Songstellations

A quick tour of Sam Price's somewhat cluttered yet impressively organised studio reveals a man whose biggest vices are buying new toys and digging for new sounds. His music has long been described as a “genre-tastic swirl of hip hop beats, monster movie sound effects and spaghetti western soundtrack guitar licks”, but these days Naik, his nom de guerre, cares more than ever about making a great song.

He fires up Abelton and plays The Music a recent collaboration he recorded with Sugar Army's Pat McLaughlin. The tune is classic Naik, laden with some of the best hooks McLaughlin has ever sung. “I'm really loving working with vocalists now,” Price says, “like, the stuff I'm doing with Pat is probably the most fun I'm having with music at the moment. He's taught me how to write a good pop song I guess, which isn't really an experience I've had to deal with before. Quietly I've always liked pop music; like every kid I sang The Beatles in the car with my dad and my sister.”

Intent on being more than “just a dude nodding behind a laptop”, Price's live show has always been a little outside the box. “The key elements are having live drums and guitar, then having that manipulated by the computer. Making sure there are triggers that are clearly understandable from the crowd… You can see something get pressed and you can understand that a sound came from that trigger. Nothing annoys me more than someone just tapping away and I can't understand what they're actually playing.” 

Now, to push the boundaries even further, he's developed a complex AV show he calls Stellations. Having successfully crowdfunded the project earlier this year through Pozible, he's spent many a sleepless night putting the whole thing together himself. Just search 'Naik Stellations' on YouTube and you'll see what I mean. Audiences will get to witness the show's debut at The Bakery as part of the local art and music collective The Community's tenth birthday bash, whilst he'll simultaneously be launching 7” single, Solar Temples. “It's two tunes that I was gonna put on my album. I really liked them but when I was tracklisting everything I just could never find a spot [for them]. So I took them off the album, then decided to press them on a 7”. They're just gonna stand on their own, [I'm] releasing them as kind of a precursor to the album. [With] the first track, Solar Temples, I picked up this Bollywood record, got home, found this vocal sample and then had most of the song written in a day.”