New band of the week: Semi Precious (No 20)

Hometown: London.

The lineup: Guy Baron (vocals, music).

The background: Semi Precious is what happens when Guy Baron – a singer-producer and music graduate of James Blake’s (and Damon Albarn’s) alma mater, Goldsmiths College – takes two sampled tracks and creates a new piece of music from them. Sampling, of course, is as old as the hills/Sugar Hill. But Baron – half DJ, half maudlin songwriter – brings a quiet novelty to the art. Or do we mean science? It sounds technical, the way he shifts the two tracks’ pitch then adds his own melody and lyrics over the top, but the results are emotional: think Robert Wyatt crooning poignantly over eerily slow, languorous, late-night, drowsy electronica. “Each track consists of two fragmented instrumental samples,” he explained to us. He cited as an example the “reharmonised” fragment of a song by an Israeli singer called Sivan Shavit, which he fused together with a section of the group Jazzanova for his track When It’s Hard. Elsewhere, a bit of Zero 7’s Morning Song gets “chopped, reorganised and looped” for Lady White & Lady Grey, while Shaky Skies features a short but “heavily manipulated” piano extract from an old Oscar Peterson recording, which provides the track’s dark, bassy intro.

What began as a project for his music degree course at Goldsmiths developed into a six-track EP of subtly dislocating beauty. His intention was to “recapture, reconstruct and reinhabit fading sounds, basically,” he says – “a poetic way of putting how I perceive what I do. I was never an ‘instrumentalist’ in the traditional sense of the word and I’ve gradually come to realise that I’m less interested in creating music ‘from scratch’.” Baron compares what he does to sculpting, architecture and renovation. “I’m interested,” he says, “in working with leftovers, breathing new life into them and reaccommodating them – with my own voice. I feel that sampling is a rather unique practice, since it’s trying to recapture or represent something that has already been captured once, so I think that it often creates a sense of something that is somewhat familiar but at the same time quite alien or strange.”

Baron’s debut EP as Semi Precious is released on 3 September by Squareglass, a new collective of south-east London-based artists who “seek to explore distinctive and unconventional production approaches”. There is an atmosphere in his music of “gloomy intimacy”, according to DIY, and a feeling of sleepwalking only to be jolted awake every so often. That’ll be Baron’s editing technique, whereby he leaves in the joins between the individual samples, creating the gentle disruptions and ruptures between samples. These are uniformly disquieting mood-music pieces, with changes of tempo but, more crucially, shift in ambience, from solemn to stark and sepulchral. Light Cleaning is just the right side of supper-club, jazzy Satie. Shaky Skies sounds like someone crying in a cathedral – it combines intimacy (that word again) with immensity, its use of just voice and piano somehow contriving to be at once serene and disturbing. Familiar yet alien/strange. It’s the way he tells them.

The buzz: “It just slides through an open door and crawls into your bed and sets its tunes right into your ears and heart.”

The truth: Another successful Goldsmiths alumnus.

Most likely to: Dive for pearls.

Least likely to: Build ships.

What to buy: Semi Precious’s debut EP will be released via Squareglass on 3 September.

File next to: Robert Wyatt, James Blake, Alpha, Satie.

Links: semi-precious-music.com.

Ones to watch: Frances, Summer Ghost, Pale, Kamp!, CuckooLander.