Bob's Long Long Long bio page IV

Now at la Borde Basse, Dave and I spent several months recording what would become Crisis in Clay. We picked a room and set up Maggie’s mixing desk, our shiny new ADAT machine and Yamaha NS10m monitors, and recorded the drums, bass and guitars in various rooms around the still empty house. Some of the drums, “Goliath” notably, were recorded, with two close-up and two distant mics, in the same big reverberant barn where I would later record The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors. I'll point out again that Crisis in Clay, like most of my work, was done with the most basic and minimal equipment: Maggie's Russian Elektronika mixing desk and a selection of microphones. The only piece of outboard gear was a budget Behringer compressor, and during the mix I used my Boss SE70 for special reverb or delay effects. Room sound has always been a major part of my recording work and we had plenty of them here from which to choose, all with different ambience. That's really all I need - a good reverberant room and a couple of microphones.

Dave and I shared guitar duties, using a dilapidated 60’s Framus and my Bruno Royal Artist (the only electric guitar I used between 1984-2007!) The drums, bass and guitars finished, Sanjay came to do the keyboards, bringing along his E-Mu Vintage Keys module, expecting we’d have a proper full-sized midi keyboard for him with weighted keys and so on. He is a real pianist after all...but when he saw the little, plastic, toy Casio keyboard Dave and I had been using was the only midi keyboard in the neighborhood, he was aghast..and rightfully so! Dave and I not being much of keyboard players ourselves at the time, we hadn’t even considered this! Sanjay did all the keyboard parts on the album using this little toy keyboard with half-sized keys and maybe a three-octave range, used my Korg MS20 here and there, and we had a plastic Yamaha organ, which sounded great blasting through a saturated guitar amp. (The beginning of Hunter-Gatherer is an example). Sanjay finished and returned to the USA.

The album mostly recorded except for the vocals and final mix, I put it aside for a while, Maggie came back, and for a few months the three of us did a lot of work on the house. Then I went on tour doing the sound for Peter Sellars' The Merchant of Venice between August and December 1994. A well-paying gig which helped with some house repairs and studio gear, and there were elements of the theatrical experience I very much enjoyed, but it was enough to tell me once and for all that the theatre world, and doing live sound in general, were not my cups of tea.

In late December 1994 The Merchant of Venice finished in Paris, I took the train down south, and back at la Borde Basse got to work on the Crisis in Clay vocals, then once again put it aside for a while, a lot was happening around this time! For one thing, 5UUs did two European tours in 1995 with me on bass and vocals, Dave drumming, and Scott Brazieal on keyboards. Mike Johnson was guitarist on the first, Mark Smoot on the second. There are some videos from the first tour here. It was a superb band, no question about that, though I still felt seriously unprepared as the lead singer in a performing band, which troubled me...I knew I would get there eventually, but wished I didn’t have to do my crash-course "how to sing" learning in front of audiences!

After the final 5UUs tour, Dave left for Brussels to join the group Present, Maggie moved out of Rotterdam to live here, and shortly after we had our first "official" paying recording session at La Borde Basse, which was also responsible for how we named our still theoretical studio! A Paris theatre company had commissioned Stevan Tickmayer and Chris Cutler to record music for a dance program, so Chris suggested doing it here. A grand piano was required, the theatre company had a reasonable budget so we rented one. The instrument was loaded in and set up in our large room where the concrete floor had barely dried and we hadn't completed the walls or ceiling yet. The piano tuner finished, nodded his approval of the sound of the room, and we got started. First Stevan on piano and then Chris on drums.

In order to be paid when it was done we had to make an invoice for the very proper theatre company, appearing as if we were a proper, respectable business. A studio name was needed. In this part of France, the Midi Pyrénées region, many small businesses and shops are called "_______ Midi-Pyrénées", so just for a laugh we chose "Studio Midi-Pyrénées". Maggie drew a simple and convincing logo with stylized mountains, Sun and flying birds, cobbled an invoice together with glue and liquid paper, photocopied it, sent it off and they paid with no questions. After that the name Studio Midi-Pyrénées stuck!


Along the way, I had also started working on what would be my second solo album, using song ideas I'd collected on a Walkman recorder in hotel rooms during The Merchant of Venice tour, and a few leftover songs from my Burbank days. To make it different from What Day is It, and because I still wasn’t really confident about singing, I wanted to make an instrumental album, with a dirtier and darker sound. That last part wasn’t hard, because some of the gear I was using was not exactly in the best condition – the drums for instance – in those days I was still using Chris Cutler’s old Henry Cow snare, the one with the paintings on it. Chris had abandoned it here because the shell had been broken years before by an airline, it was impossible to tune or get any “snap” out of it anymore, just a “clunk”.

After recording the album’s first few songs I began to realise I wasn’t enough of a songwriter yet to do a good instrumental album, my melodic skills still under-developed. It’s the easiest thing in the world to come up with a good-sounding chord progression or groove and play it for a while, but where’s the melody...why is this going on? So I ended up singing on some of them, because a vocal, at least, gives a repeating progression a good excuse to exist!

I finished it early in 1996 and wanted to release it without a title, but as it was to be the first of my albums released by ReR, Cutler strongly disagreed. I asked for suggestions – he replied without a moment's hesitation: “It should be something like...Little Black Train...” (the title of a Manly Wade Wellman story) I said “Great, that’s it!”

Inspite of one "what WAS I thinking?!" moment (the cover version of my friend Bruce Odland's song Same Old Story), it's not all bad, I think a lot of my difficulty listening to it now is the sound, often harsh and not very clear, and what really makes me wince is my old habit of always playing rimshots on the snare (hitting the drum so the stick contacts the head and the metal rim at the same time) - especially the broken snare I was using then which was already lacking any punch or snap - what came out on the recording was often more of a sharp click! It would be many years later I finally recognised and overcame that old "all rimshots" habit. But there it is...no apparent progress unless there is something to progress from eh?! It was released in May 1996 with the perfect cover painting by Maggie Thomas.

Then I returned to Crisis in Clay, finished and mixed it, Maggie made the fantastic cover sculpture using a pigeon's skeleton and clay, and it was released by ReR in 1998.

Now, I thought that maybe on my previous two solo albums I’d strayed from some qualities I liked in my older, more crude home recordings – for instance, doing things obviously “the wrong way”, deliberately clumsy or obvious edits, “bad” mixing and so on. So for the next album I wouldn’t try so much to be a songwriter, I’d record fragments, or episodes, things that sounded interesting or curious, crudely edit them all together into one album-length track. It would rely on unkempt production and attitude more than plain old good tunes, and indeed that's just how it turned out.

Looking for ways to get broken, messed-up sounds, I made a device used on a few tracks from a large tin can with a 1/4 jack socket on each end, and inbetween, inside the can, an unconnected tangle of thin, rusty old wires, so the connection would constantly cut in and out and crackle as I rolled the thing with my foot while playing or singing. You can hear it clearly on the guitar at 22:25 on this track.

When I had completed about 25 minutes worth of the edited fragments concept, I felt it was enough, and called it "Part I". To complete the album I used a set of old-timey tunes I’d recorded, deliberately "badly" a few years previously and had always loved listening to. It seemed a perfect match and now the finished album needed a name. I had used a random phrase generator to come up the album's lyrics so it seemed only proper to find a title randomly. I walked towards a large bookcase, looking the other way, reached out and took the first book my hand touched, and still without looking, opened it and put a finger on a page. Whatever I’d pointed to was going to be the album title. “Medallion animal carpet” (it was a book about Oriental rugs and carpets.). Thus Medallion Animal Carpet was released by ReR in Autumn 1998.

I had not heard this album for years until today (3 December 2019) and I was actually pleasantly surprised, it's better than I had been making it out be in my memory! It really does what I had set out for it to do. Well well, that's always nice.


Then work began on the first album by The Science Group: a Mere Coincidence. Composer and keyboardist Stevan Tickmeyer wrote the tunes, Chris Cutler drummed, Fred Frith played guitar, Amy Denio sang, Claudio Puntin bass clarinet, I played bass, engineered, and did whatever else needed doing. Stevan’s use of sampling wasn’t my cup of tea, but was very natural for him so I kept my opinion to myself and made the best with what we had, as always! I remember Fred Frith doing the guitar parts. He was here for two days, and played the parts sight reading Stevan's scores but sounding completely natural and easy. Listen to a song like Napoleon in Schroedinger's Box, he read and played that part with no more than a couple of drop-ins. Unable to read music at all then, I spent something like two days learning the bass part for that song!

One funny aside: Before Fred arrived and we were recording the drums, the song Chimera included a section where Stevan wanted a particular drumbeat which Chris didn't care for and wouldn't play. I did it myself, though Chris still didn't like it. When Fred was doing the guitar on the song and that section came along, he looked up and said "Great drums in this part!". Laughter ensued though we did not explain why.

Amy Denio came in and did the singing, and very quickly too. As her voice is often quite round and warm-sounding, I wanted a bit more "edge" to some of the singing so later I sang along, doubling some of her parts to add a brighter tone, and sang a couple of them myself. It's a curious album, and I can hear that sonically it belongs to same 1995-98 production era as my previous two solo albums. This was also the last time I did a mix using an analogue mixing desk. It was released in 1999, with Maggie Thomas' superb photo of the room where much of it was recorded, reflected in a soap bubble!


In 2000, I did a second AA Kismet album What's The Use of Crying with Lukas Simonis, this time just the two of us. After Lukas went home I mixed the album, still using the analogue desk. The year before, when we were doing the Science Group recording, Stevan Tickmayer had given me a multitrack software called Samplitude, which I'd only had a cursory look at once or twice, I was still skeptical of computer-based audio then. Out of curiosity I decided to do a second mix of one of the AA Kismet songs, essentially the same mix as I'd done on the desk, but using Samplitude, then listen to both mixes in a blind test to hear if I preferred one. I did, and it was a big surpise to me when, after several blind tests, the one I preferred was the Samplitude mix, no contest.

In 2000, the band NeBeLNeST came to La Borde Basse to make their Nova Express album, which was the first entire album I mixed with Samplitude. The band's keyboardist Olivier knew a lot about the program and introduced me to many of its features. With the money I was paid for mixing their album I bought the newest version Samplitude, I think it was version 5 at the time...and since then every project I have recorded, mixed, or mastered has been done with Samplitude. Except the one I will next describe, which was done on a 4-track hard disk recorder.


Because it's so easy for me to think up suggestions for weird tales and have been a fan and avid reader of classic weird fiction all my life, I thought I’d try to do an album where each song told a short weird story, the music and even the sound itself would be skeletal and dusty. This idea felt like a significant step away from my old habitual ways and musical influences, and onto a road I’d been looking for.

I could picture the atmosphere and places – dusty, late-summer afternoons in the dry weeds near a deserted farmhouse which the few people still living in the locale instinctively avoid...or seem unwilling to talk about...strange prints in the dust leading to a long-disused well...a slab in an ancient or disreputable cemetery seems to have been subtly pushed aside, from below...that sort of thing! The instrumentation would be simple too – my low-budget Paul Beuscher classical guitar I’d picked up in Paris on The Persians tour in 1993 (the poor thing has fallen to bits now) and a truly dilapidated little Bontempi electric organ, the kind with a very noisy fan that pushes the air across the reeds. I had not been much of a keyboard player by then, and decided right from the start to keep all the unintentional notes and mistakes in my organ playing. I’d record it all in our vast, and at that time, empty reverberant barn which had large doors and arched windows all open to the outdoors. The sounds of wind, birds, insects, the occasional passing vehicle on the not-too-distant road, a dog barking somewhere, a tractor plowing a field, would all be part of the sound and atmosphere.

My singing was better - I'd became more confident about my lower and middle vocal ranges, which I used to think were bland and featureless. They weren't - I just hadn't really known what "my" voice was before or how to write for it. That was what I meant when I was unhappy being the singer on those 5UUS tours - I still don't think the other members understand what I was talking about. Then, because I didn't know what else to do, I was still imitating other singers or just letting the words fall out without knowing how to get a sound like I wanted to hear. Not enough experience. But now, starting with these Skull Mailbox tunes, I was getting somewhere both as a singer and a songwriter!

I recorded this album entirely on the Akai DR4, a 4-track hard disk recorder. I became very adept at using this device both for recording and editing, and for years it was my mixdown/editing machine on scores of projects. It had a neat feature which seemed like magic at the time – one could fill its 4 tracks, then internally bounce them down to one stereo track. That’s how I made The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors. It was released in Autumn 2001.

Meanwhile, a few other things I recorded and/or mixed around this time include:
Hamster Theatre: Carnival Detournement, Cuneiform Records, 2001.
The Dead Brothers: Day Of The Dead, Voodoo Rhythm 2002.
Chris Cutler/Tom DiMuzio: Dust, ReR Megacorp 2002.
Think Of One: Naft 2, Zonk Records 2002.
Coolhaven: Blue Mustache, 2002.
Chris Cutler: Solo, ReR, 2002.
Best Before: 04/04/44, SMI, 2002.
Les Ormores: Aus Der Reihe, Z6 records 2002.
Les Collegues Pasha: Les Collegues Pasha, RecRecRecords, 2002.
Blast: Altrastrata, Cuneiform Records 2002.
Sotos: Platypus, Cuneiform Records 2002.
Dick El Demasiado: No Nos Dejamos Afeitar, Tomenota Records 2002.
NeBeLNeST: NoVa eXPReSS, Cuneiform Records 2002.
Fred Frith: Prints- Snapshots, Postcards, Messages And Miniatures. Fred Records 2002.


Especially when working on my own, I love everything about recording, so as soon as I’d finished The Skull Mailbox I wanted to carry on. Rather than wait until I had some song ideas worked out, or even a clear starting direction, I began recording immediately what would become 13 Songs and a Thing. Falling back on old habits like recording a chord progression without really knowing what it was going to “do”, and relying on production or fancy playing to make it SOUND interesting. I asked friends to do solos or sing, trying and spice it up. I'm not putting it down, I just think in retrospect the tunes weren't really ready. In spite of that, it does have good moments and some good songs: Griffin, which I often play in my solo shows, and the Stevan Tickmayer cover Pechan and Willey, Move the King is nice, but, to my ears now, these good songs are bit lost in between some long instrumental passages which are lacking a bit in the compositional department.

The album's "thing", Building With Bones, was something I constructed using every single one of the cassettes in my collection, all things I'd recorded over the decades. Bands, conversations, ambient sounds, rehearsals, you name it. Originally it was 45 minutes long - the length of most of my cassettes, but I shortened it by cutting it into 4 more or less equal parts and overlaying them one on top of the other. I enjoyed making this piece so much I hardly slept for the several days I spent on it! But did it belong on this album of songs? Who can say...but there it is. I learned a good lesson making the album – from then on I would never jump right in to making another solo album until I had a definite, clear starting direction and more importantly, some good, complete songs ready to go first! Despite all my disclaimers about it, it does have an atmosphere, and as always, I did me best at the moment. I made the cover art, which I quite like, and it was released in May 2003.

Then came the second Science Group album, Spoors. We’d decided to do an instrumental album this time, and since guitarist Fred Frith who’d played on the first album wasn’t going be available for the forseeable future we asked Mike Johnson. He recorded the guitars himself at home in Denver, a way of working I don't care for, but it wasn't feasible to fly him here for the sessions. Because there were no vocals, the recording went much more quickly and smoothly than with the first album. I drummed on the opening track Timeline 6 because we all liked that pattern Stevan had come up with, not really Chris' kind of part, it was more my kind of simple unchanging groove. I played the kit, and Chris played the hi-hat to give it the signature Cutler touch. And those familiar with my guitar playing can probably tell which guitar parts were played be me.

Again I was leery of Stevan's use of sampled keyboard instruments, the organs especially, and I put a lot of work into making them sound less sample-ey. I'm old-fashioned in that regard, sampled instruments just ain't for me. I feel they make a recording sound like a demo. But that's just one of my little quirks, don't let that stop you from enjoying this fab album, or any other with lots of sampling for that matter!! Another fine cover by Maggie, and it was released in 2003.

In those days I was still doing a LOT of recording work for pretty much anyone who asked, bands were still coming here and staying for a week, ten days...I was doing lots of remasters for ReR...to list few from this period:
Jason Kahn: Pool, Cut 2003.
Dick El Demasiado: Pero Peinamos Gratis, Tomenota Records 2003.
Zoambo Zoet Workestrao: Svakoga Dana U Svakom Pogledu Sve Manje Nazadujem, Manufracture 2003.
The Homosexuals: The Homosexuals CD, ReR, 2003.
Art Bears: The Art Box, ReR Megacorp 2003.
Art Bears: Revisited, ReR Megacorp 2004.
What's Wrong With Us?: What's Wrong With Us? 2004.
Thinking Plague: Upon Both Your Houses, Nearfest Records 2004.
Slapp Happy: Desperate Straights, ReR Megacorp 2004.
Nikola Kodjobashia: Reveries of the Solitary Walker, ReR Megacorp, 2004.


I had done some work with songwriter and guitarist Lukas Simonis in the 90's, notably the two albums by AA Kismet. I loved his knack for catchy yet slightly odd melodies, often with a bit of surf guitar flavour. So I proposed this instrumental band with Lukas on guitar, me on bass and guitar, and Chris Cutler (known guitar instrumental enthusiast) on drums. That became Vril, and we made the first album Effigies in Cork in 2003, with liner notes, song titles and cover art by the late great Frank Key.

In 2003 I also set to work on my sixth solo album The Shunned Country. I had a very clear starting idea: minatures, telling tales connected with an imaginary rural area known by the locals as “the shunned country”, because something just ain’t right around there. Each song would have a good structure, for instance intro, key change, recapitulations, verses, bridges and choruses, lines played by one instrument repeated later on by another, all of that...but each as short as I could manage. It ended up with 52 tracks, most under 30 seconds, many around 1:00, and a couple of “epics” at 2-3 minutes. Once again this gives you an idea of how easy it is for me to come up weird lyric ideas! The music on the other hand took an incredible amount of concentration and work, and in those days I still knew nothing about musical notation, which would have greatly helped in that regard.

I had a good idea for the sonic picture of the album too right from the start. It has a clear, natural kind of sound, often with a big, upfront bass. I rarely used "drums", I used boxes, buckets, cans, rubbish bins, metal sheets, a big old metal sink (good bassdum!) along with the occasional tom or actual snare drum. In the end, you can't always tell which were drums and which were rubbish bins, they all just sound like drums!

I still like this album a lot, and artist Ray O'Bannon went far beyond the call of duty to make so many lovely paintings, for which I will be eternally grateful. It was finished it late in 2004 and released February 2005.

All those tiny, hyper-attenuated songs drained my songwriting for a while, I would wait as long as needed before thinking about a next solo album or even writing a song. I kept plenty busy with other things:
Zaar: Zaar, Cuneiform Records 2006.
Pamela's Parade: Shake Sharks, 2006.
Dead Brothers: Wunderkammer, 2006.
Hail: Hello Debris, ReR Megacorp 2006.
Hamster Theatre: The Public Execution Of Mr. Personality / Quasi Day Room, Cuneiform Records 2006.
Buttercup Metal Polish: 50 Ballets, Creativesources Records, 2006.
Coolhaven: Strömblock Phantasieën, Taple Records 2006.
News From Babel: Complete Collection, ReR Megacorp, 2006.
Picchio Dal Pozzo: Abbiamo Tutti I Suoi Problemi, ReR Megacorp, 2006.
Vialka: Plus Vite que la Musique, VIA, 2007.
Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp: Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, Strabique 2007.
The Peeesseye: Mayhem In The Mansion, Shivers In The Shack, Evolving Ear 2007.
Max Der Zinger: Acoustique, 2007.
Condor Moments: "And Though We're Told We've Got It All, The All We've Got Is Freezing Cold", What Delicate Recordings 2007.
The Rude Staircase: Sookie Jump, What Delicate Recordings 2007.

Go to page 5