Will Samson
WILL SAMSON still remembers his first – and only – experiments with psilocybin. He’d never been terribly interested in recreational drugs – least of all psychedelics – but he’d started to notice increasing references to its positive effects in the treatment and healing of trauma. For some time – following the death of his father in 2012 – the musician had suffered from mild PTSD, unable to process the grief provoked by the sudden nature of his passing. In particular, his anxiety was fuelled by a fear of breaking down in public, and he’d begun investigating different approaches to easing these symptoms: flotation tanks, meditation, the Wim Hof Method. It took him several years, however, before he felt confident enough to explore the possibilities this popular compound was said to offer. Finally, he and his girlfriend retreated to the countryside for a day.
“The whole experience was treated with great respect and care,” Samson recalls. “The dosage wasn't really enough to trip – my only hallucination was seeing an electric blue duck that faded back into white! – but it did totally silence my mind. It was a particularly beautiful summer's day, and I felt like a happy child, amazed at the natural world, without a single concern. Over the following days, my mind was unusually alert and fresh, which gave me a new perspective on things, sometimes quite literally: my living room looked so much bigger afterwards! But this new perspective also affected the songs I was recording at the time.”
Samson’s fifth album, PARALANGUAGE – his first for Wichita Recordings – was in many ways inspired by these events, and it seeks to emulate them too. Indeed, vocals for two tracks, ‘Ochre Alps’ and ‘Flowerbed’, which he’d been struggling to finish for a number of months, were written and recorded over two subsequent afternoons spent micro-dosing. “The creative solutions really came flooding out,” he smiles, though he emphasises he’s not pursued the practise since. “I really pushed myself to sing with as much passion as possible on ‘Flowerbed’, and I think it shows. It's the track I’m most proud of in my whole catalogue and, to my mind, the psilocybin played a significant role.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, PARALANGUAGE – the title chosen because the album’s central themes address the way “our bodies, not just our minds, hold memories and emotions” – is SAMSON’s most cohesive album to date. There’s a conspicuously tender thread running through its eight songs, from ‘Calescent’, its eloquently poignant opener, to ‘Lacuna’’s fuzzy nostalgia, from ‘Beyond The Dust’’s sweet serenity to ‘The Smallest Sliver’’s redemptive fragility. In the past, each new work has tended to represent Samson’s reaction to his last: the fragile, tentative sounds of his debut, 2011’s Hello Friends, Goodbye Friends, led to the haunting folktronica of 2012’s Balance; 2017’s Welcome Oxygen replaced the electronica of 2015’s Ground Luminosity (and Animal Hands, the same year’s collaboration with Berlin’s Heimer) with a more guitar-friendly aesthetic; and there were also ambient EPs, A Baleia and Lua, which allowed him to dispense altogether with structure. This new collection, however, finds him exploring and assuredly consolidating these various styles.
Samson’s voice, too, has never sounded more moving, committed or confident, his yearning falsetto as touching as his gentle tenor – comparisons to Sufjan Stevens and Patrick Watson are not inappropriate – while his arrangements are intricate yet never ostentatious, with precisely detailed programming inseparable from the warmth of his analogue instrumentation. “Perhaps it's a reflection of feeling more centred and grounded,” Samson observes. In contrast to Welcome Oxygen, furthermore – whose composition required just eight days – he took his time on PARALANGUAGE, which was composed and recorded over a year, beginning on a dark, wet day in November 2017 when he sat at his friend Sylvain Chaveau’s electric piano and laid down the first chords for ‘Calescent’. “When I first played it to Sylvain,” he chuckles, “he said ‘It's the most Will Samson track I've heard!’ It seems that, from the beginning, this was set to be my most cohesive album so far. I’d reached a point of maturity where I realised there was every chance that, no matter how hard I worked, the album may not find a label or audience. There was a large part of me that thought this would be my last. So a lot of the pressure was gone, and that was definitely liberating.”
Certainly, it’s true that Samson has often displayed a restless nature in both his artistic and personal life. Born in Oxford in 1988, he emigrated soon afterwards with his parents – whose own parents had first met in Kenya – to Western Australia, where he lived for ten years before returning to Oxfordshire. A little over a decade later, he began shifting between Oxford and Berlin, then tried brief spells in Brighton and Lisbon, finally winding up in Brussels, where he’s lived since 2016. It took him a while, too, to settle on a musical direction that suited him. A shy child who was nevertheless a fan of punk, he began learning drums at the age of 12, but slowly gravitated towards the guitar, which allowed him to perform alone rather than rely on a band, while also providing a necessary outlet for him to express himself publicly.
It was, all the same, the mainly instrumental, dramatic post-rock of bands like Do Make Say Think, Stars Of The Lid, Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – acts to whom he was drawn following At The Drive-In’s revelatory, turn of the century Relationship Of Command – that first focussed Samson’s mind during his youth. Later on, he adds, he was drawn to the so-called New Classical scene, and he’s since performed shows with Ólafur Arnalds, while Balance was mastered by Nils Frahm. “In the same way that punk was about knowing a few power chords,” he elaborates, “it’s possible to create a striking piano piece with limited knowledge of the instrument. When music is so minimal, each detail has to be carefully considered.”
Though his own music remains stylistically different, it could be said to represent a comparable refuge. Samson admits this is partially motivated by his desire “to recreate the warmth and reassuring comfort flotation tanks give. Also, because it gets so hot in Western Australia, I spent much of my early years underwater, and still have vivid memories of exploring that silent world. I've often tried to evoke that same feeling in my music.” But while it’s fair to say a track like the gracefully amorphous The Human Mosaic offers a deeply immersive quality – partially due to Samson’s occasional technique of recording on vintage cassette recorders, then soaking his tapes in disparate liquids to influence their decay – at other times his music is intrinsically bucolic and full of space. ‘Triplet’, for instance, is about surrendering to nature – “Do you feel more alive,” he asks, “than a wild river flowing through a valley?” – and he’s in fact not averse to a little gardening, laughing as he recounts how “the morning after Wichita told me they wanted to sign me, I was up at 7am to dig trenches!”
Recorded largely in his home studio – the first time he’s had a space exclusively devoted to his music – PARALANGUAGE finds Samson reunited with regular collaborator Beatrijs De Klerck, a violinist who also plays with A Winged Victory For The Sullen and Christina Vantzou. She and Samson have worked together since 2015’s Ground Luminosity, and he recollects how, in those early days, “when we were discussing the parts, we would have the same ideas and literally be finishing each other’s sentences.” Additionally, Ben Lester, who’s worked with S. Carey and Sufjan Stevens, added pedal steel to 'Beyond The Dust', and Jeremy Boettcher (who also performs with S. Carey) added double bass to 'The Human Mosaic', while Canadian songwriter Michael Feuerstack added backing vocals to 'The Smallest Sliver'.
Otherwise, the album is all Samson’s own work, a testament to his desire to seek peace not just on record but in his life. Drugs of one kind or another have, of course, often provided inspiration to musicians, but seldom do they prompt an album of such tranquillity and enviable contentment. A tribute to his inquisitive nature, PARALANGUAGE is also, ultimately, a memorial to his father, whose life shaped Samson’s own, and whose tragic passing has now inadvertently yielded a source of magical consolation for us all. As the 30-year-old sings on ‘The Smallest Sliver’, “Sometimes my love feels too big for my body/ So I have to let it go.” In so doing, WILL SAMSON has allowed us all to share it.