Earlier this year I received a message from classical guitarist and composer Tom Smith, who is based in London. I loved his music straight away, with the classical guitar compositions having a light electro-acoustic treatment and the addition of field recordings. But, I was also really impressed by Tom's overall aesthetic, with a nicely designed website and some live video performances of his songs. This included a cover of Ólafur Arnalds' classic 'Near Light', from his legendary early album Living Room Sounds. Tom told me that Ólafur shared the video, which is really cool!

So in this blog post, Tom has done a live video of his new track 'Path' which features in the recent 'Electio' EP. It seemed a good time to fire a few interview questions his way too, so read on to find out a little more about his work!

HT: There seems to be a strong connection to nature throughout your EP. Is this the case and if so, what led to this to be a source of inspiration for you?

TS: "Yes, absolutely – the very first piece I wrote for classical guitar began when I tried to musically emulate the first few raindrops that I heard after a long dry spell. Since then I’ve always found nature to be a particularly fruitful point of departure in my work – you can see that in a lot of the imagery and titles that I choose as well as in the music itself."

HT: How did you decide on the visuals for this live performance? Tell us about the choice to overlay subtle natural scenes—how do you feel these visuals complement the music?

TS: "When I wrote the track that I’m playing in the video, I had been reading about desire paths and although I’d obviously noticed these before, I’d never really thought too much about them. It was interesting to me that we can have routes conveniently laid out for us, but ultimately we will always want to go off and discover our own things. The introductory melody is supposed to give a sense of cautiously setting off down an unknown path, stopping to reflect, choosing your next move, continuing…and so on.

When I came to make the video I returned to the place where I captured the recording of the crickets and aeroplane overhead that you hear in the track. It’s a large common near where I live with various paths crossing over each other, and you can just about make it out at the very end of the video. I like experimenting with blending images as a way to disguise them, to see what the resulting combined image is, and I overlaid several different shots to make up the background of the video. This felt like the most direct way to visually include the environment that the piece was composed around."

HT: Can you walk us through your creative process for the Electio EP? What were some of the musical and thematic ideas you explored, and how do they come together?

TS: "I had originally planned to make an album about edgelands – I’m weirdly fascinated by decay and the combination of the human-made and natural that you find in those environments. I also wanted to incorporate more improvisation into my recorded music as I enjoy doing this live.

I started by taking a few extended walks through areas of East London that fit the edgelands theme, taking images and capturing field recordings. When I took these to the studio I began to have quite clear ideas about what I wanted to try with each track. I would then spend some time improvising guitar over the recordings until I arrived at an idea that I felt achieved what I was looking for. The tracks each developed in very different ways after that - some, like Path, could be described as compositions-through-improvisation: they feature the original improvisation that I recorded, with just a few edits here and there to help with flow and pacing. With Limen, I knew that the motif that appears right at the start was going to underpin the whole thing, and I composed the guitar part in a more conventional way before adding the electronics once it was recorded. Greenway was approached more like a piece of sonic art, and I recorded very small fragments which I then ran through various effects."

HT: How do field recordings fit into your compositions? Are there specific sounds or locations that particularly inspire you when creating new work?

TS: "As we discussed earlier, nature is often a source of inspiration for me and field recordings are the best way to directly quote this in music. I think the way that field recordings actually influence the music that I write is quite subtle – it might be that I notice rhythms or pitches somewhere within a recording that influence an initial musical idea, but because I then compose through improvisation, it’s not always that obvious by the end. The opening track, River, is an exception to this – on that one I was consciously layering tiny, percussive guitar sounds underneath the recording as a sort of sonic exercise: creating a natural-sounding yet completely artificial environment.

I never know when I’m going to hear something that might be inspiring, and have probably missed capturing quite a few sounds that would’ve made it into tracks had I remembered to take a recording device with me!"

HT: What or who would you say are the key influences on your work?

TS: "Compositionally, I’m always looking to squeeze the most that I can out of a single idea and for that reason I really love lots of very slow music – Éliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone are recent favourites, as well as Laura Cannell’s semi-improvised music. I’ve been gradually discovering artists who’ve released on the Touch label as well, and so much of that music also fits into this: Hildur Guðnadóttir, KMRU, Claire M Singer, Fennesz…

Strangely I’ve never had very many ‘guitar heroes’, but from that world I really admire Janet Feder, who’s a pioneer of composition for prepared classical guitar. Her music is both sonically exploratory and melodic, which few people manage to do well. Her most recent album, Break It Like This (with her cowhause duo partner Colin Bricker on electronics) has been on heavy rotation this year."

You can follow Tom's work in the following places:

Website
Bandcamp
Instagram
YouTube

'Electio' is available now as part of Whitelabrecs' digital-only eRecords series, in a range of high quality format options. You can take a listen to the EP in full and buy a copy HERE!