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Glasom sličan Tomu Krellu (How To Dress Well) - što je već dovoljna preporuka - Samson je manijak obeshrabrujuće nježnosti.
willsamson.co.uk/
One year after the release of full-length album ‘Balance’ (‘Awash with Eno-esque ambience, and recorded late at night to cassette…an unusually intimate collection’ 8/10 – UNCUT Magazine), Will Samson returns with new EP, Light Shadows.
Since the release of ‘Balance’ in October last year, Will has
travelled across the UK and Europe, touring and sharing stages with Kurt
Vile, Ólafur Arnalds, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Marissa Nadler, Shearwater,
Pinback & more – as well as his own headline shows.
However, it was personal experiences of a very different nature that shaped these new songs.
During the summer months between completing and releasing this most recent album, Will unexpectedly found himself facing an extremely close & profound experience of death.
Following the aftermath of such a loss, he briefly retreated to India, seeking some time & space to gently reflect on the recent events. Travelling alone from the Southern tip, all the way up to the giant mountains in the North, this is where the first sketches of songs slowly began to form.
Fast forward to the summer of 2013, Will travelled to Berlin to begin recording these new songs with close friend, Florian Frenzel (who also helped to produce ‘Balance’). Using a small selection of tape machines and home-made outboard gear, the two crafted away on the scrapbook of ideas until they emerged with a miniature collection of new music. The end result is ‘Light Shadows’.
Cover photograph taken by Will Samson in The Atlas Mountains, Morocco.- www.karaokekalk.de/
However, it was personal experiences of a very different nature that shaped these new songs.
During the summer months between completing and releasing this most recent album, Will unexpectedly found himself facing an extremely close & profound experience of death.
Following the aftermath of such a loss, he briefly retreated to India, seeking some time & space to gently reflect on the recent events. Travelling alone from the Southern tip, all the way up to the giant mountains in the North, this is where the first sketches of songs slowly began to form.
Fast forward to the summer of 2013, Will travelled to Berlin to begin recording these new songs with close friend, Florian Frenzel (who also helped to produce ‘Balance’). Using a small selection of tape machines and home-made outboard gear, the two crafted away on the scrapbook of ideas until they emerged with a miniature collection of new music. The end result is ‘Light Shadows’.
Cover photograph taken by Will Samson in The Atlas Mountains, Morocco.- www.karaokekalk.de/
Balance (2012) streaming
vimeo.com/58289122
Just over one year after the release of his first vocal album Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends, 23 year old Will Samson presents a brand new album of his own personal fragile blend of experimental folk and ambient electronics.
However, with songs about a surreal overnight boat journey in South East Asia, paintings from a Dutch art gallery, to the simple love of a dear friend, Balance takes a confident step away from its predecessor in both feeling & sound.
The record began its life in Summer 2011, whilst Samson was living in a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment with 5 other people. One of whom was Joel Danell – a wonderful musician from Sweden making music under the pseudonym of ‘Musette’. When Joel moved back to Stockholm towards the end of the summer, he kindly left behind a collection of old cassettes, a Tascam 8-track and a cassette deck for tape mastering – it was then that Will set to work on some new songs.
“It didn’t take long before I became totally absorbed with the magic of analogue recording and the mysteries to be discovered within these ancient cassette tapes. Numerous nights were spent working through to the early morning, playing quietly so as not to wake up my house mates. On ‘Dusty Old Plane’ you can even hear the birds beginning to sing with the sunrise.” – Samson recalls.
Around September 2011 there were a few rough sketches of songs, but lack of equipment and recording knowledge had become a restriction. Around this time Will happened to receive an email from Florian Frenzel, expressing interest in helping to record some music. Shortly after, they casually met up at Florian’s home and became better acquainted over a few cups of tea – soon realising that they shared a mutual obsession/love for the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack, as well as many other musical (and non-musical) interests.
It was in Frenzel’s home studio (containing a multitude of vintage equipment such as salvaged organs, analogue tape delays, beautiful old microphones, home-made equipment, and even a reel-to-reel from a former GDR radio) where they began recording new songs, editing earlier cassette demos, drinking more tea, exchanging music & childhood stories, watching Autumn slowly turn into Winter – becoming great friends in the process.
By the beginning of Spring, the album was finally complete and handed over to their mutual friend, Nils Frahm, who lovingly mastered it at his Durton Studio in Berlin.
Floating in a gentle haze of melodies, soft white noise & intimate tape crackles, Balance manages to retain the spirit of the aged cassettes and equipment it was made with, whilst offering something altogether unique & new.
“The recording process of this album was a joyous one, and it is my sincere hope that you may find some happiness within these songs too.” – Will Samson www.karaokekalk.de/
"Just over one year after the release of his first vocal album Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends, 23 year old Will Samson presents a brand new album of his own personal fragile blend of experimental folk and ambient electronics. The record began its life in Summer 2011, whilst Samson was living in a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment with 5 other people. One of whom was Joel Danell – a wonderful musician from Sweden making music under the pseudonym of ‘Musette’. When Joel moved back to Stockholm towards the end of the summer, he kindly left behind a collection of old cassettes, a Tascam 8-track and a cassette deck for tape mastering – it was then that Will set to work on some new songs. Floating in a gentle haze of melodies, soft white noise & intimate tape crackles, Balance manages to retain the spirit of the aged cassettes and equipment it was made with, whilst offering something altogether unique & new." - boomkat
Be warned, fans of instrumental work: Will Samson‘s album is quite heavy on the vocals. With understandable lyrics and everything! There’s no charter for ignoring singers at A Closer Listen, just that our natural inclination is towards songs and sounds without words. But Balance relies a lot more on atmosphere, and Samson’s voice (imagine Antony sampled through a Jonsí machine) sits within the music rather than on top of it, a fragile instrument threatening to crack and disappear at any moment, so it shouldn’t alarm or distress any visitors to ACL.
The overall impression that Balance conjures is of a lo-fi folk album, recorded on a cassette player’s built-in microphone and then lost down the back of the sofa for half a decade. There’s no small amount of tape hiss here, which adds to the atmosphere and lends a hazy feel to the songs, obscured as they are by a layer of Dolby-free gauze. The opening “Oceans Are Wilder” is the whole album in a microcosm: a delicate toy piano, ambient waves, Samson’s voice – sometimes sampled, sometimes multi-tracked – and a rich organic hum filling out the arrangement. It’s an almost heartbreakingly beautiful sound.
Samson began recording the album in a house shared with five others, and so he had to balance (hey!) his work; waiting for times when the house was quiet enough to make music but without disturbing the others in their slumber. The hushed approach gives Balance a four-in-the-morning feel – not in the alcohol-fuelled comedown sense, but rather capturing the sense of wonder at the first rays of dawn on the horizon, the birds warming up their voices, the feeling of nature awakening again while most humans sleep on. Although the record was completed in a more sympathetic recording environment, the spirit of the earlier work was retained; it’s an album that relies more on feel than on melody.
That’s not to say there aren’t tunes on Balance; it’s hard not to be swept along by the lilting guitar of “Painting The Horizon”, for example, but the overall impression is not what Samson is saying but how he’s saying it. Where many home-recordists tend toward a crunchy digital sound, this music is full of analogue spaces, made up of sounds that would be removed by other artists and engineers. The result is an album that’s warm and welcoming, like a hot bath at the end of a busy day. - Jeremy Bye
As far as cult soundtrack releases go Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was never a milestone, but it clearly had a strong effect on one experimental musician. At 23 Will Samson has built Balance out of everything he loves: Tascam 8-track cassettes, the crackly accordion music of Musette, and the kooky, intimate amnesia soundtrack from composer Jon Brion. The result is a decidedly mixed bag, and that’s even after producer Nils Frahm has worked his magic over it, coating every quiet chime in fairy dust.
With his high voice cracking like a boy who’s just lost his Lego set, and singing to twinkling guitar backgrounds, Balance is intimate to the point of farce. If you can picture Sigur Rós’ Jónsi on a sailing holiday you’ve imagined Will Samson’s sound, perhaps best exemplified by ‘Hunting Shadows’ with its ethereal synths and voices like orphaned wolf cubs. Human vocal tracks are even more twee: the gentle bass and glockenspiel of ‘Oceans are Wilder’ where Samson screeches about being ”Like crystal”, or ‘Cathedrals’ with its loose acoustic guitar as he sings about the ocean, ”The kind you swallow”. Looking for bite size post-rock gentle enough for an evening’s stargazing? You’ve come to the right place.
However, even someone with the patience of an astronomer might struggle with the schmaltz that recurs throughout Balance. Those echoey guitar nothings tug persistently at your heartstrings, and don’t always have the substance to meet the emotional highs they’re aiming for. ‘Eat Sleep Travel, Repeat’ ticks off lullaby riff/falsetto/tape hiss but also incorporates a trumpet solo, one which sounds so shy it’s like it was recorded in a library. Instrumental ‘Music For Autumn’ meanders further before allowing slow guitars to imitate Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’.
Perhaps the fact that there are no immediate standouts prove you need to be in the right mood to enjoy Balance. If rustic, wholesome guitar melodies laced with grime effects are your idea of ambient, this is going to be the most relaxing 33 minutes of your life. But for all its strange ideas - and there’s plenty, with the folktronica strings of ‘Storms Above The Submarine’ being a highlight - Balance’s compositions feel directionless, not helped by the fact that you need to be a dolphin to get what their creator is singing about.
- George Bass
Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends (2011)
willsamson.bandcamp.com/album/hello-friends-goodbye-friends
Berlin-based Will Sansom presents a fragile blend of acoustic pop and ambient electronics through Japan's Nature Bliss/PLOP records - home to music from Rod Modell and F.S. Blumm. 'Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends' is a very canny blend of falsetto vocals strongly reminding of Tom Krell's HTDW album, with tender acoustic guitar, the most tingling brand of lo-fi electronics and decayed piano ambience. We can imagine quite a lot of people falling deeply in love with this release. Check! - boomkat
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