I do like to collaborate. It is pretty much my favoured way of making things. Most of the time I don't know what I think until I argue it out in the air with somebody. That seems to work with the music too.

I am going to stick up a few things that I have done with other people - mostly so that I can point out how great those people are and point out what they brought to the piece.

I'll be putting up some lovely simple songs by Tom Horn (or Ron Moth as he seems to go by these days). There will certainly need to be some wonky lullabies I made with the multi-talented Roland Taylor. This could also be a place where I stick up some soundtracks I have done for the animations of Orla McHardy. And, if I ask Robert Popper (very busy comedy man (I'd better check if that is a fair description of him)) nicely, perhaps he'll let me put up some of our early experiments. Something I will want to be putting on display are a few bits I have done with the unimpeachable bass player Pete Marsh - he's in about 10 bands but I feel I need to claim something of him for myself too. Last but not least, you'll begin to notice just how much cello and female singing gets in to my tracks - the reason being that Sylvie Wright is a splendid supplier of such things, and thank the crows she is, as it would be a duller music without her.
[1]
First off then I'd like to play a track that was an odd collaboration I had with Pete Marsh. I played him all sort of phrases and patterns I had been working on in Ableton Live and he added a whole range of sticky sweet bass parts. He has a lovely wooden upright bass which we miked two ways. At this point this was in no way a song, it was a barely coherent and enormously varied assortment of beats and bloops. Anyhow Pete somehow managed to bin the whole thing together and from it emerged two distinct but related tunes.

This is one of them, it is called:

The Marsh

[2]
Second off then I'd like to play an older track that myself and Sylvie Wright devised some years ago. We were living in a different house and I was at the very start of coaxing her to bring her cello in to my sound world. She wasn't so sure - she complained that the cello made everything sad. So we tried to prove her wrong - I think we managed to pull back to 'vaguely melancholic'. Well with the added extra of some farty synth I think it may even be quite a positive number.

Figs

[3]
Thridly I want to play you something quite different. This collaboration was a very different thing to what I was used to. This time all the music, the words, the voice and the guitar came supplied in the form of Tom Horn. I was going to have to do some thinking to work out what my role could be, other than just recording the man sounding good. I first heard Tom live as part of a small band, with lap steel and swishy country drums and I thought that maybe I could hint at some of that whilst doing my best job at making it all sound a bit 'Eva Hipsey'. Our first recording session came at the end of a large Spanish meal, lots of wine and then a further course of whiskey. This meant that I thought it all sounded fabulous - in fact I still do. But let's see what you think, because some time after that session we had another go only this time the sun was shining and our blood unchallenged by powerful liquids.

The first attempt we did  I am calling the 'sleepy pirate version'.

Open up your heart
Sleepy Pirate Version

Or there is this more recent version

Open up your heart
Album Version

What do you reckon? One for a fuzzy autumn evening, one for boldly striding out on a spring morning perhaps?
[4]
My fourth example of collaborative work is with the very highly spec'ed Roland Taylor. He is what one might call a proper composer. A talented pianist who understands dots on paper and of course the theory of why one might choose this note over that. So, working together was initially a little daunting as I wasn't sure whether we shared a language that would bind our two quite different approaches, let alone whether I would understand a word he said. But we did have something that we shared, and that is a love of sound. So our process became more more improvised, guided by our ears rather than our eyes. What Roland helped me think about was change, whether that be in key or in dynamics or even texture - he made sure I kept things moving. I think you can here some of that in this tune that has nearly every instrument in the house in it and both of us singing.

Try