The Tanner and the Carpenter (December 25th 2007) - Christmas night 2007 I came back to the Utrophia arts collective building after dark, expecting to be the only one in the old engine house, and scared the crap out of my housemate Jason, who’d thought I was an intruder and hid with a weapon. For the rest of the night he recorded drums in one of the main rooms, while I was in my tiny shelf room writing this. I didn’t have any proper microphones with me and wouldn’t until February, so I used a clip-on electret mic plugged into a minidisc recorder that was connected to the input on my Mac mini. I re-recorded the guitars later and the piano was a VST, but the bass (played on acoustic guitar), percussion and melodica were all tracked that night in a room the size of a double bed not high enough to stand in. I finally had my own melodica, having bought one on my trip to see friends in New York in December. I’d also bought an EBow which I didn’t get along with, and a Boss Phaser like the one I’d used in the late 90s. This tune was written for the ‘Rigsby Smith and the Centaurs’ band, Sonia began learning the piano part and the melodica was intended for violin. It’s overlong, but I never found a way I liked to shorten it.

Over the course of the next week I built a room in the old reception area of our new arts collective building with my dear old friend Michael Charlton, a set designer and boat rebuilder. The room was quite beautiful, all made from old doors and salvaged wood, the whole thing only cost just over £70. Michael was a wizard, it looked like a small boardroom. The building as a whole was two storey ex-ice cream factory with an 80 metre sloping drive down from the road and a large yard in front. To the side there was a barn which was quickly split into three: a small performance space, space for two of us to have as a couples studio and storage on the other side. In the main building four more of us had old office rooms arranged around a kitchen/living area, and the large reverberant factory room downstairs would become our project space and gallery. The heating and electricity were both off when we making my room, so Michael and I would work as long as the daylight and cold would let us and then dash over half frozen to the Sam Smith pub across the road. Pie, mash and veg for £4.25, and pudding and custard around a pound extra, it was the perfect tonic. A couple of times we went back and finished up by torchlight. We didn’t know how long we’d be there, it was initially just for six months, but with the financial crisis that came later in the year slowing the speed of developments in the area, it would turn out to be three and a half years.


Room Tryout (14th Jan 2008) - Trying out my new 9x10ft room, PZMs (flat shaped robust microphones that hang against the wall) and minidisc electret mic on everything, no headphones and so everything bleeding through the monitors onto every track. Utrophia had quite a lot of instruments laying around, so I borrowed some drums, a bass, a doumbek, a 15 watt Squier practice amp and a Buddha Machine. The room was kind of ringy, had a slight bell-like quality to it, more so when listening back then when recording. I hadn’t learned about sound treatment, so I did find it hard to mix in there, but I loved my little space. The culture shifted slightly when we got our own rooms, we went to them more and spent less time existing and making communally, and I did miss that. The first couple of winters were exceptionally cold and there was no heating in the communal areas until Steve installed a log burner towards the end of 2009.


And Now I’m Sacred (28th Jan 2008) - Named after a miss-spelt text after I sent the piano player the score for ‘The Tanner and the Carpenter’. Some of the ideas had been sketched out in September 2007 (2007 Work Tape, track 22, 00.51). I think it was well-intentioned and has some nice ideas, but there’s something a bit TV show theme about both of these tunes, perhaps ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ and a 70s sports show respectively. I managed to borrow some headphones so I could track without bleed. The snare, electric guitars and bass were re-recorded when I realised this wasn’t going to get past demo stage.


Let’s Make Some Ocean (4th Feb 2008) - I got a call one night in early February from my friend Matthew Cullen, his band ‘Chorus of Arrows’ were touring from Martha’s Vineyard and had been let down for a place to stay that night. They all came over and crashed in the kitchen/living area. The next day, full of gratitude and realising a lot of my stuff was still in storage, they drove me out to my mother’s garage to pick up my recording interface, drums and as much else as we could fit in the van. It was so nice of them. They were due to come back and play a ‘secret session’ in our kitchen for a small audience but all came down with flu before they could make it back. My housemate Serafina bailed me out, filling in the night with songs on her harp that she didn’t tend to play in her set. With a lot of my gear back with me after several months, I made this to test it out. Still PZMs on drums but usually a C4000 or 319 on everything else.


Three Places Where I Left You Empty (February 2008) - Recorded much the same as ‘Let’s Make Some Ocean’, but with close mic’d brushed cymbals and no PZMs. The train at the end is a sample from Teddington where I’d lived with my ex for six years and had left the previous Autumn.


Uke Should Be So Lucky (15th Feb 2008) - I wasn’t the only one who’d felt hugely inspired by the arts collective, a couple of years before a 16 year-old Jason Kerley had found himself at a Utrophia event and took the concept on in his home town. On a visit to the new space, he gave us a decorated Utrophia ukulele, which came to live in my room, hanging on the walls with the other instruments, cables and hand percussion. Things would often get broken in the building and I thought the yellow uke needed preserving, I gave it to founder Steve when we left the final Utrophia building in 2013.


Can Can (3rd March 2008) - A mixture of played and home sampled drums. Some of the sounds, like the child’s keyboard were recorded in the project space. There’s a couple of brief samples of Ross Parfitt (A Buffalo Crossing/Heartfelt Four) playing saxophone from a session in 2004. A rare outing for my berimbau at this point, I hadn’t used it much in the previous year or so. That free Wurlitzer VST from 2007 again. I don’t have that VST now, and with this tune I’d only printed a rough working mix with the Wurli, not just the keyboard track. I tried the phase flip thing that had saved the cellos on the ‘Free Will’ album (2006) to pull the Wurlitzer out of a rough mix, with almost success, you can hear some artefacts here and there.  I rarely made any rough mixes of this stuff, just make and then never mix it, so I was lucky there.


Hands Up in 30 Seconds (3rd March 2008) - A few of us were talking online about condensing music and then doing it to our own to see how it sounded. This is 2007’s ‘Hands Up Baby Hands Up’ EP squashed into 30 seconds. Hey Chris, hey Shane.


My Ship Sailed From China (March 19th 2008) - My favourite childhood song, sampling two takes of my six year-old self from a cassette. I was very shy about singing but my parents liked me to do it. The music was made using Optigan samples my friend Alissa sent me. The Optigan’s a vintage keyboard a bit like a Mellotron but it runs from 12” record-like program discs.


I’m Not in the Mood for Papier Maché (21st March 2008) - My housemate Jono Allen and I were supposed to be finishing the papier maché over a large hanging egg shape made of bent wire in the project space below. Instead we made a short video of us playing in the hallway with our limbs restricted. Jono played guitar with his hands sellotaped up so he could only use his pinkies and I played drums and melodica with one hand tied behind my back. Then we went and finished the egg because the arts collective’s ‘Egg Festival’ was beginning that afternoon and it’d have to be dry by the evening.


First Transformers Tune (21st March 2008) - Melody for the first song I remember ‘writing’ when I was nine or ten. It was about a story I’d been playing with my Transformers toys. We’d been talking about our first things online and I drew the melody out on a MIDI grid so someone could hear it. Not long after I tried to get a gallery show together at the project space, all of artists’ first or early work, but there were few takers, just me and Michael Maier, who sent me some artwork. I thought it might make for a fond, jovial and levelling show, but it was not to be. Cowards!


I Didn’t Mean to Wake You (31st March 2008) - Little acoustic sketch when it was too late to make anything else. The walls were thin, but there was a corridor or a room between me and anyone else.


Recording ‘Red Blues’ Violins with Natalie - My friend Scott sent over the files for the ‘Immortal Kittens’ sessions I’d done with him and our friend Evan in Boston, December ’07. Natalie Sedgewick came over to record some violins for ‘Red Blues’ (Immortal Kittens - ‘These Kittens Immortal’, track 3). I always laughed a lot with Natalie.


Liiiii (14th April 2008) - I was really into Battles' B&C EPs at the time, it shows in the bass guitars on either side (that Squire amp again).  I was going for a sampled sound, tight gating, still with the manipulation of instruments but leaving the drums as live as possible.  The Wurlitzer was still the free VST and there's a brief VST synth in there as well, and a sampled-sounding multi-glock loop, otherwise it's all clarinets, and a rare use of the upper register from me (so hard) as well as the squawling I was into at the time.  It's another one of those times I figured out the clarinet scrawl on another instrument (bass this time) to double it. I was into that, trying to make it sound deliberate by doubling. I can hear the hi-hat reacting to the pingyness of the walls through the overhead mics, but there's nothing I can do about that now.  Call it lively.


Enough Already (15th April 2008) - More PZM drums. Made very quickly because I wanted to write something and not worry about sound quality.


Film for Sonia (25th April 2008) - I recorded some drums on a Beocord stereo reel to reel deck to go with a short film I made for Sonia, the keyboard player in my band who’d become my girlfriend the previous couple of months. Soon after I put some bass ideas over the drum track, but this is as far as it got.


Lashings of Hair (Rehearsal, 26th April 2008) - Recorded to the Beocord with a PZM. Steve Molyneux - drums, A Janus Face - bass guitar, Sonia Kiourtzidis - keyboard, me on clarinet and guitar. Natalie was also part of the band but wasn’t around for this rehearsal. I let the band go not long after this, it just always seemed so hard to get and keep together and there were some issues between a couple of the members which only complicated things. Some of the players were amazing, but I wasn’t so sure of the ideas I was coming up with, I certainly didn’t feel in my prime. It was also hard to have to borrow a MIDI keyboard for Sonia every practice, she had a beautiful piano at home that I loved to softly play in the mornings, but portable weighted keyboards were a lot more expensive then. I’d have to take my room apart to fit us all each time and then often someone couldn’t make it, it was hard to hold together and we never quite got there. Most of the things we did (with our old jazz drummer, Vic) are on ‘Fruitless, Unfollowed Volume 9: Rigsby Smith and The Centaurs’, which spans August to November 2007. This was more like an attempt at a rebirth than anything. It’s a fond memory though, the four of us wedged into my little 9x10ft room with our instruments, Steve refusing not to sing the out of tune harmony at the start. Steve.


James and Sefa (2nd May 2008) - James Dunn exhibited his home made and reworked synths at the project space and we spent an afternoon recording. In this very small clip, my housemate Serafina Steer brought her harp down and I played with effects while James played the synths.


Toy Pianos (2nd May 2008) - Someone had some toy piano samples, so of course I was going to play with them.


Opener (8th May 2008) - With the band still moving, but slowly, I started thinking about making an album by myself again. This was the first idea I came up with, thus the title, but I didn’t take it any further.


Sticks Drums Song (15th May 2008) - Just a thing to make a thing, blow off some steam. PZM on drums again. This might have been a late sketch for the Centaurs before we split.


The Philosophers’s Niece (20th May 2008) - I made this around the time Sonia and I broke up. After six years cohabiting in Teddington, I wasn’t ready for a proper relationship so soon. It would take me four very different quarter-year relationships back to back to realise that, but I was only on my second. I remember a conversation about breakups a few months before in the kitchen of the old space where Serafina told me warmly ‘you’re mad at the moment, you won’t realise it, but you are’. Pretty spot on. This was another piece based around one or two themes and then played against with different rhythms, the themes switching instruments.


Lifetime (May 2008) - This must have been the last thing I was working on before I took off on a whim to Wiltshire where I made films of ink in water and got myself in more relationship troubles for three months. In the middle of this I did a brief art show at Utrophia showing my ink films, briefly coming back to record an album for ‘Sabor Legume’ in my room, which was a lot of fun. I’d lost my cafe job in London because the building kept flooding and so my friends moved out (‘Deptford Properly’, I loved that cafe), so I’d been working for my new ex and when it ended badly, I came back with no train fare and a lot of trolleys and bags. I got humiliated and thrown off the train by the ticket guy in Wiltshire but when I finally made it back to New Cross, the guard just opened the gate for me. I thanked him and said what a rough journey I’d had, ‘Well you’re home now’ he replied with a big smile, which kind of sung me all the way home. I was home, I liked it there, and I think that’s when I settled in properly. Sabor Legume’s Molly Palmer got some funding to do a show and spent a lot of it on paying for materials to do up the project space. We worked hard and it looked plush at the end, even if someone did paint themselves out leaving us to listen to Red Hot Chilli Peppers all night (I mean WTF, we’d had Beefheart earlier) from the CD player downstairs because we couldn’t walk on the floor. There was a lot of hope in the air. Meanwhile, I joined the band ‘Now’ on drums for a few months, from August 23rd, playing my first gigs at AMC and the Foundary on 11th and 17th September. It was nice being a drummer and not the writer. We also had a drum machine and another drummer, Delia, who I really liked playing with. I also met Zee, one of the singers in the band, and we began seeing each other for three months. ‘You are sunlight’ she told me and that’s stayed with me ever since. A couple of years later she gave me reiki and as dubious as I was, it opened up my stomach muscles, it made me laugh and it made me cry and a lot of stuff shifted physically and emotionally. She put the sunlight back in me.


160 BPM laidback bass (October 2008) - Settling back into South East London throughout August to October, I was working doing market research again. The organiser would call me up, tell me my backstory and age and off I’d go to talk about car insurance (I don’t drive) or cereal or beer (they had to get you a cab home if there was alcohol, so those were quite good ones). I’d been doing these pretty regularly the last couple of years, up to three a week, enough to pay the rent and bills. They’re not supposed to use the same people, but they did, and I’d often see her son or other people I’d met before, all pretending that we hadn’t. The last one I did I got Steve on it too, I think it might have been clear we knew each other and I never got the call again. Luckily I’d got a job working in a cafe made from an old train on Deptford High Street.


Uka Revisited (22nd October 2008) - Brief return to a theme from the 1998 Work Tape (track 2). I think this was a ‘how do I make music?’ thing where I took a brief look into the past. That late 1997 and early 1998 period had always seemed like the beginning of something good and a really productive and inspired time, like the things on 1998’s ‘In These Clothes I Am The Future’ album. I’d made a few things since I got back and these became part of Pronto Porto’s ‘Horse and Universe’ album, which I continued making until mid November.


Two Basses and a Glockenspiel (November 2008) - I left ‘Now’ on 23rd November, between work and Utrophia and its financial concerns and general running of the place, it was hard to make the trip to one of the further parts of East London with my gear every Saturday. I rounded my time off by making them a video for ‘Relive the Food’ and continued supporting them, booking them at Utrophia events and introducing them to the Bird Nest where they found an interested crowd and still play there regularly. Meanwhile, I decided to be single for a good long while.


IWA4TH068