This collection covers the years I mostly stopped making instrumental music, functioning much like the series of riff and work tapes, as an outtakes compilation, running in date order. My favourite instrumental passages from releases throughout these years can be found on ‘Document 75: Folk Band Instrumental Sections, 2009 - 2016’.

With It (‘Now’ cover, 4th March 2009) - Made for a ‘Now’ covers album organised by the band. I’d been Now’s drummer for some months in the latter half of 2008, having first jammed with them at (arts collective) Utrophia’s 1st ‘Cwm’ festival in Wales, 2004, on glockenspiel and drums. I’d just about started my folk project in early 2009 and was still pretty shy about it, so kept this instrumental. The instrumentation’s very similar though. Recorded in my 9x10ft room where I’d lived and worked since the end of 2007, a handmade room in what had been the reception area of an old ice cream factory in South East London, which became Utrophia’s second project space and studios when we moved in. My friend Michael had helped me build the room from old doors and salvaged wood, the whole thing only cost just over £70. Actually, it’s far fairer to say I helped Michael. The room was quite beautiful.

With It Outtake (4th March 2009)

Roof Projects (7th November 2009) - Soundtrack to a video I shot of us cutting out an access point to the roof through the kitchen ceiling, repairing the roof above my studio, which had six leaks, and installing a long burning stove and flue. This was our third winter there, you could see your breath in the kitchen, people would dive into cook and then head back to their rooms, something had to be done. We were so toasty that winter, but my room still leaked a bit. Not as much though!

Wrum Loop (Late 2009)

Club Club Extracts (10th and 13th February 2010) - Rehearsal and live clip of ‘Club Club’, Utrophia’s brief RnB band. Jules Goldsmith - vocal, Steve Molyneux - keyboard, Gavin Housley - guitar, Ben Meschko - bass, Jonathan Allen - bongos, me on drums. I couldn’t play that beat, but I did an approximation.

Helena’s Film Soundtrack (25th June 2010) - New visitor Helena made a one-shot video around the Utrophia area and buildings, this is a clip of the soundtrack I made for it. Helena would move in some months later, taking my studio, while I moved to bigger room at the front of the building, overlooking the drive. With a double bass player joining my folk group it was a good time for more space.

Drum Club/ I Know A Little Thing About Temptation (Summer 2010) - An open-house Drum Club in the ‘Left Side of the Barn’ space that a few of us prepared for small music nights, poetry and puppet shows. The barn was a second building we’d split into three sections next to the main space. Followed by one of those things where I noodled on the clarinet and then mimicked the part on another instrument, in this case the banjo.

Piano Improv (23rd November 2010) - We had an out of tune piano in the main space for a while before it took up residency in the left side of the barn, having moved it from the previous space at the end of 2007. Back at the end of February I’d cut through my studio floor and run cables into a box in the main project/gallery space below so it was easy to record in there. I mostly used it as an echo chamber, running previously recorded sounds into a speaker down there and recording the reverb. It was a lovely sound and would pick up little details like birds and distant cars swooshing past, and occasionally Chris and the rest of the mechanics who worked behind our building and were forever parking cars in our yard. In the end we rented him a space to store three massive armoured vans, built like tanks, and the MOD would fly over in a helicopter to check on them. That’s genuinely true.

MD/Cowbeat (16th December 2010)

Anna Lucier (December 2010) - Recorded for Utrophia’s ‘New Cross Cinemagraphic Theatre’ event, celebrating the building that had stood partially where we lived a hundred years later. Anna Francis played the piano and then I used the Alvin Lucier technique of playing the recording back into the room and recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Slowly definition is lost and the sound becomes a wash. This edit blends all the takes, by the end of the clip you’re hearing copy number 10.

Three Pianos (23rd December 2010) - Three tracks of me noodling on that piano this time.

Carnival of Zog Soundtrack (6th April 2011) - Recording Polly Huggett - cello and Ben Cummins - guitar, while I manipulated the sound live through an amplifier. This was for an exhibition of the same name. Six weeks later, Utrophia closed at the old ice cream factory with a group show called ‘That’s it?’ on Friday 24th June, three and a half years after we’d arrived. With the site sold to developers, I made a deal with the landlord of the old job centre in the High Street and we moved in there on a series of three month rolling contracts. We would now be a far more public space. Most of us worked like proud dogs the next month getting the new building ready to go and then opened in the high street with group show ‘This Is It!’ on Friday 29th July. It was another reverberant space and this time my studio was right next door. My room had one of those serving windows from when it had been a job centre, with the closing blind. I covered it with a sound treatment panel. That was the first room I treated, making panels from old painting frames. Amazing what a difference that makes when mixing especially. One of the other panels was a single mattress so I could sleep on the floor.

Channeling the Machine (1st October 2011) - The very amazing Ben Parry built a 30ft long mechanical structure in our project space, out of things leftover after Deptford market packed up in the evening. It would turn on at a switch, banging and clanking away in random polyrhythms. Andrew Kerr who ran a space in one of the two front windows organised three groups of people to perform music with it. I set up my ever-faithful Boss PS-3 pitchshifter with a mic running into it at the front of the space, the sound running into an amp, giving us a quiet reversed octave-down sound at the start. I moved to clarinet with Ben Cummins on keyboards while Russell Bond switched the machine on and then off. Then we played parts of the machine with sticks as I moved over to some metal bins and built a rhythm. Ben had some repeated lines he wanted to say, mimicking my shoulder issues at rehearsal. Russell took to the drums as Ben turned the machine back on and then returned to the keyboards. We did two shows.

Metal Bins Beat (2nd October 2011) - I knew Ben Parry was going to take those metal bins with him at some point so wanted to record something with them before he did.

Axel F Drums (14th October 2011) - I’ve always really liked this tune and thought I’d give the beat a go. Camcorder audio. I was so desperate to have a cassette of Axel-F when I was a kid that a friend taped it from a phone-in line for me, it was terrible quality, obviously.

Live with Rozi Extracts (15th October 2011) - Rozi Plain was playing in our project space for one of the ‘Lunch Music’ events which ran most Fridays. She asked me to join her on drums, melodica and backing vocals. We only had one brief rehearsal, so a little bit seat of the pants, but it was really nice to do. Rozi’s top notch.

Utrophia Kitchen Ensemble - A Deal With Ismet (November 2011) - Chiara Goldsmith moved into one of our studios and cooked dinner for Steve Molyneux, Helena Doyle and me and then we played a bit. I loved singing with Chiara, she sat in on a couple of recordings for my folk group while she was there too.

Progress in Work (March 2012) - Bernie Kerr recorded around the local streets and asked me to make an edit’ for the ‘Progress in Work’ event that was happening in the project space.

Untitled Little Jam (July 2012) - Made with some time on my hands just to make a thing.

Boom Kerfuffal Idea (Summer 2012) - Much the same. Is everything just to make a thing though? That’s a whole mind discussion about making stuff that I don’t want to have right now.

Animation Station Music (11th September 2012) - As part of ‘Gallery Closed, Studio Open’, a couple of weeks of creative guests teaching people their skills and the things that interest them, Andrew Dennison made an animation station with a lightbox and people would sit down and draw a few frames. Some people really took to it, drawing for an hour or more. We were always open market days and Saturdays whenever something was happening, which it almost always was. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Andrew had a minute and 16 seconds worth of frames and asked me to make a soundtrack for it. A lot of it is foley-style sounds mimicking what’s happening on the screen, like the panning skateboard for instance. I used a bit of the 23rd November Piano Improv at the end.

T-Shirts of the Mind (1st October 2012) - I always had t-shirt ideas but no inclination to make any of them, so very briefly I was drawing them and posting them on a website, this was the theme song, harmony vocal by Martina Borrut. My friends Tom Bogdon (The Shirley Rolls) and John Robert Lennon (Inverseroom) made cover versions of the theme. I still have t-shirts in my mind, I imagine a lot of people do. Around this time all of possessions that had been in storage suddenly came back to me, and a little overwhelmed by it all, I opened a shop in the other front window in-between shows, calling it ‘Matt’s Cool Things’. I sold about 80% of my stuff over twelve nonconsecutive weeks: records, instruments, comic books (I’d been slowly selling my childhood collection of several hundred for years), toys, tools, clothes etc. So much vintage stuff. I took photographs of people buying my things to document it and the shop was a hub for group reminiscence.

Improv for kids - 28th November 2012 - Art teacher Jack Brown had been running art sessions at our space with kids from his school since Ben Parry’s show. At this one he asked Martina Borrut (shakers, tuning pipes), Ben Cummins (triangle, whirly tube, woodblocks) and me (glockenspiel, clarinet, floor tom) to improvise music to draw to. I love the kids’ reactions, some of the drawings were really cool and wild.

Steak Diane - Sweet Ride Humility (Spring 2013) - I made this about a photo of a sexy motorbike. Another thing to do a thing.

People with Record Collections (5 clips) (1st May 2013) - David Morris - bass, Tomislav Kezele - guitar, me on drums and melodica. Pooling ideas, we thought they were quite broad (we’d planned to be a surf band originally, I think that would have been hard for me). We talked a lot about bands where every song is kind of the same, like they only had one record, whereas we’d sound like a band containing people with record collections. And then we just never got together again. Maybe a year later David did work experience for his Sound Engineering course with me, some of which was during the venue’s yearly festival, and he was as safe a pair of hands as he is on the bass, making it a far less stressful event than it sometimes could be. Not that I didn’t really enjoy the running around, solving problems and delivering good sound fast for the six years I worked there, because I did, I really did.

In G Sharp Unfinished (ADAT, Summer 2013) - I’d been thinking pretty much since I switched to computer recording how nice it was not to have a screen before. My friend Alex Wendt was selling an ADAT machine so I tried it out, made this, and went back to the Mac Mini. Meanwhile, the arts space days were at an end due to redevelopment. We’d always known it was coming, we’d been housesitting. The whole ending was quite bitter and marred by being attacked by a girl I’d been seeing who also lived there and some of the others not really accepting that a woman can injure or intimidate a man. Some of them outwardly mocked me for it, mostly the people who had been there to live in a ‘cool arts space’, rather than the few who’d been doing it for the love and some kind of small hope for humanity. Steve had often half joked that Utrophia could save the world, and I was with him on that. It felt like we were being useful in ways that we also enjoyed. Almost everything had been free entry and open to all, there was often a making aspect to the events, and when we put on gallery shows our commission was only 20% at a time when many asked for 60 (truly, and crazy). We even did a small skatepark in there at one point. So many magical years, it’s nice to be able to remember that way again now. This was also when I found a Casiotone CT101 on the junk market.

EP Guitar Ideas (late Summer 2013) - It was a weird summer, some good, some bad, but I learned a lot. I also moved six times, mostly multiple trips across town with my things in a shopping trolley, thank God for ‘Matt’s Cool Things’. On 13th August Mouth 4 Rusty released our ‘What’s Getting Somewhere?’ Album, which I’d been recording in the reverberant project space. I had a hard drive failure while mixing, but a crowdfunding campaign and a very nice friend of my bandmate’s got us the album back and we used the extra cash to make nicer CD covers (it was still CDs then, or it was for folk people). We had a great release party on the Minesweeper, an old minesweeper boat from the Second World War, owned by my friend Camden McDonald.

Crouch End Placeholder (2014/2015) - I was in pretty bad shape at this point. The violence I’d encountered at the end of the arts collective had triggered childhood memories, especially of the clawed fingernails coming towards my face and arms. I’d sort of patched myself back together until my friend Emily killed herself and then the walls kind of tumbled. When I slept I started to relive another kind of childhood abuse and so I stopped sleeping, and then I was a wreck. I ploughed myself into music, working on Mouth 4 Rusty’s ‘Must Take More Care’ album (clips at 00.53 with Fiona Stewart on violin, my dear friend since ‘A Buffalo Crossing’ in 2002). I also made an animation with hand drawn characters for one of the songs, making 2238 stills in Photoshop. It’s good to have these kinds of things to focus on sometimes, deeply, intensely, all-encompassing focus. I fell more deeply in love with my girlfriend than I knew it was possible to be and I still am.

Hard Hand End Section (August 2015) - We moved to the sea in mid July and things were better for a while while we worked on the house. Danny Green from Laish was putting together a collective of people covering each other’s songs for a charity compilation, so I recorded a Willy Mason song, my friend Scott Craggs (Immortal Kittens) very kindly sending drum tracks over from Bwoiston. I recorded the rest in our untreated spare room while we decorated downstairs, sanding floors, digging out a fireplace, sourcing tiles, and undoing a million bad DIY jobs from the previous 110 years. As soon as we moved to the sea I’d started hearing less acoustic sounds and more synths and rolling drums, some of which had peppered our ‘So Long City, Sorrow, Sadness’ album, written just before I left London.

Three Four Walking (15th October 2015) - My new recording space was in an old beach hut at the end of our short garden. I spent most of September replacing the joists under the floor and placing three layers of flooring, cut by hand and treated. I replaced the roof and felting, and my girlfriend and I spent days measuring, cutting and fitting insulation before adding acoustic plasterboard and painting. I made some speaker stands filled with insulation and initially used an old dressing table as a desk so I could set up and continue working on the house, free of all the instruments and recording gear. Next we took out the kitchen and fitted a new one ourselves before we set about tackling the bedrooms. I made this at some point in between. When the house was kind of done I made the shed a bit nicer inside. Small, but lovely.

Not Only The Oar Collage (January 2016) - Clips from a Mouth 4 Rusty EP I haven’t put out at time of writing. Very elongated, and few words, quite the opposite to how we’d been. It wasn’t going to be the same thing anymore if it was going to be a thing. We’d played a farewell gig (and then possibly regrettably, another) before leaving London, but my bandmate really wanted to carry on, so we did for a while.

Thing from Jim’s Loops (February 2016) - I’d had a bit of contact with Jim Dowd in the 14 years since ‘Some Beat Group’ (Fruitless, Unfollowed Volume 4) broke up, the occasional call or he’d come to a gig, but we started talking and meeting up a bit more regularly, which continues to this day. He sent me some little guitar noise samples and this is far as I got with them. We’d do some more recording online and in person though.

Pear and Gorgonzola (February 2016) - The drums are single note samples, placed by hand (I finally intend to get a sampler), everything else on this is very much like a throwback to late 1997. I think there was some subconscious intention there, as we’d been packing up leave London I’d come across a CD-R of 1998’s ‘In These Clothes I Am The Future’ album, and it had surprised me, it kind of felt like a different life that I’d lost touch with. I thought it was good and inventive, and hearing it planted a seed for starting going back through what a friend more recently called my ‘archive’.

Video Test MP Revisited (Early March 2016) - I started gathering some old visual work together and wanted to make a video of all the photographs of people who’d bought things from my ‘Matt’s Cool Things’ shop in 2012/2013, so I started making this. The thing was, and this sounds absurd looking back now, I wasn’t at all convinced I could make music. Instead I asked ‘Now’ if I could use one of their tunes. More recently I’ve found a huge other batch of photos of people with their purchases at the shop, so if I recut the video maybe I’ll make the soundtrack this time. It’s nice to have a reason to make something, that’s one of the things I’ve realised going back through all these old recordings.

20th June, 5th July and 25th October Outtakes (2016) - I wrote another Mouth 4 Rusty album throughout 2016 but my heart wasn’t entirely in it. A lack of interest and lacking any real confidence in conjunction with not sleeping and the night terrors again, it wasn’t the greatest of times.

Eastern Telecats (October 2016) - I bought a telecaster copy for £50 from a charity shop and this shape on the guitar fretboard revealed itself to me and slowly opened up as a scale. I’d always been a bit anti music theory, but over the next couple of months I started learning a bit. I found it very different to approach it as a tool and not a rule.

February Raag (February 2017) - I’d say this is where my recovery began really. 2016 had been a terrible year but I was starting to sleep properly again, and memories of childhood trauma had been settled to the point where I could work through them, a slow process of grief and acceptance. Sometimes you just have to live with those memories and those feelings and let them gestate. It was hard to accept myself as an abused person but I had a lot of tools from having so much therapy when I was 21 for my PTSD, and nearly 20 years later I was using them again. The biggest thing was deciding to like me, to decide to be on my side, and make sure I wasn’t doing any harm, and therefore, I should be on my side. Shame and anxiety had always been such big parts of my life and they’d rarely helped me. My girlfriend was amazing throughout, I wouldn’t have got through it without her and her endless empathy. I had to cut some family members out of my life, which seems easy to read but not easy to do, people are not just the things you don’t like about them, they’re also people you know, people you wanted to trust, maybe some you still love in some way. But you can’t have the good without the bad in people, they come with both. I’d been on the run from all this stuff for a long time. It wasn’t all suddenly cleared up, but I ended 2017 in much better shape than I’d started. That aside, I’d just had flu in February when I went back to the shed and made this one afternoon. It’s rough but I really like it.

CZ230s Test (Early March 2017) - My girlfriend’s family clubbed together to get this for my birthday as I turned 41. I’d had this keyboard stolen in 1999 (the story’s in the liner notes for Heaton Electronics’ ‘Receive’ EP). One day I was thinking about that, searched online and found one on Gumtree listed just two hours before. It has one replacement key that’s a bit cranky, but otherwise, j’adore.

I and You Instrumental (10th March 2017) - This was the last written for the final Mouth 4 Rusty album, I liked the melodies and instrumental parts (presented here), but lyrically the time had passed for me. Not to be too poetic, but the whole M4R thing had always been about redemption for me, dealing with guilt, figuring out who I was and wanted to be, finding my place in things, and it kind of worked, and so then it was over.

Jim Dowd (Some Beat Group) and I got together at his place and recorded some things, most of which became 'Oubendermin' releases on my 'Pretend Bands' micro label, this was one of mine that didn't. Just improvising on the black keys and then a bass and guitar overdub later at home.

By the end of the year I’d be taking stock of the past and transferring things from DAT, and then CD-R, and as it went on, 4 track and cassettes back to my childhood, and compiling things in order. I made it a little micro label, releasing it all to my friends from March 2018. It’s mid June 2022 as I write this and I’m just finishing up now. It’s been a massive and vivid trip through memory and it’s been amazing to spend days with some of those people I played with again. It’s also done me the world of good. I’ve tried to resist making anything new for the past four years, but I have a few things on the go. We’ll see.


IWA4TH075