Not Fire is the outcome of close to a decade in which I experienced something of a creative block. I was writing and recording, in my absence from the music scene not recording and releasing albums, I remained musically active in the period 2008-2020.

Living in Aoteroa New Zealand for the period 2008-2014 I lived a reclusive life in solitude on a 6 hectare coastal rainforest property. While only about 45 min from Auckland city, but about as remote as one could be with just a small community, off a dead end road which had a vista of the spectacular and wild west coast iron sand surf beaches of Auckland, which during the summer periods, these beaches, Kare Kare and Piha are swarming with day trippers and surfers, but during the Autumn and winter months are more or less completely empty except for the od- hardcore winter surfer ( myself being one, some days I would swim and surf alone on this seemingly endless beach)

I was splitting my time between teaching at Elam School of Fine arts in Auckland, I would commute 3 days a week from my isolated cottage, leaving early each morning in darkness on the winding road through the Waitakere forest and returning in twilight, or if lucky with time I could catch a western sunset over the the Tasman sea from my little house perched high up on the mountain range overlooking the wilding and raging seas breaking on the coast.

This decision to embrace this lifestyle in 2008 was following a decade of itinerant touring, playing European gigs with the the Autistic Daughters on 2 tours, and playing some horrendous amount of solo concerts across Italy, Spain, France, China, Australia. In 2007 alone , if memory serves, I would have played 120 European shows, and suffered 3 or 4 36 Hour flights from New Zealand to Europe.. I was burnt out…

This period wasn't all isolation. I was working with Brent Hayward, formerly of the Kiwi Animal and Shoes This High , and I played and recorded regularly with him and his group Fats White, a madcap collection of vagrant musicians who would play 6 hour sets in Auckland Pubs and dives.

I became involved with the Audio Foundation, a government funded organization for touring experimental music in NZ on a board with Richard Frances, my former band-mate and dear friend Rosy Parlane, Clinton Watkins, Jeff Henderson, Zoe Draton and others.

I had a band, the Absolutionists with guitarist Sam Hamilton and drummer Chris O"Connor, which played regular gigs in Auckland in the period 2008-2013, Inspired by "Guitar Absolution in the Shade of the Midnight Sun" by Jesse Harper of Human Instinct fame.
This group morphed into The Blue Ladies to include Jeff Henderson (horns) and Hermione Johnstone( Prepared Piano), and I worked with with the arts collective known as "et al" who represented New Zealand at the Venice biennale. I was head of sound for films and installations for the collective.

Later in 2008-2011, I was commissioned to make a piece, a song cycle entitled 'Red Memory' which was made for the MAU Theater Forum by invitation of choreographer Lemi Ponifasio.
This was a kind 'opera' inspired by the writings of the late ecologist/ sociologist Geoff Park.
I wrote a libretto steeped in NZ colonial history, and thus the work was maybe too colloquial for an international audience so it was never released.
For this work, I employed Paul Taylor (Drums), Chris O'Connor( Percussion), Marie Thom ( Cello/Bass), Matthew Sunderland ( Lead Vocals), and a String Quartet. This was an hour long piece that was performed 4 times and sadly there is scarce documentation of the show.

But it was during the development period of this piece that I was concurrently writing the songs that appear on Not Fire, - namely, "Paul","Kids", and "Heron".. Paul and Kids were recorded in my afore mentioned shack/studio on the west coast of NZ..

Also in 2008 took a commission for a permanent sound installation in an outdoor space in a sculpture park called Brick Bay which has commissioned artists to create work in this wild landscape and so I made a text- based multi speaker sound trail in the forest using a text of mine inspired by Geoff Park again and used the voices of prominent actor Rena Owen( Once Were Warriors) and Barry Jenkin( a famous NZ FM Radio Host and DJ).

This work was re-commissioned and sold to a private investor who had me install the work on their property in southland New Zealand, making this the 1st piece of non sculptural or object based "sound art" to be sold on the art market in New Zealand. (apparently).

I worked as an art installation technician for Artspace Gallery and the Auckland City Art Gallery, and I was living itinerant between Auckland and Melbourne.
In Melbourne I was working with a team of people from the Strines and Rear View galleries, and playing occasionally in the Improvisational music scene, memorable gigs were playing in duo with Mike Cooper, solo gigs at IMA in Brisbane, Make it Up Club, Adelaide at the Hotel Exeter.. Too many to remember. ..

I found myself back in NZ, and had a part-time lecturing position at Elam School of Fine Arts heading critical studies and sonic arts, and concurrently engaged in an MFA/ Post Graduate Diploma, studying and teaching concurrently approaching 40 lead to a kind of burnout, and I was also working again with the Artspace organization as in-house preparator and technician.

It was through working in the art world that I began to work as an assistant to the award winning filmmaker and artist Vincent Ward (In Spring One Plants Alone, Vigil, The Navigator, What Dreams May Come, Map of the Human Heart, Alien 3, Children of the Mist), and I became his wingman.

It was Vincent who encouraged me to get back into music and it was through working with him on his Audio Visual shows that my work was spotted and I was head-hunted to compose music for the Lemi Ponifasio MAU dance company.
The 2014 show 'The Crimson House' was commissioned to perform at festivals in Europe including Theater De la Ville Paris, Molier Theater Sete, Linz and The Holland Festival, and it was months of development on the road, starting in NZ and then Austria, and huge shows in these festivals. I didn't play on stage but from the sound booth front of house, and the noise and music needed to be played live using Ableton Live™ because the Butoh inspired dance sequences were not fixed, so I had to keep my eye on stage for cues.. The brief for this work was Xenakis and Black Metal, and Lemi the director loved the music of the golden age of Mille Plateaux, so that was my directive.

For this I composed very noisy drone based sound beds, and drew a lot of the material from my catalog, including "Red Memory, All Cracked Medias, and sheets of sound that were used as a score to this dance work which featured a cast of Kiribati, Samoan and Maori dancers, an extremely complex light and sound show.

While this show was touring the spring and summer festival season in 2014 I flew 3 maybe 4 times back and forth from Europe to New Zealand. The travel and work load was taking it's toll on my physical and mental health, and so in 2014 I decided to live in London, because the Company was mainly working in Europe and it would make it easier for me to access the continent for gigs with the MAU dance company.
It all came to a sudden end when the show was dropped from a festival in Athens which subsequently bankrupted it and so the show was canned, leaving me with no other plans.. I retreated to my friends studio in Surrey and demoed some ideas, but didn't make a masterpiece but learned a lot about analog recording and production techniques whilst there.

During this 6 month stay, I lived in London and worked with a close friend Travis Hefferen- an old friend who had a sound recording studio in the East End. I would work for him doing night shifts mixing commercial music and sound design. This was a fairly unfruitful period except for a full-house solo show at Cafe OTO and a period working with Heather Leigh at the studio is Surrey to produce her album 'I abused Animal'.

During this time I left central London and moved to live at the TRAK recording studio in Surrey with my mentor Joe, and with it's close proximity to Gatwick Airport, and very cheap flights,I soon found I was coming to Berlin almost every week, as my cohort of friends are here, cheaper living day-to-day, and so I eventually extrapolated myself from the UK and made my base here in Berlin in summer of 2014.
I arranged an Italian tour playing solo, and in the spring of 2015 toured Italy playing shows solo and with Stefano Pilia, and it was on this tour that these songs started to come to life, I also took in a 10 day writers retreat in Umbria in rural central Italy, where I could write in solitude, and developed some of these songs there.

Following this tour I returned to Berlin still living out of a suitcase and squatting friends houses, until getting a semi-permanent residence.
A chance meeting lead to me being invited to guest lecture at the dBs Academy( a division of the University of St Mark's and St John, UK, which set up a satellite school in Berlin). This lead to an offer to develop a lecture series and to supervise Dissertation/ Thesis in the field of 'Critical Studies and contextual Awareness' which I spend 6 month writing and then engaged in teaching and lecturing full-time.
The workload in academia was not super conducive to creative musical work however, but I had a few sporadic gigs, playing improv in the "echtzeitmusik" scene, playing support slots for Lee Ranaldo, Thalia Zedek and Seth Frightening.

I produced records for Victor Herero and Julia Reidy consecutively at Funkhaus Studios, and with my students produced numerous performances of Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music", Phill Niblock's "guitar 2 for 4" and John Zorn's "The Book of Heads". These were just academically based learning exercises.
I was lucky in my teaching module to be able to have a guest lecturer visit monthly, and so in my classes we had lectures and workshops with Tim Barnes, Mouse on Mars, Roger O'Donnell(The Cure/Berlin/Psychedelic Furs ), Ashley Paul, Andrea Parkins, Mike Bulloch, Danny Butt, Thalia Zedek, Simon Reynolds, Bob Ostertag were among the guests I could bring into my class, and eventually Andrea Parkins joined me and became a senior lecture and we headed the program together.

Fast forward to 2018, and 19th nervous breakdown ensued and because of stress I left my University job and worked solely as a freelance language advisor to a left-wing news organization.

In early 2018 my partner Erin Lang organized a tour of Mexico and Canada where we shared the bill, myself solo and her project Foundling, which was quite an odd coupling but it was good to road-test my new material solo, because playing live can sometimes be the best way to figure out what one wants to do with a song.

On returning to Berlin in the summer of 2018 I was a little lost for ideas and spent most of that year working with Erin on her vegan catering business, and had a failed attempt to open a record store, as the winter came on I retreated to Australia in early 2019 to visit family and regroup, and during that time played a single concert in Brisbane and gave a lecture on Tony Conrad at the Institute of Modern Art.. In this period in Brisbane I started to collaborate with Leighton Craig and Sandra Selig AKA Primitive Motion and we had a weekend of recording together at Sandra's studio and some of the material recorded became sound beds over which I would compose songs for Not Fire.

On returning to Berlin in April 2019, I played a single show with the group Perlonex for their 20th anniversary at Ausland, I only playes 2 shows that year, November when I debuted the Not Fire material with the band consisting of Erin, my old friend Boris Hauf on Piano, Emanuele Porchinai on guitar, and Andi Stecher on Drums..

Stepping back to August 2019, David Bryant (Godspeed You Black Emperor/ Set Fire to Flames) had moved his studio The Pines from Montreal to Berlin, and set up in N.K. a building that had housed a venue, artists studios and recording studios, but was by now abandoned and just housed David's studio. David was going back to Montreal and offered me the studio to work for 6 weeks, and there I worked in solitude day and night on making Not Fire, with some recordings made with Andrea Belfi(Drums) and Emanuele Porcinai (Guitar, and production) at their studio and migrated back to my studio for tweaking.
For the technical geeks, the Pines Studio has an excessive collection of vintage gear, Neve, API and Studer pre-amps,Coles, AKG and Neumann Microphones, and all of Godspeed's custom guitars and vintage Fender amps, all at my disposal, I used David's guitars more than my own, a custom built Telecaster, Travis Bean aluminum guitar, and few sprinklings of 12 string acoustic, which are hardly audible but do have some presence.
This was a long way from recording with my TASCAM 4 track in New Zealand.

On finishing this tracking phase of extensive late night recordings through to the end of the Berlin summer, I decided to work with Giuseppe Ielasi in the final stages of production and mixing. Giuseppe is a very close friend of over 20 years, we have had many many hours of listening and discussing productions of albums we love, and our relationship in terms of creativity and realization verges on telepathy and so I handed it to him to mix and master. I flew to Milan to spend 5 days with him, and in this procedure Giuseppe suggested I keep out of the studio and leave it to him, because - and rightly so- if I am to be in the studio fastidiously combing through each track, by the end of the week I would lose perspective of the vision of the overall, which I had already pre-mixed and settled on such as track sequence and mix/production techniques, or be driven insane from hearing the material over and over.

So I would meet Giuseppe each morning for a briefing on what songs would be mixed that day, then I would roam the parks and piazzas of Monza as a flâneur. Giuseppe and I would meet for pranzo and discuss directions of the mixing proecess. Over these late afternoon , long Italian style lunches we discussed production styles, and references to other producers who's work we admire and respect, names bandied about in discussion were Mitchell Froom, Tom Verlaine, Trevor Horn, The Blue Nile, Mick Harvey, The sound of Memphis Ardent Studios, Lo-FI and Hi Fi aesthetics and how to harmonize a lot of different elements ( because in this case, the tracks were comprised of material made in many different recording locations, ranging from an iPhone recording in a garage ( the foundations of Say After Me), a stereo recording made in my shack studio in the forest in New Zealand ( Paul/Kids), Live recordings from a concert with Chris Abrahams and Paul Taylor (Not Fire), and free improvisational meditations made in Sandra Selig's studio with Leighton Craig in a tropical storm in 40 degree heat in Queensland, through to very precise Hi-Fi tracking made with Andrea Belfi (My Diviner) and finally the majority of the guitar and vocal parts done at The Pines Berlin.

Song by song breakdown.

On all of my solo albums, I have featured a cover version or an explicit homage to my influences (On 'Be Mine Tonight', it was Jackson C.Frank that I cited, 'All Cracked Medias' I cited Mario Bertoncini, on 'The Back Moths Play The Grand Cinema' it was Brian Eno (Cindy Tells Me), on Autistic Daughters 'Jealousy and Diamond' it was 'Rainy Day in June' by the Kinks, and on 'Uneasy Flowers' - I didn't 'cover' as such but appropriated lines from Jay Clarkson, Roy Harper, Ed Kuepper, Howard Devoto's Luxuria, in the text/vocal parts.

I am not ashamed of taking ideas and even directly lifting lyrics from other artist in a process of re-contextualizing. Also in the production style a lot of referencing happens as well, say for example as a production idea I will work to my own brief -"Eno Goes to Memphis"-might be an example of an idea and the techniques of recording will reference that, this is all part of the color and pallet as much a song will be.

Also, working with the engineer Joe Gubay in the past has been a big influence ,At nearly every stage of my recording career,Joe has been involved in some advisory or technical capacity. I've learned recording techniques from Joe who is an older generation British producer who worked in the 70s as part of the Canterbury scene, Hatfield and the North et.al. and he has extensive experience in recording Jazz and Classical music, analog technology is his area of expertise and he has a great sense of spatial awareness in the recoding studio,knowing how to place the right microphones in the right spot.

Joe engineered Heather Leigh's 'I abused Animal', LP which I facilitated and assisted on which is a great example of a production ethos and method which I learned a lot from. Additionally Joe recorded my first band Thela in 1994 on a session that remains unreleased. Joe also did masterful work on a much overlooked Flying Nun record, the album by Bressa Creeting Cake, as well as a great album by Lawrence Arabia.
Joe also worked for the BBC digitizing historical master tapes and through that experience as a technician was able to have an inside view of the processes of producers such as Joe Boyd, John Leckie et al.

I was very fortunate to have some of this knowledge and logic passed down to me through my friendship with Joe, I learned a lot from him.

Track. 1 Say After Me.

This is maybe an unusual choice to start an album with a cover version. The song 'Say After Me' was written by Bic Runga, a prominent Aotearoa New Zealand heritage artist and she has been a friend and neighbor in my time in New Zealand. Her album 'Birds' which featured this song struck me as a masterwork and it was the soundtrack to my life for some years. Produced by Neil Finn, the album presented a brave move for an artist who had been in the pop/mainstream limelight for many years taking a step into making a deeply personal record, exploring love, death, life, faith etc.
This song stuck with me and I used it often as a soundcheck/warm-up song when playing live and I felt an affinity with it that compounded as the years went by it became something like a hymn to me. When I wrote to Bic and asked her permission to use it she responded with kindness and took it as flattery and we discussed the tradition of folk music and the way that songs can be passed down… And so an angelic voice such as Bic, perfect pop composer and songwriter giving her blessing to a middle aged guy from the underground to take liberty with her song was something of a shock to me, and I was very flattered that she accepted and gave me her blessing to take it and do something new with the labor she had put into beautiful lyrics and composition.. I never expected that I would have made music which included the line " My Baby Yeah", a guitar solo, and a descending pick scrape.. But in the moment, I felt like this could be the most 'Avant-Garde' thing to do, and I am really grateful to Bic for giving her blessing to let me tear this song apart.. Andrea Belfi provided a drum part that in mixing we decided to leave live sounding, stereo, with the reference being the dry drum sounds of 70's prog and folk rock and Jazz drummers such as Dave Mattacks, Pip Pyle and especially Chris Cutler.

While a lot of work was added to this in the studio, the original take of the 1st guitar and vocal track was recorded on my iPhone in a garage in Melbourne. The reference for this, with Andrea Belfi's drums was the sound of 'Electric Eden' 70's folk, Sandy Denny's Fotheringay, Fairport Convention, and I don't know if it is evident but I was going through a big Joan Armatrading trip at the time..

track 2. Caroline

I wrote this song in 2008/9, I made a recording which was lost and so over the years in between it became a live staple but unrecorded.
The idea with this was that the person 'Caroline' has featured in so many songs, from the Beach Boys ' Caroline No', Lou Reed 'Caroline Says', Robert Wyatt/Matching Mole' 'Caroline', Neil Diamond 'Sweet Caroline' , Colin Blundstone 'Caroline Goodbye' …. the list goes on.. I wanted to contribute to the pantheon of songs about this mysterious Caroline, or if it is just a name that phonetically rolls off the tongue and sits in music in a way that names such as Gustav, Donald, Elizabeth, Priscilla, for example may not have the same musicality. With that said it is a personal song about a dear friend by that name.

3.My Diviner

Another cover/ interpretation of a song from The Walkabouts, a huge inspiration and a band who's records and repertoire are very close to my heart. Conceptually I wanted to address the idea of the diviner, the person that leads one to water, and possesses skill of finding water , health and safety and prevention of fear from fire.. I am obviously pointing this song as a directive to my partner who I consider my 'diviner' in that, I don't want to explain away poetry of evocation, or personal details, so I will explain the structural concepts of the song and my reasoning for choosing to cover this song.

I had played the song in live sets over the past year or so, and as a backing to the simple chords C Major/F.major/Am/Gmaj. that comprise the song, I went into using the drone backing for a spectral harmonic effect - because the drone that is buried beneath the song contains harmonics that resonate with each of the changing chords, and create different rhythmic and harmonic shifts with each chord change.
I could never sing it like Carla, so I settled for using my natural voice, and some guitar filigree and bass linked with Andrea Belfi's solid 4/4 drum beat, which we discussed Bernard Purdie, Mick Fleetwood, Jim Keltner, - masters of the back beat.
about this time of recording this I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Eckman who was playing in Berlin with his group Distance, Light & Sky…. over a long discussion I plucked up the courage to ask his permission to include this song, and his response was that songs are vessels, and if one finds oneself floating around it then to do a song justice is often times to adopt it, and I am very grateful for Chris and Carla giving me their blessing to live inside this song for a while…
The drone effect is something I constructed with Valerio Tricoli many years ago, the brief being 'what if Phill Niblock were to make a piece for percussion? ' and so we built this spectral drone from short samples of hi-hat timbre, layered en-mass to create a drone and also a percussive texture, that sounds like a swarm of bees or cicada.
I really hope this adaptation of this song does justice to the original and can be seen as a loving tribute to my diviner and to the Walkabouts who are such an inspiration for the creativity and longevity as, in my opinion one of the most overlooked and underrated bands the Americana/Alt Country cannon.

4.Kids.

This song took its basic theme as a revision of an older song 'Gin Over Sour Milk' from my band he Autistic Daughters. I re-configured it for an acoustic setting and the circular guitar motif in C minor is a very difficult cluster of notes and fis-harmonic to play but once I get the hang of it it is relatively easy, its not Burt Jansch but it is pretty complex.. . So I guess in a way I could say this is a sister song to that song, both thematically in the lyrics and stylistically. It is often in live shows this would segue way into "By this River"By Brian Eno because the notes are the same, just inverted.. Paul Taylor provided Drums and Jenny Lange provided keys and backing vocals.
The reference in the lyrics to "Listening to Lush or listening to Laws " is a reference to Marcus Lush and Michael Laws, 2 prominent politically opposing Talkback Radio hosts in New Zealand.. Maybe 1 person in the world gets the reference !?
Lyrically I guess the sentiment of this song is a short story of a couple who are coming of age and in the process of dissolving their relationship and are looking back on the could-have-been scenarios, observing regrets and mistakes.
It was recorded in my living-room/ studio late one night in the winter, west cost, New Zealand..

Heron.

Also from the West coast period, written there at least, struggled to get it on tape until the Pines Berlin studio session in 2019, but the song floated around in different forms for more than a decade.
Inspired in part by Townes Van Zandt "Nothing" but subject-wise deals with the idea of the comparison of a a Heron, behaviorally a particularly type of bird/ person who ponders an estuary and flights when approached.

Paul.

This song came as a 'cat out of the bag', the situation was that my friend Jenny and were testing some new microphones and she suggested I try a song in the style of an artist who I adore called Sir Paul De Boe, an Australian Singer/Songwriter who has made some beautiful albums over the years and yet remained completely underground except for being adored in the Folk/Country/Pub scene in Victoria..
The actual song was written very fast and it was based on a different Paul in my life, a guy who I had known for years who was for me a kind of talisman for bad luck. .. Every time I ran into Paul, it was usually occasions where I was in dire straits, going to the tax department, dole office, doctors surgery, University grilling, passport office, Bank, etc. and this guy Paul would always appear, and want to talk.. He was a bad dude, a junkie and delusional pathological lier….. a very smart but vacuous person I would compare to the character Jonny played by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's 'Naked', though Paul envisioned himself as Bruno Ganz's character in 'Wings of Desire'…
I can't play this song in New Zealand because everyone in my friend circle knows exactly who it is about (!!) it's a bit too close-to home…..
I have an über fan in Germany, a guy who always comes to all my gigs, and he approached me after a gig with Charlambides, where I closed the set with this song, and he said he admired me for being so brave as to write a song about an ex partner from a same sex relationship. I guess it can be interpreted in many ways, but mostly people relate to it as I think everyone a a thorn in their side "Paul" type person in their lives.

So it is not about Paul De Boe, but as an aside, I wanted to make a documentary film about Paul De Boe, and ended up meeting him in Melbourne and becoming fast friends, and spent some time together and did some interviews but yet to make the film. The outrageously titled song by Sir Paul De Boe, "Privatization: with it's inevitable erosion of the social wage, is tearing the heart out of my family" became a live staple in my sets.

At this time and still, very into Robyn Hitchcock's music, the Go Betweens and the Triffids, the Verlaines et al. and this song for me sort of summarizes my obsession with Australiana/ Kiwiana, pop/country/folk.

Untrained Spirit

An instrumental, Christened by my best friend Mimo Mali, 2 guitar parts interlocking, I wanted to lift the mood with something a bit bright, and I was attempting an instrumental vignette in a similar vein to the piece 'Sunspots' by Bob Mould on "Workbook".. I was feeling pretty flash on guitar because I had been playing so much in the studio, and this came through messing about with some Graeme Downes-esque chords, and thinking a lot about Robyn Hitchcock's "Nocturne (Prelude)" from "I often Dream of Trains" I am not by any stretch an adept guitar player.. it is alway a bit of a blurred struggle for me, and this was the first time I'd really practiced a note for-note instrumental composition…. On that rainy night that I did this, I went running and slipped over on the wet pavement and fractured my left shoulder and tore a ligament that completely crippled my ability to play this fluidly to date.. So the next day, I went back to the studio and I couldn't play it anymore, so had to live with this version….This was done with David Bryant's Custom Telecaster on the left channel and my 62 Mustang on the right, through the Fender Princeton, with the Coles BBC Ribbon Mic on the Amp the room mic being the Bock Audio, which I had used for Vocals up to that point, and just left it on…

Dead Insects.

This song came about quite some time ago (2010 I think) with the help of Jenny Lange, who wrote the chords on piano, also West Coast period, recorded a demo, played live often but never made it to tape until the Berlin Session of 2019. The idea of the form was a kind of Steven Foster classical folk pop song form, but it mutated into this. I really like the way that Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson could do a 3 chord thing and make filigree that makes the song sound much more complex than it actually is….
The sentiment and subject of the song is not about a specific person but generally the friends I have lost to suicide, and the metaphor of the insects, that sleep underground for decades such as the cicada, which then hatch and live very short lives….
The grieving and acceptance of losing friends to suicide has plagued me since my teens, and this song is a kind of meditation on objectively letting go and accepting, that however we go, we all end up with the insects in the ground in the end.
Particularly morbid I know. This was also done during my Robyn Hitchcock phase… When played live this song is just backed by Piano.

Not Fire.

This songs basis and origin was a recording of a live improvisation as a trio with Chris Abrahams ( unusually playing Harpsichord) and Paul Taylor (Drums).
The live recording tapes were made by Jeff Henderson and Andrew McMillan at the Auckland Old Folks Association where we played a gig in 2014, which they captured in high-fi, capturing a lot of the room sound of that hall.
I took the live tapes to Emanuele Porcinai, and he and I combed through the session tapes and extrapolated some passages on which we made a basis for this song, which I had recorded at the Pines. We then combined the elements, and I over-dubbed piano (which I note was in the style of Chris Abrahams) and did the vocal, guitar, bass, and at the end a feedback symphony and backing vocals from Emanuele, all of these components were done as first takes in keeping with the spirit of the improvisational nature of the original recording, and in came together in an afternoon.. Points of reference for this composition were Roy Harper's Stormcock and Led Zeppelin, and Paul Taylor's drums have a roomy vibe, Chris' Harpsichord, an unusual instrument but somehow Chris' touch he was able to activate a spectral and multi-phonic sound field much as he would with his piano playing, achieving overtones and drones one would not expect from a Harpsichord. . Also I loved the way the Kinks, Pretty Things, Zombies, Hendrix Experience all the great 60's bands often used harpsichord, so it was was kind of an experiment with that pallet,. ..
One note bass, and 3 guitar chords, I thought of it like a slow motion Public Image Ltd…. The end of the song is 2 guitars, feedback, opposing ascending and descending from the fundamental note, and we replicated that with the backing vocals as well, to create a kind of splay effect…. And this is a technique I've played and experimented with since way back in Thela days….

To my mind, this record sweeps up a lot of the different influences I have absorbed, and there are sonic elements that draw of my own past music and recording that I have been affected by, all artists mentioned, and many more. I love the aesthetic of experimental and improvisational music, thought I also love popular songwriting, folk music of the British folk revival, 80's indie music of Australia and New Zealand.

I am very happy with the record and I am starting to work on the next chapter now with plans for a new record I intend to work very quickly on with Emanuele Porchinai as a producer/collaborator, using material from a session with Tim Barnes and Hermione as a base....

I hope this makes sense,

Dean