Like a lot of these tunes, ‘Kung Fu’ is kind of celebratory, in this case written around a series of heavily discussed improvisations with ouddist Attab Haddad. He’d play for short periods over our looped brushed beat and shifting oud drones, then we’d talk about mode changes, motifs and where to go dynamically with the oud. We kind of loved that stuff. I worked on the structure for a while and added panned bass guitars, keyboards and some more percussion. Most of the latter was recorded in the reverberant concrete stairwell outside my flat. The reverb out there was beautiful and immense.

The clearly Frank Zappa inspired 'Saint Z’ was another experiment in switching between major and minor feels. Layered acoustic guitars in different open tunings, overdubbed with glockenspiel, wood flute, clarinets and tin whistle. The string parts were edited and reshaped from things Fiona Stewart had recorded for ‘Billy No Fear’, while the notes of the pizzicato line were single note samples from a free CD on the front of a magazine. I always intended to replace them, but now they’re just part of the sound of that time. It sounds clumsy and I both love and loathe it for that, depending on my mood. *whispers* let it go..

Inspired by borrowing Fiona's portable minidisc recorder and stereo microphone, I bought my own from cartoonist ‘Toothpaste for Dinner’ for the remarkably low price of £90. Drew was a cool guy. Where my mic was small and clipped unseen onto my collar, Fiona's was handheld one. The first time I borrowed hers I took it to the main road to record the rush hour traffic swooshing rapidly past, but the cars kept slowing down. It took me a few minutes to realise the drivers thought the mic was a speed reader. I felt a bit embarrassed and a bit fraudulent, but it made for a lower more detailed sound, and I used it on 'Three Guitars'.

Some of the percussion layers on ‘Glocks and Rhythms’ were metal and wooden hits I recorded with my minidisc recorder and then edited together to make patterns and beats. I was out a lot the next year or so, gathering sounds.

‘Acoustic Guitars 2004’ was a little afternoon noodle after Jay had given me a beaten-up nylon string guitar. You can hear it rattle, it always rattled, but I loved that guitar, it was a joy to play, your fingers just landed so comfortably. Five years later it'd become my main guitar, rattling away at gigs and on the first two Mouth 4 Rusty albums. Sadly it was unfixable and slowly fell apart. I left it on the street with a 'please take me sign' when we moved down to the sea in 2015 and somebody took it home.

‘Span One’ features kazoos, what more could you want? The handclaps were also recorded in the stairwell. I was too embarrassed to record the vocal out there, so I sang through distortion and delay for that ‘man on a mountain’ vibe.

‘Vierzehn Rooms’ is a reprocessed version of ‘Funf’ from A Buffalo Crossing’s ‘Die Funf Nummern’ EP, with oud and drum parts taken from ‘Silver Leaves’, a piece by Attab that A Buffalo Crossing never completed the recording of. The oud and some of the drums had been tracked the same day as ’Strolling’ from the ’Sketches from the Tall Trees’ LP.

Another minidisc enthusiast, drummer Ross Parfitt very kindly gave me a recording he’d made of the sea in Portugal. I used this on ‘Kilohertz’, alongside some glockenspiels played back at lower sample rates and an early 70s Roberts radio my girlfriend had bought me that someone had kindly retro-fitted with an output. I used that radio a lot for a good few years, running long and medium wave radio through delays and EQ. I remember playing the Roberts at a Utrophia improv night and the volume would increase each time you touched the aerial, so you could tap out little rhythms. It only ever happened there, I’m imaging the building had some bad wiring. Nobody got hurt and some good music was played.

‘Kabadodom’ was written as part of a set I worked on with Jay Sheridan on bass for the Utrophia art collective’s first CWM festival in Wales. It wasn’t an easy musical pairing, but I always liked this one and it surprised me that he did too. That was a magical festival. Three years later I’d end up as a resident member of Utrophia, co-running a series of art spaces for making and displaying work for the next six and a half years. A couple of us lived and breathed that place, it was a labour of love.

‘Billy No Fear’ was one of the first times I used VST synths, which I wrangled with for a few months and then largely discarded. Too many potential options. Since the previous year,I’d been slowly building up a drum kit piece-by-piece but it wasn’t quite there yet, so I recorded the snare and kick (which was actually a large cardboard box) first. I only had one tom tom, so I’d record the first part of a drum roll, retune the drum lower, record the next part of the roll, and then do the same again to get drum low enough to sound a bit like a floor tom. I also only had one cymbal stand and two cymbals, so those had to be recorded separately. Without a hi-hat stand, I had to clasp the two cymbals with my hand to keep them together while I played. If this is why the drums sound weird, those are your reasons right there. Fiona had written some four piece string parts for ‘Billy No Fear’, which I tried to compliment with some single note saxophone samples from another free sample CD. Single note samples from another free CD also form the ‘string’ parts for ‘Little Rug’, which I’d written for an online charity compilation.

And yeah, this is the period where I really fell for glockenspiel for a while.

Matt Rigsby Smith - guitars, bass, glockenspiel, percussion, field recordings, synths, wood flute, clarinet and sampling
Attab Haddad - oud on ‘Kung Fu’, ‘Vierzehn Rooms’ and ‘Billy No Fear’, co-writing on ‘Kung Fu’
Fiona Stewart - violin on ‘Saint Z’, ‘Vierzehn Rooms’ and ‘Billy No Fear’
Richard Davis - moog and piano on ‘Vierzehn Rooms’
Ross Parfitt - drums on ‘Vierzehn Rooms’
Jay Sheridan - bass guitar on ‘Vierzehn Rooms’ and ‘Kabadodom’


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