There is a saying. “Sleep on it.”
This served me well. After having constructed the various example sound files full of all the bleeps, bloops, blips, and sweeps I thought would work well on this album, I slept on it. When I woke up today, I could see the structure of the album starting to coalesce.
I spent today reorganizing the sound files a bit more and taking copious notes on where, when, how, and to what key each song should modulate to.
And then I wrote most of a song. It needs work still, and is not mixed at all. I’m desperately avoiding getting trapped into mixing at this time since for me I think I need to just bring forth material before I worry about mixing it.