Tarkes (1995) by Rigsby Smith

‘Tarkes’ is another collection of recordings from my 1995 Riff Tape, continuing on from ‘Cheat Notes’. These were all made on 4 track between May and August 1995.

While ‘Night Song’ is a much shorter version of what appears on the riff tape, almost everything else is unedited here, it’s just that I was working in collage-like way, running songs and ideas into each other as I went.

As I mentioned in the ‘Cheat Notes’ liners, the DOD multi-fx I’d bought in early ’94 had gradually become a massive tool for me, especially the one-second sample function, where you could change the speed of the sample and trigger it or loop it. By May 1995, this had become my way of looping beats, sometimes playing them into the DOD at high speed (thank you, hi-speed dubbing) and slowing them down, stretching that one second to two, three or four. Sometimes I’d only be able to grab a kick and snare from a beat, so I’d have to ‘play’ the beat myself as it would restart every time you pressed the switch. ‘Press-press’ on the pedal played as ‘kick kick snare’ and so on. You could also play through it while pitching and looping, which gave you an effect much like a stepped phaser, as you can hear on ‘I Hear You’. There was so much you could do with that £130 guitar effects board.

The middle of ‘Sa Sad’ was taken out for this comp, but you can hear it on the riff tape, along with a lot of similar material to these things recorded in May ’95. ‘Dejay Da’ was made straight after ‘Sa Sad’ and tries to slightly expand on the sound. ’Bye’ is from June ’95, I have no memory of where the answerphone recordings came from, we didn’t have one.

Throughout the whole year I’d been playing in a US-indie inspired trio and in the spring drummer Ben Winn and I had made a tape of some his poems set to music and sounds. On 30th May (see riff tape) we’d made another tape, this time in his garage with him on drums running into the DOD, and his friend Matt Green generating sounds on an Amiga computer. Some of the drums and (reversed) vocals were reused at the end of ‘Bye’ and in ‘Hashiff’s Noz’.

We called ourselves ‘Potato Rebel and the Controllers of Sound’. On 6th June we made a third tape, and were booked to play at the local festival, partly, in full disclosure, because I’d been asked to be on the committee a few months before. We needed some backing tracks to play to live for a tighter version of ‘Chow Mein’ and new poem ‘Disassemble’, so we set up in Ben’s garage again, this time just the two of us as Matt Green would be doing his parts live on the day (I’d be on bass). We played ‘Chow Mein’ straight, but after the first few rounds of chords in ‘Disassemble’ I put the guitar down and played the DOD, so the drum effects you hear there were done live, Ben hearing the effects through what we affectionately called ‘the brown amp’ while he played. I did the rest of the overdubs at home, I tried to find a good sample of Ben saying ‘Chinese Food’ from the tapes but in the end I sampled my own voice.

After the festival, having called the day on the indie band, I went back to recording and made ‘Berschwee’, which contains several clips of songs from the two years I’d played in ‘Nova Cone’ with different line-ups. I seem to make collages to wrap things up in my head and this would continue into the next collection, ‘Me and Dod’, which very much takes off where this sets down.

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IWA4TH006

A micro-label releasing my (mostly instrumental, mostly unreleased) back catalogue. I'm Matt, a 49 year-old self-taught player and 'composer' from London & the sea. New work expected sometime in 2026.