Biography

Sam is a Melbourne-based composer working primarily in the field of notated, acoustic music. Variously described as ‘beguiling, mysterious and gentle’ (Canberra City News) or ‘glistening with totally gorgeous sonorities’ (The Australian), Sam’s music is characterised by the use of harmonic and non-harmonic frequency integers, slowly unfolding process, instrumental colour and virtuosic gesture.

Composer website:  https://soundcloud.com/samuelsmith

Featured Works

bleed-through, for guitar and laptop.

In 2011 I interned with the audio preservation department at the National Film and Sound Archive. I was fascinated at the time by how beautiful these now-obsolete technologies became, the more they had deteriorated. Ageing Magnetic Tape often creates a phenomenon known as Bleed-Through, which occurs when the magnetic signal prints (or bleeds) across to adjacent layers of tape. The result is a ghostly prediction and recollection of the original signal, itself now significantly diminished. Conceptually, it conjures a certain nostalgia; a memory of a signal since deteriorated, recreated by echo and prediction.

Featured in Playlist 8 – String Waves, 31/08/2015

elsewhere; everywhere, for seven antiphonal violas.

The piece seeks to conjure a fantastic geography composed of the literal and the vague; the luminous measurements of space; the individual and the communal; presided over by the ghosts of Herman Melville and Henri Michaux who sit quietly together, listening to David Bowie. elsewhere; everywhere is dedicated to my good friend, Xina Hawkins.

Featured in BIFEM Waves – August 2017