The first part of this suite, recorded in February 1994, is an orchestral rendering of the main melody line from the original "Table Jam" project. It features a fairly typical Casio sample orchestra of mine - cello, viola and violin, clarinet and oboe, flute, trombone and two trumpets, xylophone, piano.. the way in which it is done is heavily influenced by the mid-60s Brian Wilson style of production and arrangement circa "Pet Sounds" and "Smile". The piano composition that follows (subtitled Piano In E Flat) was recorded in October 1994, and was intended to follow straight on from the end of the first piece, although I didn't get around to joining the two recordings together for a number of years.

This track is hard to explain. Back in mid 1992, Val Tarin and Adrian Wood used to convene at my place in North Perth on Wednesday evenings to record music using the small home studio I had set up. During the last session on August 19 1992, the three of us decided to take elements of an improvised percussive jam we had recorded that featured mainly rhythmic tapping and thumping of the table we were sitting around (captured on a PZM microphone resting on the table itself) and make a base track of percussive loops (4 in all) that we sampled from the jam, adding sampled kick drum and tambourine. In order to do this, we used the powerful Amiga computer I had at the time that was also linked via midi tone to my hard-working 1/4 Fostex 8-track reel to reel tape machine. High tech stuff.

The next Wednesday evening, Adrian and I - working onto tape - added two vocal lines to the track, one (triple-tracked by the two of us) which said "Was the machines called in animal does the instruments way", a phrase which was the result of picking words at random from a study paper that Adrian had with him at the time. The other vocal line, "I never saw dragons coming out of the wall" was somewhat more obscure. (We also sampled some odd bits and pieces such as the opening of the Tom Jones song "It's Not Unusual"). Sometime shortly after this evening, I had to re-use the tape from this session for some other song I was doing at the time, and I saved the two vocal spots as digital samples using my Casio FZ-1 sampling keyboard. A few days after the vocal bits had been attempted and canned, Val came around and we both tried playing synth bass parts against the original "table jam" sequence which still remained on the synth and sequencer. Neither of us were particularly happy with our attempts, and the results were saved onto an Amiga floppy disc.

Then, a couple of years later, around the same time I was recording the "overture" piece that was itself inspired by the "was the machines" vocal line, I re-assembled all of the components from the original "table jam" - the table percussion, kick, tambourine, vocal samples, and even the two alternate bass lines. For some reason I abandoned this attempt to finish the piece, and somehow forgot all about it.

Around May 1997, I began a new attempt at finishing "Table Jam". Once again, all the elements of the piece and its basic structure were reconstituted onto the Fostex 8-track. This time, however, I also made good use of parts of another 8 minute recording taped at the very first session (decanted to cassette), which featured other musical ideas tried out for the "table jam", such as guitar strumming and a piano part. Over several months, I painstakingly put all these pieces together, until I finally had an approximation of what I thought the track would have sounded like had we ever been bothered to finish it at the time. Clocking in at just over five years, this has to be my personal record for the longest time taken to finish a piece of music.