What you have just downloaded is the product of 8 days’ sickness in the mid 90s. I had German measles, or mumps, or something, I can't remember exactly, and I was stuck in my studio flat (first floor, 39 Shaftesbury Road, Brighton-just down the road from where Brigitte and I would record our first EP a mere 16 years later, and from within a completely different life). But for now, I was trapped in a tiny flat, sick as a dog with nothing to do.

At the time I was playing keys in a band with three other guys, but the guy in charge, the bass player, was being a bit of an arrogant knob. He had some great friends though, particularly the gang of mates from Hamburg, some great girls and boys, and all with a very open-minded view of music, and much more accepting of electronic music. Remember, this was the 90s, and in the pub-music scene in Brighton, there was actually still a lot of mistrust and animosity towards electronic music. I used to get a lot of stick from the old-school rock guys (always guys) that ran the nights we played. Likewise, the bass player often ridiculed my music, maintaining a cooler-than-thou stance at all times regarding his own musical taste, quite unlike his friends from Germany. It was all rather demeaning and depressing, so I was actually glad of the excuse to be away from the band, on my own, and making my own sounds in private.

So I began recording, and set myself the challenge: fill a C90 in a week. I think you can hear me slowly recovering as the songs tick by, with the earlier tracks being more disorganised and having less musical value than the second half of the tape, but this is just my own opinion, possibly coloured by the fact that I'd never felt sicker in my life.

The equipment used in these recordings is as follows:
Tascam Porta 1 Tape: “That’s” CD/IIF High Position Tape. DBX nr
Roland SH-1
Roland Juno 6
Casio SK-5 (x2)
Boss DR-660
WEM Copicat Super IC. Home-made loops on ¼ inch Ampex 456
Junk Shop Flanger Pedal with the name scratched off
Junk Shop Digital Delay Pedal with the name scratched off
Archer Telephone Amplifier functioning as distortion

The catalog number for this tape is BBC7-"Big Blue Clusters" 7, and this stack of C90s start at BBC1, in 1994 and extend all the way into the early 2000s with BBC24. A large chunk of my life, which, with very few exceptions, have never been heard before by anyone but me. Private stuff.

Now don’t get me wrong, I'm not sharing this tape with you because I believe that there's anything particularly special about the music, I chose it for release because of some strong atmospheric memories, especially invoked by track 09, 12, and 14, and as a record of how I’ve changed over the years. I’m sharing “Bip” because this tape was made in a very particular, clear, and very short space of time. The youth that has now passed, captured here, so close I can almost hear it in the next room.

Decades passed. Brigitte and I went to play as BOO in Hamburg at Hasenschaukel in 2016, we met up with some those old German friends, including the girls, now women, from all those years ago in Brighton. They’d fixed up the gig for us to play live, which was lovely, but before we went on, they told me a revealing and hilarious story:

Back in the 90s, they had been staying at the bass player's flat, the one I mentioned earlier, and on one evening he uncharacteristically put some moody electronic music on, and they naturally asked him what it was. He explained that it was his own composition-he had been walking around in the rain, and feeling sad, and just came home and put this beautiful, melancholy track down, in one go. They were all suitably impressed, as it seemed out of character, and showed a more sensitive side to his personality.

So later that night, they all came round to my flat for drinks, and asked me to put on some of the music I'd been doing, so I grabbed this tape, this very one you’ve downloaded, and pressed play. The track began: it was track 08, apple juice, but as the track played, all our German visitors had a very strange look on their faces, and the bass player was strangely silent, almost hiding his face. I never knew why until that night in Hamburg all those years later. Apple juice was the track he'd claimed to have recorded after his sad, rainy, introspective walk.

How we laughed, but it taught me an important lesson: When people are disparaging of your creative efforts, watch out-they may just wish they were actually as good as you are and secretly hate you as much as they hate themselves for it.

Oh, and hang out with good people, especially the German ones.