After nearly four years, the British producer Ross Abrahams, under his moniker S.maharba, released his new album, Cold Friend, late last year. The album coheres truly to his sound that’s been honed over the decade and has become his salutation. Cold Friend comes with tracks like “Scabitha” and “Wurm,” where the tracks lure you in with coiled verve, while “Jessamine” and “Unborn” ease you with an eerie warmth.
Abrahams’ 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’s convenient for solo-listening – where you can let it in and take it in. In tracks like “Pianomouth” from She and “For Someone” from Memorial, Abrahams adopts samples from other artists and crafts around them an inviting ambiance of fuzz. “Pianomouth” samples Ella Fitzgerald’s “Blue Moon” while “For Someone” samples Vashti Bunyan’s “Here Before” for the root sample, Bonnie & Clyde’s “I Realized You” for the vocal sample and Mort Garson’s “The Wozard of Iz” 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.
With the absolute excitement of Cold Friend being released, I asked S.maharba about the album, his sound, cover art and more.
UU: Hi! To start off, how has the past year and first month of 2022 been treating you?
It 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.
You just released your new album, Cold Friend, 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 was released was the best part of 2021. There’s a big gap between your last EP Mirror & Veil and Cold Friend, could you elaborate on the process of the new album?
Yes, it was exciting for me too, being able to share some new music finally has been a great relief. There isn’t 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’t 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.
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.
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 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.
There 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 “better” produced versions of these songs, that is why I focused the sonic presentation of Cold Friend in such a raw format, to try and achieved a demo tape vibe.
To what degree was the process of making Cold Friend an extension of making Most Forgotten? Did it feel like a continuation or a new chapter?
I would say that it is not an extension at all, the 2 albums are complete opposites. Most Forgotten 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 is definitely a new chapter but has a lot more in common with Self-Titled than any of my other releases. I think of Self Titled a bit like a short film and Cold Friend follows a similar format.
Your 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?
Thank you, having a unique style and sound is very important to me. I don’t really know how to define it. I’m 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.
“Scabitha” is my favorite track from the album and I know there are multiple layers in your music, what layers were used in “Scabitha”?
That is one of my favorites too and was the one that kick started the creative spark for the entire album. It was almost left off the album completely and was only added on to the track listing in the final stages as we were completing the mastering. It is actually quite a simple track in terms of the way it is constructed and the whole song from start to finish was sampled, programmed and sequenced on a single Teenage Engineering PO33 KO! sampler and consist of 4 individual tracks: 1 track for drums (kick & snare) 1 track for percussion (Hi-Hats) 1 track for sampled instrument (heavily distorted bass) and 1 track containing the vocals which is sampled from song called “Magic Night” off a 1984 album from a female japanese duo called Manekineko Kagekidan.
What would you say your favorite track is from Cold Friends?
Hmmm, let me see, I think “Wurm” could be a favorite because it is so different from anything I’ve done before but still sounds like I made it. It was also very fun to make and came together very quickly. Sometimes when I find a certain sample I like, I will sit on it for a very long time until the perfect opportunity arrives. The vocal sample on this track is something that I had been waiting to use for ages and is from a 1973 film called Lemora.
You usually use these captivating black and white images of women as album art (except Most Forgotten) but for Cold Friends you used artwork by Luca Van Grinsven that is really captivating and fits the aesthetic of your sound very well. Why did you choose to have artwork instead of a photograph for this album?
Yes that’s true and again this direction came from Joe at Knives, we decided early on that having the artwork out sourced would be a nice change from my usual input. Joe began sending me examples from artists he had known or found whose images could work in conjunction with the sound that was starting to take shape in this project. Joe presented some examples of Luca’s work and I was immediately in love with the idea of having him produce the cover and we were very lucky that he agreed to complete an original piece for the album and could not have been more pleased with what he came through with.
Since you’ve been putting out music for more than a decade now, do you feel you’re closer to the places you wanted to go when you first set out to make it?
I don’t know if there has really ever been a specific place where I wanted to take my music, it just comes out how it comes out. It has always felt like it’s just coming out naturally and from somewhere I can’t really explain but it feels right. I think as long as I can stay true to that way of working then it will always be the right place.
You’ve collaborated with a couple artists throughout the years as well. Are there any people you hope to make some music with?
Collaborating is something that I struggle with, It’s something that I would like to be able to do more of but it never really works out in this project for some reason. I am a very passive and shy person and in a situation that involves other people I can tend to just go with the flow, whereas in my head I’m maybe going somewhere else and I can only really allow that to come out when I’m working alone. There are lots of artists I admire but I would never put a name forward or even reach out, but if someone came to me with a proposal for a collaboration I would certainly consider it if it felt right.
I think that your music doesn’t really fall into a genre outside of trip-hop or electronica, it’s too unique in itself to be put into one. If there were a few words to describe your music what would they be?
That’s good because I have no desire to be bogged down with being categorized outside of those genres, but I feel that I do draw in from and nod back to many genres that really interest me deeply such as punk, noise, drone, boom bap, black metal, golden era hip hop and pop.
Thank you so much for speaking with me! To finish off, what do you hope 2022 brings you this year?
Music wise I hope to be able to work on new things, stay productive and have fun doing it, Lifewise I hope I can continue to be there for my family and provide as much love and laughter as possible. Thank you very much for the interest in my new album, this is the first time I’ve been able to speak about it and I really appreciate that.