in the early days, rmi's centre of operations was in duncan's studio in london. steve lived just 15 minutes down the road. this meant that at short notice an evening or weekend could be spent recording with a set up which was always ready to go. gary would make the 500 mile round trip from manchester when he could, but there were inevitably many more duo sessions in these early days. the recording rig back then was direct to 2-track, and mixed on the fly. done and dusted, there and then. we used reels of ¼" tape at 7.5 ips which gave 67 minutes recording time.

at the time we were aiming towards making cd albums, so most of the material was subsequently edited down by steve using a mixture of methods (digital editing in its infancy, and manual tape cross-fades courtesy of facilities offered by the bbc at his day job....yes your licence fee helped pay for the post-production of this music !).

'abbey' was edited down to 21 minutes by the time it appeared on lost in space. here is the session reel from august 1995 in all it's uncut glory...you'll hear the odd howler...we were still taming the maq sequencer back then...but this warts and all representation should give a good insight into the real time working methods of rmi at this time.