So by late 2004 I was itching to make, as much as i could, a kind of orchestral record, and I kept going back to this idea over the next year or so. Turn this one up, it's kind of dynamic and especially quiet at the start.

The opener, 'Grace and Sophie' was made from long improvisations edited down, largely on instruments we couldn't play. Jay Sheridan had built a small collection of orchestral instruments from a junk/antique shop and we'd spend hours recording ourselves in my living room studio in Teddington, Middlesex, where I'd lived since 2001. I wanted to create some sort of soundscape of a human being made inside the womb and then born at the end, a simulation of nerve endings and tissue being created and so on, in honour of two female friends who were pregnant at the time.

Grace's mother, Natalie (who'd performed on the 'In These Clothes I am the Future' and 'Bill and Ricky' albums) is still a dear friend, and the wonderful Grace now has an eleven year-old budding polymath brother in Lex. Both are amazing young people. Sophie's mother was a dear friend of my then girlfriend's. Her health being very poor, she was told that she could live maybe ten years if she didn't have kids and maybe two if she did. She chose to have Sophie, and died when she was two. I always thought that was a move of incredible love and a desire to get the most of life while we have it.

'Starts With Bowed Gong' was made in a similar fashion to 'G&S', although after initial edits, improvisations were directed and semi-planned and some parts were written on top, like the lead bass guitar part and many of the rhythmic string parts, as Jay was getting somewhat to grips with the cello. Originally the track started with the sound of a bowed gong (which features elsewhere throughout the tune) recorded by Eric Psychoctopus who I'd been swapping homemade samples with via the TapeOp messageboard. The piano string sounds were recorded in my dad's hallway, I took a mic (C4000, my first condenser), a mixer and a DAT machine and recorded each string individually inside our family piano to arrange later, as well as slides across the strings with a variety of objects.

I was just so into recording at this point, I was trying a lot of things out and enjoying myself, techniques and different sounding spaces, but probably not actually writing as much as I previously had, it became more about collecting sounds and organising them.

I'd often find myself fighting the limitations of the technology at hand. My software would let me have 32 tracks, but something like 'SWBG' has just over a hundred, and my workhorse of a Mac G3 had a tiny 4GB hard drive and no USB ports, so I'd be endlessly backing things up 100mb at a time via zip discs to my girlfriend's PC and then burning CD-Rs, two copies of each. As much as a hassle this was, it turns out I kept almost everything, and I wouldn't have been able to do this little micro-label had I not. Yay me. Still, at the time, something like 'SWBG' was so hard to mix in thirds and I never quite hit a version I was completely happy with at the time.

I became obsessed with the berimbau I'd bought in Amsterdam (heard in the 'Amsterdam Collage' and on the 'Mystery Theme and Other Songs' album), and that became a heavy feature of 'Dance With Me Like You Used To', both in the rhythms and when making one of the lead patterns using homemade samples. I played that thing so much at this point, taking it around and away with me, an awkward bow-and-arrow-like thing to take on a train or packed tube. I think with the sampled berimbau I was going for something like Joe Zawinul's percussive synthesized 'world music' sounds. I really loved the way he'd restructure melodies over rhythms, splitting the same melody into different phrases. My dad had listened to Weather Report a lot when I was growing up, so that stuff was always in my head, and I'd been consciously listening since my early 20s. I saw Zawinul on his last tour, still amazing, I'm so glad I got to see that. Ronnie Scott's, up close.

The track 'Free Will' was based on a little haunting loop I played on my friend Attab's oud and put to one side. The kazoo was recorded out in the stairwell outside our flat, this was actually the occasion where a neighbour shouted 'stop making that bloody noise', which I mentioned in the notes for 'Sketches from the Tall Trees'. The tune also leans pretty heavily on sounds from my Amsterdam Collage. The squawling nature of the clarinet is partly due to a bit of damage to the instrument. Around this time I played a noise gig in the Bearspace, Deptford High Street for the Utrophia arts collective and the soundman knocked my clarinet over, knocking a little section of cork out of one of the joins, meaning you had to hold it more firmly in the middle to make the seal tight, and I was still getting used to that.

'In the Subway Sometimes' was put together with homemade samples of single glockenspiel notes, recorded at 44.1kHz (CD standard) and played back at 48kHz and 96kHz. I faded each sample in at the start to remove or reduce the attack sound of the mallet, keeping more just the resonance. I arranged the samples by hand (with a mouse), which is how I still work actually, I've never had a sampler. This tune always reminded me of the underpass (subway) under the approach to the Croydon flyover, between the church and Waddon Road, where I'd lived for a couple of years before moving out to the trees. Subways can be spooky, but I quite liked that one.

'The Boy Who Cried Milk' was recorded in 1998 and also features on the 'In These Clothes I am the Future' album. I was beginning to go through my old recordings as I made this album in 2005 and that tune in particular caught my attention and I thought I'd give it new life, especially as I'd hadn't released 'In these Clothes..' at the time. 'Free Will' didn't feel the same without it when I started this microlabel, so it has the weird honour of being on two albums in pretty much the same form.

My violinist friend Fiona Stewart left the UK in Summer 2005, leaving me with some beautiful violin ideas for 'Dance With Me Like You Used To' and 'To The Man Who Visits Her Room at Night', which was named after a story she told me. Fiona's a musical sister, I loved playing together, it always clicked, and she writes incredibly beautiful parts for things I've come up with it. I could write more but she'd blush, but I know Kirsty from Reflectiostack and the rest of Rock Plaza Central feel the same. A lot of us have benefited from Fiona's thoughtful arrangements, she's not one to blow her own horn, but I think she has a real gift.

I like this album, it was a huge struggle over confidence, technology and mixing balances, but I like it and I'm relieved it's out there now, finally 14 years later.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Fiona Stewart - violins
Jay Sheridan - cello, horns and flute
Ross Parfitt - saxophone on 'Grace and Sophie'
Eric Psychoctopus - bowed gong
Matt Rigsby Smith - guitars, bass, glockenspiel, clarinet, berimbau, percussion, bowed things, field recordings, oud, piano strings, organ, radio, piano, noise violin, kazoo


IWA4TH057