Fresh back from my little trip to Amsterdam (check out the 'Amsterdam Collage' for audio), I started putting my new berimbau to good use, bowing it on ‘Are You There?’ and striking it on ‘Mystery Theme’ and ‘E Minor Thing’ in the more traditional manner.

Actually, I found immediately that I didn’t enjoy playing in a traditional style. A few months later, a guy would get insistently angry at me at a small festival for playing it ‘wrong’, as I preferred to rest it by my feet while I sat, rather than standing with it at my chest. I’d been just sat quietly enjoying myself, I wasn’t even performing. The Brazilian guy I’d bought it from had given me some quick lessons, and I was a fan of Nana Vasconcelos (thus buying a berimbau in the first place), I just preferred playing it my own way, sat on a chair with it resting between my feet and bending over to strike and ‘fret’ it with the stone. I liked the purchase it gave me to play the rhythms I wanted to play, which weren’t traditional either.

Actually there were a lot of notions around me of ‘how to do things properly’ at that time. I had two friends who regularly liked to tell me I wasn't really a musician, which slowly damaged my confidence, making it harder still to get things finished and feel confident in the things that I did. I guess in fairness I wasn't what they sought to be as musicians, I wanted to explore sound (man), whereas they once broke into a speed-playing contest at band practice while the other four of us looked on in horrored amazement. Unfortunately, with the band broken up, these were the two guys I was hanging out with most at the time.

I was still building my drum kit piece-by-piece in 2005, so the drums on ‘Mystery Theme’ and ‘Very Sixties’ were recorded with a snare and detuned rack tom resting at an angle on the floor, propped up by cushions, captured with one mic (AKG C4000) from above. I played bass drum-like patterns on the tom with a beater and hit the snare with a stick, crouching in front of them. Then I’d overdub the cymbals. 'Mystery Theme' opens with my dad teaching a six year-old me how to record, which I found as I dug through boxes of cassettes while making the tune. 'What are you going to say?' 'I'm taping this!' Kind of weird to find your voice on tape from the first time you ever hit 'record'.

The Institute of Iowa had just recorded every note on every conceivable orchestral instrument in an anechoic chamber (a room without reverberation) and put them online. Someone had sent me a link and I’d spend hours at the library downloading them all. I used these for 'Flutes Cellos', as ever, moving each note around with a mouse until I liked what I heard.

‘E Minor Thing’ was built on a simple picked guitar part in an alt-tuning, panned to the left, and a delay of the same panned to the right. I liked the way the notes collided. Attab and I added a plethora of western and Arabic percussion and we worked through oud parts based on a couple of themes. The next section used multi-layered acoustic guitars recorded in my bathroom, some of which I nudged out of time so the patterns would change rhythms against each other, before it ends on a glockenspiel improvisation with dual berimbaus, melodica, clarinet and pitched-up distorted bass. The bass drum at the end is a cardboard box mic’d closely again, I wasn’t to get a kick drum ’til the following year.

The underlying sounds for 'In the Arms of a Southern Belle' were made by playing a sine-wave drone mixed with the sound of an acoustic bass guitar played with a beater that I fed into a guitar amp in my kitchen. I surrounded the amp with drums, pots, pans and bottles, anything that rattled, and move the snare to and from the speaker to increase or decrease the movement of the snares underneath the drum. There's also a pitched-down recording of a storm in there somewhere, made leaning out of the living room window, and a couple of trains passing as we lived right next to the tracks.

The voices for 'Berimbau Guitars' were recorded in the concrete stairwell outside our flat, a conversation with a neighbour and his friend three floors down, the reverberation smearing their words beyond comprehension. The other sounds are single note samples I made in my bathroom with a guitar, capoing the neck at each fret to record one note at a time. As ever, I arranged these samples with a mouse one-by-one. This piece was made before I bought the berimbau but I’d been wanting to create those type of sounds.

'A Ball that Bounced' was the last time I collaborated with ouddist Attab, recording this together one summer afternoon at his parents house in Wimbledon.

‘Glock Improv’ is the earliest recording here, from 4th January, played on the full-size glockenspiel I’d bought the previous summer. My recordings prior to mid 2004 used a small 17 note instrument I’d bought in 2002. I actually preferred the sound and feel of the flatter keys on the small glock. The larger had more notes but a less-rounded and less forgiving sound.

’Ambient Strings' uses the same single note string samples I'd gotten free on the cover of a magazine in 1998. My use of other people’s samples had always been proportionately rare, but was very unusual after this.

'Very Sixties' was inspired by the Utrophia arts collective's second 'CWM' festival, where the atmosphere of the first in Wales was taken to Greenwich instead. It was a magical event, especially the acoustic set by Norway's 'Centre of the Universe', where Jørgen's largely electronic songs were performed on oud, darabuka and cello. Foolishly I'd gone in shorts and a T-shirt, carrying my berimbau around with me everywhere; it was inconvenient and I near froze during the night, sleeping on a shelf in a warehouse, where two years later I'd come to live through the winter. The crowd sounds were recorded on my minidisc at the festival (the largest, closest cheer is mine). The main organ sound comes from my childhood hand-me-down Bontempi fan organ, a very budget version of an electric harmonium that I'd just reclaimed from my mother's house.

Ross Parfitt (A Buffalo Crossing/The Heartfelt Four) came over and recorded some saxophone that I used for the 'The Letter B'. Once edited, I added some percussion in my stairwell and then ran the tracks through a mixer, performing a live dub with delays and pitchshifting.

‘Thoroughly’ was recorded sometime between the spring and the summer 2005 using a cajon of Attab’s that lived with me for a while.

Cover collage by the wonderful Jay Harper, with thanks.

Ross Partfitt - Saxophone on ‘Are You There?’ and ’The Letter B’
Fiona Stewart - Violin on ‘Are You There?’
Attab Haddad- Oud on ‘E Minor Thing’ and oud and co-composition on ‘A Ball that Bounced’
Megajoe - Fishing line harp on ‘E Minor Thing’
Kenneth 'Lovely' Smith - Teaching me how to record, 1982
Matt Rigsby Smith - Everything else

Many thanks to Richard Davis for the melodica loan and to Louise, as ever, for everything.


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