MAKE are proud to announce Peter Wyeth’s beautiful EP, “Safe, sweet, happy journeys’ . Released 10th August 2009 on green cassette ep

To buy: (Payal only at the moment) : Log into your Paypal account and ’send money’ to shop@makerecordings.com : Including postage it’s £3.50 (UK customers)

You’ll also receive a code that gets you a high quality download version too.

Overseas customers? Email us for postage cost to wherever you are.

Old/new fashioned and want just the clean digital high quality download? Well you can get that here in whatever format you’d like.

'Safe, sweet, happy journeys'

MAKEC001-Peter Wyeth

‘Outside – the hedgerow flickers in the breeze; buses go by and school children shout to one another as they walk home. Inside, the house is quiet. I close my eyes and start to sing.

To what extent is an artist’s work influenced or shaped by their environment and their interaction with it? For myself, it influences me on many different levels and when I set about recording the songs on this ep, I decided, through accidental discoveries, to explore it in different ways.

I had some songs that I had been playing live for a while and felt there was something I wanted to record and capture with them and wondered how to go about doing it. I hadn’t the money to go to a studio to do this and I knew I didn’t want to approach the songs in the way one normally does of building a structure to hang subsequent level of multitracking onto -  it just wasn’t something I was interested in. So I bought an 8 track digital portastudio (Ebay!) and went about recording it myself.

As I started listening back to my first attempts I noticed that because of the nature of the equipment I was using  (cheap!) and how I was using it (limited skills!), various other sounds were creeping in. Buses going past; wood pigeons in the garden; the sound of my singing reflected off of the walls down the stairs and recaptured in the machine. These are things normally eradicated in the studio – a place specifically designed to be ‘flat and ‘natural’. But where I sang was not flat, it was alive and as I closed my eyes and sang everything else would still be going on around me. Why could that not be a part of it?

Accepting this, I went about recording the songs courting this idea. I tried to record each song in one session, one attempt – finding the location or space I had available to me and concentrating on that one song at that one moment. Songs that I wanted to add more too took longer to work out and edit – which is where John Meredith’s help was essential – but stayed true to the formula.  Outside of multitracking, the other songs and pieces were essentially live stereo takes ( ‘Spring’, ‘August Piano/Hello Cow!’) working to a strict four track rule. Only the opening and closing tracks need careful positioning of the original mobile phone parts next to field recordings.

So, yes, if some of the material sounds like it was recorded on a phone, in a front room, with a £20 mic – that’s because it was. What would be revealed if they weren’t that way? I’m not sure but in not following the standard route of mid price studio and plug in effects these recordings have attained their own character through their own journey. Whatever that may be.’

P Wyeth 05/09

MAKEC001 - Peter Wyeth

ARTIST: Peter Wyeth
EP: Safe, Sweet, Happy Journeys limited green cassette with handmade card sleeve
RELEASE DATE: 10th Aug 2009
Cat No: MAKEC001

Cassette insert 'Safe, sweet, happy journeys'