Firstly – and most importantly – thank you for all the emails I have received offering to help float “Life’s a Boat”. Responses coming by the end of the week.

On a different matter, Stormy Mundy has asked me to reply to Marc Medwin, who apparently recently asked “When did David Singleton become an actual Crimso documentarian in the studio? Was it with Einstein’s Relatives? I’m talking about the distillations that led to the box-set documentaries, elements boxes and Tale of the Tapes entries we all know and love.”

There is a quick factual answer, and a more interesting “musical answer”. The factual answer is a timeline which begins with my work as an engineer in the early 1990s on “Frame by Frame” and “The Great Deceiver”. I am not sure if it is credited, but on THRAK, I compiled the album with Robert. So the soundscapes that were added between tracks, on top of B’Boom, the intro to VROOOM, the sequence of the tracks, that was my work. Which became more extreme with “The Power to Believe”, with the sequencing and post-recording production. And along the way, together with Robert, I produced the archive recordings – Epitaph, The Night Watch, Absent Lovers, VROOOM VROOOM – which led to various degrees of audio necromancy – breathing life into dodgy bootlegs. And thence to the fly on the wall audio documentaries, which began with “Keep that One Nick” in the Larks Tongues boxed set. (I recall Robert faithfully listening all the way through and then remarking that there were about two good minutes in the whole thing.) And latterly the Elemental mixes, another of which is currently brewing.

The more interesting musical answer is that until recently, I would have described my musical career as a number of distinct and disparate roles : studio engineer, digital editor, archive producer, soundscape compiler, songwriter, producer of The Vicar etc.

Surely, writing and composing your own music is completely different to reviving a bootleg or co-producing a King Crimson album?

Well, no, I am no longer so sure – and it is all due to the misconception about “my” music, or “your” music, or “King Crimson’s” music. There is really no such thing, it’s all just music.

So faced with a soundscape by Robert, my role (in which I may or may not succeed) is simply to be a conduit that delivers the music to the world in its best possible form. To do justice to it. And composing “your own” music is really the same thing. Music arrives, wherever it comes from, and you attempt to do justice to it as best you can. Yes, it is all filtered through your personal taste and sense of what is right. And that may vary depending on the nature of the project. But if you look at it as “composing with found sound” (working on other people’s music) and “composing with notes” (your own music), the role is remarkably similar, once you remove the notion of personal ownership.