Cold Friend <\/em>comes with tracks like \u201cScabitha\u201d and \u201cWurm,\u201d where the tracks lure you in with coiled verve, while \u201cJessamine\u201d and \u201cUnborn\u201d ease you with an eerie warmth.\u00a0<\/p>\nAbrahams\u2019 sound is something to note. His sonic rudiments vary from grainy static, heavy drums, distortion, dirty hip hop beats to samples of delicacy and strings of despair. It\u2019s convenient for solo-listening \u2013 where you can let it in and take it in. In tracks like \u201cPianomouth\u201d from She <\/em>and \u201cFor Someone\u201d from Memorial, <\/em>Abrahams adopts samples from other artists and crafts around them an inviting ambiance of fuzz. \u201cPianomouth\u201d samples Ella Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cBlue Moon\u201d while \u201cFor Someone\u201d samples Vashti Bunyan\u2019s \u201cHere Before\u201d for the root sample, Bonnie & Clyde\u2019s \u201cI Realized You\u201d for the vocal sample and Mort Garson\u2019s \u201cThe Wozard of Iz\u201d for the after sample. Listening to S.maharba feels like going through a box of loved trinkets that were lost for a while and the trickling of warmth and chills from relief of rediscovering.\u00a0<\/p>\nWith the absolute excitement of Cold Friend <\/em>being released, I asked S.maharba about the album, his sound, cover art and more.\u00a0<\/p>\nUU: Hi! To start off, how has the past year and first month of 2022 been treating you?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nIt has been fine really, I have nothing to complain about. This last year went by so fast and I feel grateful to have been able to have found some time here and there to work on music whilst having a continuing creative surge.<\/p>\n
You just released your new album, Cold Frien<\/em>d, which was really exciting. I love your self-titled album and ever since I found it I went into a wormhole of your music so finding out Cold Friend<\/em> was released was the best part of 2021. There\u2019s a big gap between your last EP Mirror & Veil<\/em> and Cold Friend<\/em>, could you elaborate on the process of the new album?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nYes, it was exciting for me too, being able to share some new music finally has been a great relief. There isn\u2019t a single reason why there is a large gap between this and my last release but I would say aside from balancing family and work life around four or five years ago I just lost a lot of drive and just wasn\u2019t interested in working on music. The process of how I was making songs just became very dull and uninspiring, there were limitless possibilities and I found that to be more and more overwhelming to the point where I was completely stifled.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I decided to try and work with some new equipment that encouraged creativity by being a lot more limited and immediately began having fun making music again. I took some time experimenting with different recording techniques combined with sequencing. Drum programming was something that I plainly avoided until this point and I have learned to love it mainly because of the equipment that I had started using.<\/p>\n
I had begun to compile some tracks that I felt were worthy of holding on to and around this time (early 2020) I was contacted by an old friend to see if I would be interested in releasing a project on his label, Knives. So that is when the Cold Friend<\/em> project started and it was about a year and half process of making and sending over tracks until we felt we had a cohesive body of work. Joe, from Knives ultimately steered the direction of the project, choosing the weirder and more abrasive tracks that I presented and compiled the final track listing.<\/p>\nThere are a few different inspirations that I drew upon whilst making these tracks, at the time I had been going back and re-visiting a lot of music from around the time I was 16- 17 (this would have been 1998) and I was fully immersed in hardcore, buying as much music and attending as many shows as I could. As I was looking back at this era I started listening through demo tapes of bands from around the time and realizing how much I enjoyed the rawness of these tapes compared to later polished and \u201cbetter\u201d produced versions of these songs, that is why I focused the sonic presentation of Cold Friend<\/em> in such a raw format, to try and achieved a demo tape vibe.<\/p>\nTo what degree was the process of making Cold Friend<\/em> an extension of making Most Forgotten<\/em>? Did it feel like a continuation or a new chapter?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nI would say that it is not an extension at all, the 2 albums are complete opposites. Most Forgotten<\/em> is a collection of odds and ends, tracks that had been used in mixtapes, compilations and other rare releases and made over different time periods, it has no actual focus, it is just a home for a lot of tracks which had no other place. Cold Friend<\/em> is definitely a new chapter but has a lot more in common with Self-Titled<\/em> than any of my other releases. I think of Self Titled<\/em> a bit like a short film and Cold Friend<\/em> follows a similar format.<\/p>\nYour sound is really unique in the sense that it has distant fuzzed out elements that really tie it into a signature sound for you. How would you define your sound and what inspiration influences it?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nThank you, having a unique style and sound is very important to me. I don\u2019t really know how to define it. I\u2019m inspired by what I feel inside of me so when I am working on something I am ultimately searching to hit a certain spot that resonates with me on a very personal level. I love layering beauty and ugliness, something that feels comforting but also strange and unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n
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