the morning…

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Today I seem to be over the concussion. Or over the obvious concussion. I’m thinking clearly and the headaches have practically gone, so that’s great. Now to get over the general feeling of fragility. That’s on the list for tomorrow

The really exciting news of today is that I have written some notes. Real, live notes. I couldn’t sleep last night so after 2 hours of trying, I gave up and went to the piano and started working on the song for Charles (bass-baritone). In the end I wrote two versions in an hour. The first one was hideous; the second, merely embarrassing. But work is work, right? And even hideous notes are better than no notes at all. And there is a slim possibility that I may be able to do something that renders the second version ever so slightly less embarrassing. I’ll be taking a bit of a look at this again tomorrow.

I’ve been back at work on Sam’s slide guitar piece this evening. For some reason I’m finding this quite hard to work on for more than short bursts. I think it’s the aggression level. I hope it’s not a reaction to it being awful. I think I still quite like it but it IS scaring me a bit, especially now I’ve added in some bass and percussive sounds. I’ve used Logic’s timpani sound and mooshed it through the Bitcrusher filter and a couple of other things so it sounds a bit more RAAARGH and while, yes, the bass is helping a lot, I suspect the part itself is… erm… shit. I also think I’ve lost the balance I had before which left room for the slide guitar. Now I think it kind of works as a random scary standalone piece, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I had been hoping it was finished. Or very very nearly finished. But I think it’s not.

So what to do? The obvious step seems to be to re-record the distorted timpani. However I’m not sure just plonking down doodles will do it this time round. True, it’s more or less how this tape part has been constructed – given the concussion, it’s more to do with manipulating randomness than active composition – but I think this time round there does need to be more structure if it’s to be a slide guitar piece and not just a loud and gritty tape piece with a guitar here and there. Possibly I need to pull out the timp and instead work on the graphic score, see what I want to do with that, then see if I can doodle in some timpasaurus around where the slide guitar stuff will be. I think this may end up being a bit more satisfactory.

So that’s the plan for tomorrow.

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Still more downtime, but a definite improvement today – headache diminished, and while I’m still having patches of being dizzy & confused, overall I’m coping better and have only needed one nap today! Woohoo!

Again, real notes were beyond me, but I’ve nearly finished laying out 2×4 for harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis – hoping I can finish and send that off over the weekend. And I did a couple of tweaks to the brutal soundscape I’m preparing for the slide guitar piece. I discovered that Logic will let me automate not just the usual volume and pan controls, but allow me to automate turning filters on and off. And not just on and off – I can automate all sorts of parameters too! So I’ve been fiddling about with multiple levels of automation for this and experimenting with texture. I’m thinking that there need to be spaces in the soundscape to really let the sound of the slide guitar come through. It’s got such a beautiful tone, and the point of the piece is about extreme contrast. Might have to make the whole thing more like 2 minutes than 1 just to let the two sides of it really have time to speak.

I also need to get on to some field recording of noises for it. I’ve used one of the Cylinder Preservation & Digitisation Project’s sound files again which I think is adding a good level of interest. It’s a recording from 1902 of someone reading an American preacher’s sermon. I’m distorting it quite heavily, but I like the rhythm of it. There’s something about the rhythm of a good sermon. It’s not like a normal speech.

But back to the field recording. I pottered down to the radio shop today to try to get an adaptor so that I can start using my Rode M3 mic with my iPod Touch – only to be told that it can’t be done. Which turned out to be poppycock because I found one on Amazon. Alas, the adaptor is £30 + £8 or so postage! OUCH! Other alternatives include a £47 Tascam interface module which is getting varied reviews or buying a whole Zoom H1 (£79) which would negate the whole using what I’ve got thing. Or I could sit down with a soldering iron and attempt to make my own. Which scares me beyond belief but may yet be the cheapest and least traumatic solution.

In the interim, I guess I’m back to my tiny Sony stereo mic plugged into my MiniDisc, which is fine in every respect except the one where the MD makes the most horrendous noises at random, which the mic then picks up and faithfully records over the top of whatever lovely sound one was trying to capture. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing. And possibly, for the purposes of this piece, the disc noise might actually work OK. Given that the tape part I’m creating is very much about capturing and tweaking randomness (given my lack of capacity for rational thought ATM) maybe that’s appropriate. Either way, I need to finish it off and move on to the other pieces fairly quickly or I’ll miss my own deadline!

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Yet another day of not really being able to work on RPM. SO frustrated! I just want to work! But, alas, the headache has been awful today. I think it’s starting to subside, and I’ve been able to focus for longer today – more like 2 hours than 1 at a stretch – but it’s been really uncomfortable. I felt this morning that I’d really done all the plain thinking I should do for RPM – any more and I’d start to over-theorise and the whole thing would be a disaster.

So instead I tinkered a little with Mixtikl for iPad, which looks interesting but I think not for the slide guitar piece as I’m imagining it, plus in my weakened mental condition I couldn’t work out how to export the sound I recorded. Will try again when sane.

And after that I figured that, no, brain wasn’t ready for making actual notes today, so instead I tackled a layout project that’s been lying around for far too long. The American harpist Shana Norton asked me to do a harp arrangement of Pieces of Eight late last year, and I did actually do it pretty quickly, but the pedalling bugged me and then I started to procrastinate, trying to think of things I might have missed that would improve the pedalling, instead of doing the sensible thing of sending it off to her and saying “I’m a twit! Help me!”. With the end result that the arrangement was done, but it never got laid out. So today I finished the layout, which was about the level of thought I was capable of – ooh! that doesn’t line up! And now it’s been sent off to her for harp-assessment, so we’ll see what happens.

Overall, in spite of injury, I’m seeing huge progress in the way I’m working and thinking about my work from starting the RPM Project. It’s only been about a week, but I’m finding I’m actively looking for musical ways to fill in my time now, rather than procrastinating as much as I usually do. I just hope this brain-fail clears up quick-smart before I lose all that momentum…

10.20pm update: I managed to get the iPad connected to Logic pretty easily (using Network MIDI this time, instead of Pd & Soundflower) and have been messing about with some sounds in there and layering effects to give the sort of gritty, violent feel I’m after for the slide guitar piece. Almost scaring myself with the brutality of it. I’m thinking of using another of the recordings from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, and am hoping I can head out to a building site or similar next week with my little microphone and do some recording there of clangy and bangy sounds to go with it. SO good to actually get some work done at last, but now I really need to put it aside and rest. G’night!

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RPM is progressing in leaps and bounds this weekend! The commission project is now fully subscribed – AND there’s even a small waiting list too in case anyone pulls out! Never expected that!

Today was a snow day. Djeli and I slowly crept into Ealing to do some shopping but decided that things were just too slippery to risk going to Ikea to look at kitchen stuff, so instead we came home and watched Les Aventures d’Adele Blanc-Sec, which was good fun.

I started making a proper multigrain loaf, which started well but alas seems to have fallen at the final proving hurdle – or rather failed to rise very much. I’ve bunged it in the oven anyway, because hey, I’d only throw it out so might as well see if it turns out edible rather than assuming it won’t. (Confirmed: It is brick-bread. I don’t think any part of it is salvageable. Will have to try again later in the week)

And while waiting for the bread to rise the first time, I wrote a piece for oboe! This is the first of my RPM Project commissions and it’s called ‘Nest’. It’s mostly made up of a combination of grace-noted chirps and little snippets of melody, with the occasional trill for good measure. Hoping it’ll be more “twit! twit!” than twee. Time will tell. At any rate, it’s something like what I had in my head, if not quite so graceful, and the whole thing was done in about an hour. I’m finishing off the layout now then will send it off to its performer tomorrow. Next up is either a piece for flute, piccolo or alto flute (I haven’t decided which yet) or a piece for assorted keyboard instruments. I’ll see where inspiration strikes in the morning … and also what the light’s like – we had a fuse blow tonight that took out half the lights in the house. It’s going to require Djelibeybi to get down on hands and knees with little bits of fuse wire which he can’t find tonight because the lights are out so I will be artificial-light free tomorrow. May have to go out…

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I’ve completed my first RPM Challenge track! It’s the flute improv/field-recording collage piece and it’s called Watching the streets of Zurich and Brussels. I’m mildly happy with it. It’s very serene but not, I suspect, hugely interesting for multiple listens. The ghastly word “pleasant” is springing to mind. But it’s done and I think it’s kind of OK. And it’s tackled a few things that needed tackling:

1. Improv. I hate improvising. I have no confidence at it and never do it
2. Getting something down that’s actually a reasonable length for a proper piece of music – this one’s 6’16″ in length – about twice the length of most of my notated music. Good to be thinking in longer spans, actually, and working more broadly – thinking it might be a good exercise to work with this sort of collagey stuff every now and then to think more in terms of chunks of ideas instead of single notes.
3. Identified and started to tackle my issue of continually going back and listening from the start.
4. Quarter-tones: I’ve got a piece booked in to write for Carla Rees and her quarter-tone alto flute. I was a bit lost at the prospect of thinking about quarter-tones. Focusing on using them in the improv has helped quite a lot with this, I think

The other exciting thing is that today I decided to take RPM up a notch and make it more about the composition, so I launched a commission project: I’ll write pieces of less than a minute in duration for up to 9 people. For any instrument they want – all they have to do is to commit to sending me a recording of it before the end of the month. Want to be a part of it? As of now (7pm) there’s only 3 slots left! Find out more and sign up here.

1am update: Wow – I can’t believe how popular this commissioning project has been! There’s only one place left! And I seem to have reached the maximum number of guitar pieces I can take on – with electric, slide and bass guitar pieces, it’s going to be a challenge!

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