These are some of the first recordings made on my eight track, in Spring 1997. I’d had the 8-track a couple of months and it started to have a big effect on my music and the way it was made. I’d always made instrumental music and sound collages before I even managed to borrow a 4-track, but at heart I’d been an indie-rock kid albeit with relatively broad tastes. The 8-track became kind of a catalyst for ‘more interesting music’, and this EP is kind of a proto version of that. Actually, as it turns out, I’m still an indie-kid at heart, I’ve realised over the years it’s in the approach, however your tastes grow and develop, some of that essence from your formative years and what drew you to it in the first place is forever revealed in the way that you play and the things that you make.
Ben Dorrington and I set up in his girlfriend’s house in Epsom for the night, a large isolated sometimes creepy place with a huge open living room. Magnus Alanko brought his drums and graciously played some beats that we recorded with my one SM58 and three other borrowed low-cost mics.
I took Magnus’ drum recordings back to my tiny rented room and overdubbed onto them. I couldn’t make a lot of noise in that house, in fact I felt I had to be silent. My landlady hated renting rooms but needed the money and her conflict bore heavy on the house. So without being able to use amps or acoustic instruments, everything had to be plugged into the 8-track’s mixer. I didn’t really like the sound of a clean-tone electric guitar plugged straight in, so I focused a lot on bass, which sounded really nice. So ‘Ping Pong’ has five bass tracks, and while it sounds like a loop, everything was played live to the edits I’d made of Magnus’ drumming, likewise the vocals, sung through a flanger pedal. Aw, bless my young voice, I’m still mildly embarrassed by those last strains of a fake American accent I can hear in there. Just turned 21.
Magnus and I would briefly play in a band together a couple of months later, and recorded a single for Beanos' (then Europe's largest second hand record shop) new label as ‘William Heaton’s End of the World Revue’, a sort of psychedelic indie-rock song with two drum tracks and an extended backwards guitar outro. The mixes sounded terrible, the 12 planned singles by different local bands never happened and Beanos gradually fell apart to nothing, which was a big loss for everyone of us who based a lot of our lives around it. Rest in peace.
So yeah, that’s it really. Unlike most of the EPs and albums I’ve been putting out, this one wasn’t conceived as an EP, it’s more a little gathering of related material and a moment in time. It’s also a good opportunity to thank Ben Dorrington, a good mate and a big encouragement in making music at the time. I still have the bass we blowtorched the paint from and varnished with Ronseal. It’s still streaky, I still love it, it’s the one on all these recordings and was for the next several years.
Magnus Alanko - Drums
Matt Rigsby Smith - Bass, guitar, voice and pitchshifter/delay pedal
Ben Dorrington - Assistant Engineer
A micro-label releasing my (mostly instrumental, mostly unreleased) back catalogue. Launched 27 March 2018, new work expected sometime in 2024. My name is Matt and I'm a 47 year-old self-taught player and 'composer' from London & the sea.
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