"St Mary's has been my local church pretty much all my life, and I've been going there on and off best part of 45 years. Since 1989 I've played drums regularly at services, which has been an enlightening, entertaining and at times exacting enterprise. An unwritten trade-off from that arrangement is I've had free rein to use the church and it's several outbuildings for music rehearsals, and over the years I've been fortunate enough to play with some great musicians in a wide variety of styles. But the sessions with Mark were the first.

As far as I can recall, Mark and I played in there as a duo twice, from which these recordings are drawn, and once with Rhodri Davies, although I don't think that was recorded. Mark also recorded me playing a series of percussion solos in there, primarily to see how the acoustics of the space would capture and enhance certain sounds, (One day, with adequate time and resources, I'll release the recordings from DAT confinement. One day!)

Apart from that, I've no comprehensive memory of the sessions themselves, other than where we sat. We were in a small alcove that leads into the Kitchen, a stone wall inset with a wooden screen and a couple of leaded-light windows behind us, wood panelling above, and stone walls and two huge stone pillars on either side. The DAT recorder was about 10 feet away in the body of the church, with high ceilings, thick stone walls, tiled floor, hard/soft furnishings, and we had a view of the stained glass window behind the altar at the other end.

When Mark gave a me a cassette of the recordings, I was very pleased with the results. The music had a coherence and a focus, which surprised me, given my lack of experience and ability on the instrument. And also the recordings really captured the sound of the building. When Mark said he was interested in putting out a cassette of the recording, I think I came up with "refraction", then left Mark to do all the hard work!"-Nick Smith