Spotlight On… Loris S Sarid

The singularly conceptual works of Loris S Sarid can be evocatively tactile from their titles upward. That's true whether they're fully realised albums, curated data dumps or his 30-plus minute piece for the excellent (though now sadly retired) Longform Editions project, the title of which is a series of materials, naturally-occurring and man-made, and was produced as an imagined soundtrack to Glasgow’s Burrell Collection.

Sarid’s latest foray, Ambient $, pointedly explores the crossover and conflict between musical practice and commerce. It’s a mix of heady theory and abstract chicanery, whilst the same time also being an instantly accessible collection of ambient-leaning pop tunes. We caught up with Sarid to hear what thoughts were bounding about his head as he put the record together.

You’re originally from Rome – what brought you to Glasgow? Has it shaped or changed your approach to making music, or the kind of music you make?
Ten years ago, I moved from Rome to London. After about a year, a mixture of excessive cost of living and big-city blues led me to Glasgow. One of my closest friends was living here at the time, which helped me settle in and feel at home. Our habitats and ourselves are constantly marinating together, exchanging seasoning and flavour. Since Glasgow is so rich and varied in music culture, I often find both stuff I love and align with, or that I dislike and antagonise. Both things are essential to form your own language.

Your work mixes digital and acoustic instruments, and other organic elements, and the new album borrows saxophone and voice from collaborators. When you’re sitting down to begin work on a song or bigger project, where do you start and at what point do you decide when to broaden the scope?
I normally start from the album title and work my way backwards. It helps me think that the album is already done. Then it’s mostly about making hundreds of dummy tracks until an aesthetic is established and quickly putting the record together before I lose momentum. It’s a process in which I swing between feeling miserable and formidable. I normally ask collaborators to join only once I reach some kind of stability, and I guess that’s when the scope broadens.

Your new record is called Ambient $ – do you consider yourself an “ambient artist”? What does that mean to you?
The album title, in a certain way, expresses what kind of artist I consider myself to be now. Musical genres are an extension of the way we think, so they’re hard to avoid. The beauty of it is being able to reference them as a way of addressing the culture they represent, either subscribing or challenging it, and in doing so communicating your idea in the parameters of a language others can understand. So, in a way, ambient means a lot to me.

The description of the album poses a question: “What connects Ambient music, which often anonymously swims into endless sleeping playlists with monthly subscriptions to well-being, to the mainstream output of commercial music?” This – along with the title and the track One Million Streams – seems to be a reaction to the commodification and dilution of ambient music. If so, why did you feel the need to react?
Ambient music today is on the same trajectory of what we now call “dad rock” – when an art form reaches mass-popularity, stops being intrepid and becomes a commodity, like a Picasso poster you purchase in a petrol station. It’s the inevitable death pre-installed in everything, which doesn’t undermine its beauty. Normally something new comes about, and more often than not it starts by antagonising what came before. A new teenagerhood in which you snub your parents to make your own thing. As an artist, if you’re interested in this cultural shift, you’ll naturally react to it. Ambient $ reacts by celebrating the transition.

There’s a playfulness, a sense of satire and an ability not to take yourself too seriously, which comes across in the record. Can you talk a bit about that? Is that something you see too little of in this kind of musical style/practice?
Many artists, including myself, grow up hearing that art is not real work and that it’s very competitive and only a selected few really make it. With this background, it’s natural to take yourself seriously to somehow validate what you do. I take myself awfully seriously too. Although I made the choice to also embrace a certain chaos, which comes across as playfulness. I like when art celebrates the full spectrum of what I feel, often simultaneously.

Having said all of that, would you ultimately describe the music on Ambient $ as ambient music?
I would describe it as Taylor Swift’s attempt at making an ambient record, which she then buried inside William Basinski’s garden both to prank him and because she wanted him to listen.

I see the record as an artist-forward antidote to the faceless, personality-free ambient music the algorithm loves to feed us, especially when tech companies are trying hard to divorce our listening from the humans behind art in order to make it sneaky easy for them to file AI-generated music into our lives. It feels to me what passes for ambient music on streaming service playlists could be particularly at risk of this. Does this concern you at all?
Spotify has first monetised on ambient, then killed it, and will surely reap more victims in the future. It glorifies what works, but when the market is saturated needs a new product. It’s just the way capitalism branches into culture. It doesn’t bother me because in time Spotify itself will fade, like Facebook, and will use AI to populate its otherwise deserted landscape. I find this both dramatic and ridiculous. Art, although, is immortal.

Finally, on a happier note, you recently co-founded (with Emma Diamond) a new label, Spritz Editions, which put out your EP Paper Gum as its inaugural release – can you tell us a bit more about why you started it, and your hopes and intentions for what’s to come?
We started with my EP mainly to give us room for practicing what it’s like to release and promote music. We had the label idea in mind for a while but it was nice to try it out between the two of us before releasing other artists. We are interested in music that comes spontaneously, often recorded quickly or not fully finished, forgotten in a hard disk or that couldn’t make it in another album. This is not only because we love that music, but also to archive it and prevent it from being forgotten. We just finished compiling our first compilation, which will be out very soon, which only features Glasgow-based artists. Since there’s so many we like, this will likely be just a “volume one”. We’re so excited for this, it’s coming in December.

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Ambient $ is released on 31 Oct

Follow Loris S Sarid on Instagram @loris_s_sarid