Tim V Smyth first song of 2024 ‘Ruby for a Pearl’ released on the 14th February
Tim V. Smyth has been an active participant in the Irish music scene for many years under a variety of different monikers. His most recent musical endeavour was Hidden Highways a dark and minimal folk/alt-country outfit inspired as much by The Hired Hand and Return To Oz as it was by Townes van Zandt and Gillian Welch. Unsurprisingly then, the songs he penned for that project found their way into a number of film soundtracks.
However despite his love for Americana he has recently moved away from his alt country roots to explore a darker, more glutinous sound in his latest self-produced work. This new body of work features a wide range of influences, from the solo guitar pieces of Loren Connors to the lo-fi electronica of John Maus with Tim utilising a variety of tools, toys and techniques to create a unique and textured sound. Hear test equipment, botched guitars, dictaphone vocals, broken bass synths and wonky tape float together around lyrics dealing with the age-old stuff; life, death and love.
Tim’s first song of 2024 Ruby for a Pearl will be available digitally on the 14th February.
Ruby started as an acoustic song about 7 years ago. The lyric is about dementia-more specifically a man talking about his wife, their love, their fear, their moments where they know something is terribly wrong. I had read somewhere about rubies being a talisman to protect the mind and Margaret, being his wife’s name, is anglicized Latin for Pearl – hence “Ruby For A Pearl“. It’s a love song by proxy I guess.
It all started with a drum sample but I can’t remember what machine it came from. It might even have been from one of the Yamaha organs. I crushed and filtered it with a Bruel and Kjaer 1613 filter- which is not subtle. At first I ran a dry drum track and a filtered one in parallel but liked the filtered one so much I kept that instead. That choice kinda informed the rest of the track. The bass is from the much maligned Akai Timbre Wolf- I wanted a long sustained bass like in Bjork‘s “Hyperballad” and this did a great job. The strings are from the Korg SP80 which is an undiscovered gem of a keyboard- its not really a string machine but it has the strings of a much pricier machine kinda tacked on. The Korg Poly 800 takes the main ghostly pad – its run through the ubiquitous Zoom MS70CDR. The hand claps are a bit Kim Cairnes but I make no apology for that- I love hand claps.
As per usual there was no judgement on my lo-fi methodology from Shayne at Ragged Company Recordings where it was mixed and mastered.
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