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http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=408815

'Fear Of Falling Trees' - performed by myself and Tom Shotton (drums), for a limited time only, go have a listen and download it if you like, this isn't on the 'EPs and Others' compilation or my forthcoming record, just something in between, so blink and you just might miss it.

Melodicas, guitar, bass, drums, kazoo, pitched glockenspiel, roberts radio and percussion.

EPs and Others Compilation CD

August 2005 sees the release of 'EPs and Others' (Kill The Other Guy/Creot Records) an 11 track collection of recordings, released and unreleased, made between 1998 and 2004 including pieces featuring Guitar, Glockenspiel, Bass, Drums, Violin, Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Clarinet, Piano and Moog. Send a myspace message to order your copy - $10 US or £5 UK including shipping - $9/£4 to my myspace friends.

Tracklist:

Value and Cost (Live)/ A Live Shadow/ Nine/ Num Num/ Greedo (Version 2)/ Sam and Eggs/ Funf (Version 4)/ Acht/ Strolling/ One of My Random Injuries/ Little Rug

'A Live Shadow', 'Strolling' and 'Little Rug' can currently be heard at www.myspace.com/rigsbysmith

Instrumental History #1: Cassette Recordings (1989-1994)

I didn't begin to learn an instrument in earnest until i was 15 in 1991 when i began to strum a few power chords on a beaten up guitar i bought at a car boot sale for £15 and formed some early vocal-orientated punk groups. I'd bought a bass guitar the year before but had taken little interest in learning to play it, had a few clarinet lessons at nine or ten and tinkered around here and there with the piano and acoustic guitar we had in the house growing up, but my first forays into recording instrumental music were largely based on other people's pre-recorded sounds, sound collages really.

Whenever i had the house to myself i would set up a few record and tape decks (one to record, the others to play), gather the instruments together and get started, moving between the record and tape decks: playing recordings back at various speeds, creating loops by picking up the needle of the record players and setting them back to the start point again, playing records backwards with my hands and so forth. One of the keyboards we had in the house had a record function where you could play for a minute or two and it would play it back, it had maybe four-five tracks on it before the most recently played would begin to cut some of the others out (which also brought interesting effects as the tracks fought for supremacy), so that was always a handy device too. I would try to create patterns between sounds of the devices and build droning harmonies and such like. Then, maybe forty minutes later, i would play back the tape of everything i'd just done and record that and more improvisations on top, often with piano or acoustic guitar and household objects for percussion. With each new 'track' the sound of the previous takes would deteriorate, this was also something i enjoyed and learned to make the most of, and i used different rooms in the house to create as much of a sense of depth as possible. Finally i would go through the tapes and decide on which parts i liked most, recording them to another tape as a collage, fading between several recordings.

After i began to learn guitar i focussed on that and didn't return to sound collages until i began four-tracking in 1994. Between 1991 and 1994 i was largely interested in vocal-orientated music, using tape-decks as sketch pads for ideas, but four-tracking brought a new level of possibilities for sound collages.

Instrumental History #2: Four Track Recordings (1994-1997)

While still performing with vocal-orientated groups between 1994 and 1997 i spent much of my spare time tinkering with sounds and instruments and recording to a series of borrowed cassette four-tracks. This lead me back to an interest in sound for sound's sake rather than what i'd recently considered to be music: things formed of notes, rhythms and harmonies. It was an interesting time, and due to my main pre-occupation still being vocal music and this being merely a sideline at the time, a very freeing one, which has held me in good stead. The combination of sound and traditional music is something that still interests me greatly, and further, that all sound is essentially music, whatever 'music' is.

In 1995 i was asked to do a quadrophonic tape that would be played as part of a festival in a local high street, with each track being sent to one of four speakers spaced out along the road. This lead me to some interesting thoughts on sound and placement, both in the nature and panning of the sounds i used. I sought to incorporate everyday sounds with more traditional music, partly to create some confusion between what was 'real' and actually happening in the street and what was pre-recorded and to be coming from the speakers. Alongside the guitar, piano and sampled sounds i recorded and collected (i had a guitar effects pedal that had a one-second sampler on it), i also included sounds associated with the high street to (hopefully) create a disorientating affect, such as a babies crying, tills, coins rattling, buskers, crowd sounds, conversation and even a mugging (that i had to fake in my recording space). My aim was that once these sounds were established in the listeners' ear as being real and actually happening then and there, some sounds would then be revealed as pre-recorded, with fast panning, drops in pitch, unrealistic repetition etc, while others would remain as natural as possible. The listener's perspective would also be determined by their position in the high street, and the speed or lack of their movement in relation to the speakers positions and the movement of sounds via panning (essentially moving the sounds from track to track). Something years later i'd very much be interested in doing again, a great project to be involved in.

I continued recording to four track until spring 1997 when i bought an early portable digital eight-track.

Instrumental History #3: Eight Track Recordings (1997-2002)

In 1997 when i purchased an early portable digital eight track, i headed into the world of instrumental music in earnest. Vocal music had been less interesting to me for some time, and at first instrumental music was probably a deviation, but one that completely caught my interest. The first three collections of tunes i recorded on the eight track still contained some vocal element, but to a lesser and lesser degree as i found that vocals tended to overshadow what was essentially going on behind them and i found myself trying to listen around the vocals to hear everything that lay behind.

I also became very interested in multiple bass tracks for quite some time, 'Ping Pong' (unreleased) for instance uses six bass guitars and drums, with the basses played in a variety of ways to achieve different tones. This is possibly an extreme example, but for some time it was common for me to use two or three bass guitar parts in a tune, even as late as 2002 when i was writing material for what i intended to be the King Buffalo King record that lead to the formation of the group 'A Buffalo Crossing'.

The fourth and fifth collection of tunes that i wrote and recorded that year were my first conscious attempt at completely instrumental recordings, more learning experiences thatn anything which lead to my sixth collection that year, 'In These Clothes I Am The Future', recording of which took me into 1998. The mix of this was entirely made on headphones and that's my one regret as without the depth that speakers can provide i mixed the drums too loud on most tracks, meaning that i was ultimately unhappy with the finished mix shortly afterwards. I was very pleased with some of the music though, and that collection included the first version of 'Greedo', a tune i returned to in 2001 with a live group and intend to return to again at some point.

I continued recording to digtial eight-track until 2002 when i aquired a mac for the first time, though i still occasionally use it for it's portability.

Instrumental History #4: Akito Spokes (1997-1998)

In 1997 i got a call from Matt Cummins (guitarist) asking if i'd like to start playing together again (i'd previously played bass in a short-term group with Matt on guitar/vocals and drummer Ben Winn on a break from University - we'd known each other for some years), so we got together to play at a rehearsal space behind a record shop, just Matt on guitar and myself on drums. After a couple of weeks of playing together, i played Matt some of the instrumental music i'd been recording and we took that as a starting point for our new direction. In the flat upstairs from the rehearsal space, Antony Finch (who had just started to play bass, having previously played guitar) had been listening to us play for a few weeks and came down to play one night, leading to a few weeks as a three piece before adding drummer and old friend Louisa Knight, with me switching to guitar. The group rehearsed every week for a year before taking some of the 40 tunes we had to play in front of people, leading to a surprisingly welcome reception.

My main interest at this point was having the two guitars play very similar or corresponding patterns with different notes, and that appeared in much of the music i wrote for the group, a sort of stereo chord in many ways. The first track ('Value and Cost') on the 'EPs and Others' compilation is one such tune, recorded live in the summer of 1998, much of which is based on parts that would usually be found in classical music and played by strings.

Instrumental History #5: Cobra Kai (1999-2000)

After a break, three of Akito Spokes: Antony, Matt and myself returned to work together with a new drummer and old friend, Ben Winn, resulting in the group 'Cobra Kai'. At the time Ben and I in particular had a particular interest in variations on time signatures and this was something we very much brought to the group. The sound was also broadened slightly from the two guitar, bass and drums line-up with my doubling on keyboards, and although the three of us who had been in Akito Spokes brought similar influences to the group that we had before, Ben's input and drumming was a component that brought out new things in us as well as the year away. We were still pretty much anti-distortion, but for me, the group had a new type of groove to it, and i was less interested in my previous preoccupation with how the two guitars created harmonies together and things became a little more interwoven and diverse. The group played a handful of live gigs and recorded some tunes both in the rehearsal space and at a studio nearby, including 'Nine' which features on the 'EPs and Others' disc before going it's seperate ways.

Instrumental History #6: Chilli Chilli (2001)

After Cobra Kai split in 2000, i returned to recording solo for a few months before writing some material that would best be recorded by a live group, so assembled three old friends to record with me (Alex Lewis - Bass, Tom Shotton - Drums and Adam Mallet - second Guitar). Tom and Alex and I have a long history of short projects together, largely from the days when vocal-orientated msuic was my primary interest, so they seemed a natural choice. Adam i'd been teaching guitar for a few months and this would be his first group outing. I also approached Pete Cooper, a local trumpet and flugelhorn player to join the project and we set about rehearsing the four tunes, 'Num Num', an early version of 'Funf' (later reworked for 'A Buffalo Crossing'), 'Sam and Eggs' and the second of currently three versions of 'Greedo'. In 2001 we recorded the four songs track by track at Tom's house, then at mine and then finally at Pete's studio in London Bridge. Three of the four tunes now appear on the 'EPs and Others' compilation.

Tom, Alex and Adam are now 3/9ths of the rock group 'Do Me Bad Things' (www.domewebthings.com) and Pete currently has his own quintet.

Instrumental History #7: A Buffalo Crossing (2002-2003)

A Buffalo Crossing Live at the Spitz, London, late 2003

Left to right: Fiona Stewart - Violin and sampler, Rich Davis - Piano, Moog and Percussion, Attab haddad - Oud and Percussion,

Ross Parfitt - Drums and Saxophone, Jay Rice - Bass, Rigsby Smith - Guitar, Percussion and Glockenspiel.

I formed A Buffalo Crossing (originally known as 'King Buffalo King') in late 2002 after advertising for musicians wanted. The intention was originally to play live versions of a collection of tunes i had been recording for the past few months but the group quickly became an entity unto itself. The forming of the group became a sort of dada excerise, in that i took on the first five people i thought had ability or an interesting take on things with less and less concern with how it would work as a whole. The music grew in a number of directions with interests from the members having some crossover, but this variety of interests was largely the reason for the inevitable split a year later. The group recorded 20 CD-Rs of material in rehearsal, some pre-planned, some improvisational as well as a couple of studio takes and an EP 'Die Funf Nummern EP' containing 'Funf' (Smith) and four of the fifteen reworkings of the tune that the group had created.

After the split, Ross Parfitt, Fiona Stewart and I became three quarters of an improvisational group we called 'The Heartfelt Four' before Fiona returned to her native Canada and to a number of groups including 'Reflectiostack' (http://www.reflectiostack.com/). Ross moved further into experimental music and performances and developed a greater interest in acoustics (for which he returned to study to involve himself in further) and I began to work on my solo project amongst other things.

Instrumental History #8: The Heartfelt Four/Five (2003-Present)

An improvisational group formed by Fiona Stewart, Ross Parfitt and myself after splitting A Buffalo Crossing. Originally we played as a three piece before the inclusion of Deepak (primarily a guitarist) and much later (for just one evening so far) Ade - primary instrument bass guitar. The group essentially has no restrictions and that is part of the joy, whatever comes to hand can be used freely, whether deemed to be traditional instruments or as such something you can play in the regular sense, we allow ourselves to play, listen and enjoy.The improvisations are generally recorded and occasionally performed in front of audiences, but with the group moving further out around the country (and in Fiona's case, the globe), nights of improvisations for us are currently few and far between, but always a pleasure.Track 10 ('One Of My Random Injuries') of the 'EPs and Others' Compilation is an improvisation by the three founder members.

Instrumental History #9: Rigsby Smith and Attab Haddad (2002-Present)

Alongside the improvisations with The Heartfelt Four after A Buffalo Crossing split, i also continued working with Attab Haddad, ABC's Ouddist and Percussionist. Attab and I met on a sound engineering course in late 2002 and instantly made a connection, leading initially to a recording session of improvised music for Oud and Clarinet and then writing together before he joined 'Buffalo, we have also perfomed live together on occasion. Attab's interests are largely traditional arabic and western classical music, and so the music we write together has generally had some leaning in those directions. Currently Attab is making a name for himself as a live musician both in session work and with performances under his own name, as a solo performer and in small groups. We continue to write, record and improvise together, as well as working on together arrangements for his own compositions.

Instrumental History #10: Rigsby/Rice (2004-Present)

An occasional project featuring myself and Jay Rice from 'A Buffalo Crossing', so far we have only one performance under our belts, in summer 2004 at the Utrophia CWM festival in Wales, where we performed a short set for glockenspiel and bass guitar with recorded accompliment. Jay and I have also improvised some music for clarinet and flute that may lead to a performance at some point in the near future.