'Sketches from the Tall Trees' is a collection of recordings and demos made between late 2002 and spring 2003, mostly in the living room of my rented ex-council top floor flat in Teddington, Middlesex, surrounded by trees and green parakeets that had escaped from a local aviary, and trains running past every 15 minutes.

I wrote 'Untitled with Attab Haddad' shortly after we met, he added his parts and we recorded it in my living room together, one of the last things made on my digital eight-track. Pretty much everything else on this collection was recorded to a beige Mac G3 my friend Jim Dowd had given me, with a 16 channel Soundcraft mixer plugged straight into the onboard stereo input on the computer. It wasn't the highest of fi, but it served me well enough for the next 3 years. That said, some of these recordings were roughly made demos, but as that’s all they’ll ever be, that’s all they’ll ever be.

Attab and I met at sound engineering school, he approached me after a class in the first week where we'd been asked what we wanted to be doing in 5 years time and I'd said 'conducting an orchestra playing my own music', which was where my head was at at the time. I tended to conduct my bands and kind of wanted my own chamber orchestra of sorts. Attab had just taken up the oud and we were interested in similar scales and modes. We were also the same age, a good few years older than most of the rest of the class, even at 26. 'Man' was recorded the first time Attab and I played together, at Gateway studio by our classmate Mickel. This is from a cassette copy.

I brought Attab into 'A Buffalo Crossing', the band I'd just formed, and there were moments where things really worked, but ultimately he wanted to write and I think he found it hard to do that with us in mind. When the band broke up a year later, Attab and I carried on making music together as and when for the next couple of years.

'Strolling' was recorded with five sixths of 'A Buffalo Crossing': drums, bass, guitar, piano/moog and violin. On the day of recording, one of the band showed up and insisted we record track by track instead of all together or he was going home. It seemed weird because 'Strolling', like so many of our tunes, had large improvised sections where we'd play off each other. But we couldn't record without him, so we went ahead one by one. What followed was a lot of second -guessing while overdubbing over the drums, trying to figure out where everybody else would be in the tune. I'm surprised by how often Fiona and I managed to find each other to play our melodies at the same time, but it's far from the most cohesive version we ever played. If I ever finish going through the hours of 'ABC' rehearsal recordings maybe I'll be able to share some more spirited ones. The melody's nice though.

Incidentally, the sound school’s gear failed yet again when it came time to mix and back up (as it had with the ‘Die Funf Nummern’ EP recordings), and I had to transfer stereo pairs of each audio track in real time to CD-R for ‘Strolling’ and two other tunes. It was an arduous task and took about two days, then each song had to be pieced back together by ear on my computer at home. This is probably why ‘Strolling’ on this album is a super quick mix I made on the day to listen to at home, as it feels the most fresh to me.

'The Car Dealer's Daughter', 'VBO', 'A Slow Separation' and 'Permit to Travel' were demos for 'A Buffalo Crossing'. We played '..Daughter' live a few times but never made a proper recording of it. I think live Attab played an oud solo instead of the guitar break and the melodicas on the recording were played by violin. The band made an arrangement of 'Permit to Travel' and played it live fairly often.

'Winding', 'Interlude in C' and the second section of 'A Little Rain Won't Cause You Pain' were one-mic rehearsal recordings with Attab made in my lounge that I later overdubbed. Again, these were demos of ideas for 'A Buffalo Crossing', but with there being six of us, everybody having ideas, four people writing and spending a lot of time taking ideas from improvisations, we couldn't get to everything. C'est la vie. It was that band that brought me two of my favourite people, Richard Davis and Fiona Stewart. Fiona and I have continued to make music together in some way or other to this day.

As for sound school, I'd gone there to fill in some gaps in my DIY knowledge but I learned more from Tape Op magazine and the Tape Op forum than I did from spending seven grand I didn't really have. I liked Tape Op's DIY ethic back then, I haven't visited the forum for years but it was an amazing resource at the time.

DIY 'til I die.

Matt Rigsby Smith - Guitar, bass, glockenspiel, synth, clarinet, melodica and percussion
Attab Haddad - Oud on 'Man', 'A Little Rain..', 'Permit to Travel' and 'Winding' and oud and percussion on 'Untitled..' and 'Interlude in C'. Co-composition on 'Permit to Travel' and 'Man'
Fiona Stewart - Violin on ‘Strolling’
Richard Davis - Keyboards on ‘Strolling’
Ross Parfitt - Drums on ‘Strolling’
Jay Sheridan - Bass guitar on ‘Strolling’ 

Many thanks to Mel and Louise


IWA4TH044