Spring 1999 I subletted a flat in Norwood Junction from a touring family member for a few months and set up my eight-track there. It was my first time living alone and I kind of loved it, sitting there on my balcony eating breakfast waving as hoardes of Crystal Palace football supporters cheered on their way to the match. Sometimes I'd poke a microphone out of the window and collect traffic or crowd sounds, it was a long busy street both ways and reverberated nicely.

Almost instantly I lost my job when the production company I'd been working for shut down for a while, so I was broke but I was frugal. The market was great, I cooked from scratch every meal. My food budget was something like £8 a week, but I ate really well and made music for a couple of months and worked some more on a book I still haven't finished writing.

I had a couple of borrowed Casio and Kawai keyboards and some freebie sample CDs collected from the front of music technology magazines. The strings were single note samples that I recorded from CD into my (digital) eight-track and spent hours and hours moving around to make little string arrangements. Likewise, the beats and hi-hats on 'Jodie Foster' and 'It's a Plastic Garden' were constructed note by note in the same way. My ever-faithful delay/pitch pedal was also super helpful for creating hi-hat and beat variations. I also took a bit of a recording of my friend Natalie Edelman on saxophone from the sessions for the 'In These Clothes I am the Future' album maybe 18 months before.

I found that I liked some of the Casio keyboard sounds without their initial attack sounds, so I'd often press the note and then press record, capturing only the decay. Then I'd find the right place for the next note and do the same until I'd built up a bassline. It was all pretty intricate but my head was very into it. Meanwhile the Kawai keyboard had a record feature where you speed up or slow down the playback of the notes which lead to some rapid playing that my fingers wouldn’t have been up to.

I didn't realise there was an easier way to make electronic music. I'd met Four Tet after a Fridge gig in Croydon about a year before and asked him how remixing worked, the mechanics of it, how you get the tracks etc, I didn't know about computers or samplers. He was really nice, we sat on a wall and he talked me through it for 15/20 minutes. The information blew my mind but it'd be years before I had those tools.

A couple of months later the universe shook everything up again and I ended up staying with a friend for a while on the other side of London while my gear was packed up and stored. I’d been playing bass with an old drummer friend but we couldn’t find other people we liked playing with. He’d also been playing with two of my old friends from ‘Akito Spokes’, I was invited along on guitar and keyboards and we started a band called ‘Cobra Kai’.

I didn’t really listen to these tunes again until around 2005 when (having had some interest in my ‘Rigsby Smith’ stuff) I started a myspace page for Heaton Electronics as well and put up ‘Casio Faltermeyer’ and ‘Jodie Foster’. I hadn’t heard ‘It’s a Plastic Garden’ for nearly 20 years until I started prepping this release, I hear its faults and it hints in places at what I tend to call ‘my terrible fusion period’, but it felt like it took forever, and in the spirit of this micro-label, I think it’s time to set it free.


IWA4TH028