- original notes for the cassette edition of Hometime // November 1996 -

In my music generally I'm working on a loose conceptual trinity based on the hypothetical stages of human cultural & cognitive proximal development over the past thirty-five thousand years - the Primal & Archetypical, the Ancestral & the Traditional, the Creative & the Experimental. As a storyteller (I'm amongst that fortunate few who are able to make a living by telling traditional folk & wonder tales in the contexts of Education, Heritage & Recreation) I concern myself with the corporeal realisation of atavistic narrative morphology from the Indo-European cultural axis in which my music and instruments serve as an enrichment to the cultural dynamic of a given performance. The patterns are, of course, ancient. But like ploughing & bread baking the processes are actively resonant - hence atavistically relevant; I am not concerned with the past per se but rather with perceptive perspective which is as much mythological as it is historical. Thus do I take my place in a continuity, aware as I am that any manifest idiosyncrasy is objectively cultural and not necessarily a measure of subjective creative genius. My role therefore is essentially mediumistic - my tongue as common as it is uncommon - and in this way the three compartments of the conceptual trinity become one. And on those days when words fall away or else I have no voice left at all I weave a transfigurative conspiracy with the immediate world via my antique Yamaha MT44 cassette four-track - ten years in my keeping (and counting) & recently (1993) given a new lease of life by the addition of the Alesis microverb III - by creating a proximal music in which the instruments can talk to each other in the rhythmic, modal & temporal languages unique to each of them. In that talking they are also telling - as one critic pointed out '...I feel like an aural witness to a story I don't know...'. So do I. Maybe that's why I do it. Turns out differently every time. Meanwhile - the world is waiting. Thus: Hometime.