After the seemingly endless process of making music over the previous couple of years, I set myself a month to write and record an EP.

By this point I had a full drum kit in my living room studio and some half decent mics to record it with. I used a mixture of live takes and home-sampling for the drums, and wrote 80% of the parts on bass, recording them through a Numark DJ mixer with built-in effects that I used as a DI box. These bass parts were then time-stretched, pitched, edited and effected to make more synthetic sounds.

'Where You End and I Begin' is entirely processed bass guitars and drums except some bits of radio, the micro-synth at three minutes in and the over-driven acoustic guitars that follow. The micro-synth samples had been very kindly sent over by my friend John who was making music as Inverseroom and The Bemus Point at the time and had put the synth together. He also writes as ‘JR Lennon’, I’d strongly suggest reading ‘Pieces for the Left Hand’, I really like that book.

The basic structure of 'Here Comes Your Cash Cow' is based on some heavily manipulated samples of a circuit-bent furby that my friend Paul had sent me, alongside John's microsynth again. Paul makes electro-acoustic instruments and microtonal music, which you can check out at ubertar.com, he’s made some very cool stuff. I added some patterns with single-hit tabla samples and some outtakes of my noise-violin playing from the 'Free Will' sessions and played drums to them. Once again I overdubbed some over-driven acoustic guitar and used some single-note saxophone and string samples from the same freebie CD-Rs I'd got from the front of magazines in the late 90s, which seemed like a lifetime away by then. The synth-flute sounds are processed bass guitars again, as are most of the other sounds.

I used my stairwell again (my poor neighbours) to record the harmonica for 'The Interloper'. This was probably the last time I recorded out there as I moved out a few months later when my girlfriend and I split. That lounge had been a great place to record and I'd used it constantly for six and a half years. Being a 1960s concrete block and the living room having no neighbours except the lady downstairs (who couldn’t hear us) it was a perfect place to rehearse, record and play music, surrounded by trees and parakeets. After a particularly frantic drum session one afternoon I suddenly got worried that I'd been disturbing people. I went outside and met a cleaner mopping the halls, so I asked him if he could hear any music or noise. He thought for a second and said 'I think I might've heard a bit of saxophone earlier.' Perfect. An amazing space to have lived in, and oh, that stairwell, such a beautiful sounding thing.

'Sea Shapes' relies heavily on bass guitars and drums again, the only other sounds being minidisc recordings from a local building site and more of those micro-synth and circuit-bent furry samples. It occurred to me while writing these notes that this EP was made almost ten years to the day after making the ‘Heathen Mintle’ EP, which also relied heavily on multiple bass guitars, but I don’t know what to conclude from that. I guess I just like bass guitars.

I managed to mix the EP within the month as well, then it was lovingly mastered by Jon El-Bizri. After that I actually put it out into the world as a short-run of CD-Rs with covers that my friend Scott printed at Kinko’s and posted from the States. Although it’d be dead within a year, Myspace was still just about a great place to sell CDs. I also made a video for ‘Sea Shapes’ in my lounge where the editing tried to mimic the glitching of the furby samples. It’s still out there on the tubes, but the audio is unmastered and so not as fine. Jon did a great job with the masters.

Originally released as a run of 200 on my old 'Kill The Other Guy' home label in association with Creot Records. 'Here Comes Your Cash Cow' also appeared on Utrophia's 2008 Compilation 4.

John Robert Lennon - micro-synth samples
Paul 'Ubertar' Rubenstein - circuit-bent furby samples
Matt Rigsby Smith - drums, bass, guitar and everything else


IWA4TH061