There is a theme to the musical projects of Mat Smith. His first visible enterprise was the Mute Response series of compilations. Organised around musicians (and non-musicians) reacting to the legacy of Mute Records, it set the tone by Smith proposing an idea to see what would come back.
Since then, Smith has undertaken an ambitious set of releases under the Mortality Tables label. The LIFEFILES set, featuring Simon Fisher Turner, Xqui, Dave Clarkson, and Andrew Spackman, among others, is based on found sounds supplied by Smith. Artists are them invited to restructure, mangle, and edit the raw material as they see fit. The series is up to number twenty with BMH’s Killigrew.
The latest release from Mortality Tables is The Engineer. Made available as a limited-edition cassette tape and a digital download, it is based around a story written by Smith and narrated by Barney Ashton-Bullock. Interwoven with the reading are twenty-nine contributions from artists who had been supplied with thirty second extracts. They were allocated sections sequentially, based upon the order in which they agreed to provide their responses.
Some of the artists will be familiar to the wider public – step forward, Vince Clarke, Gareth Jones, Reed Hays, and Simon Fisher Turner. Others will be more niche, but readers of The Wire or Smith’s contributions to Electronic Sound and Clash might recognise Rupert Lally, Alka, Hattie Cooke, Veryan, and Erika Tsuchiya. The list of contributors is long, and the quality of compositions is high. Ashton-Bullock, who is also known for his work with Erasure’s Andy Bell, does an exemplary job of leading the proceedings.
The basis for the story was Smith’s father, Jim. A mechanical engineer who worked in Shakespeare’s purported birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, the elder Smith was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018. Smith, the younger, created this project as his response his father’s condition, and it serves to promote his memory. It also raises funds for the Alzheimer’s Society, so get your copy of the digital album on Bandcamp and help a good cause.