© Ilme Vysniauskaite
Delve into Semi Precious' artistic manifesto, where he transcends musical boundaries, blurring lines between genres and creating a unique sonic identity.
My name is Guy and I’ve been releasing music under the moniker Semi Precious for
almost a decade. I’m originally from Tel Aviv but London has been my home since 2011.
I’m a singer-producer and also an academic, teaching creative music production.
My approach to music making tends to be conceptual, in the sense that I normally have a theme or process of working that I explore with every musical project. I guess this is also partly to do with the fact that my previous releases have been tied to academic research, so for me there’s often an underlying process of critical reflection on my own creative making.
I’m also very drawn to the visual side of things, and love collaborating with videographers, photographers and animators. There’s something about creative “world building” that’s much more exciting for me when there’s a bigger aesthetic vision that’s not just the music itself.
© Yasmin Vardi
I naturally gravitate towards minimalist and subdued soundworlds and, for the most part,
find pleasure and inspiration in things that are somewhat ambiguous or ambivalent. I like
working with a limited sonic palette and aim to create atmospheric pieces that remain not fully resolved.
I also find a lot of inspiration in structure and materiality (also buildings and interiors), which is something I try to explore in my songwriting. For example, I often think about lyrics more like building blocks that can be duplicated, mixed and matched and reconstructed to form new and unexcepted meanings.
My new EP ‘Sun is Out’ was recorded over the past year in a small studio space. The space was pretty basic in terms of gear and definitely not a “professional” recording studio, but it provided a sense of intimacy that I feel is reflected in this new body of work. The notion of intimacy is something that I’ve always explored, and I feel that I’ve delved even deeper into it with this collection of songs. I used a very basic bedroom production-like setup (most vocals have been recorded using an iPhone) that enabled me to be exposed, whilst deliberately leaving things a bit unpolished. The accompanying audio-visual work for the lead track Queen Aquamarine (created with my long-time visual collaborator Yasmin Vardi) was shot in my bedroom to further explore intimate moments of feeling comfortable and liberated in our own skin.
Weirdly, even though my work has always had a homoerotic tone to it, it’s the first time where I’ve actually used male pronouns in the lyrics. So, whilst the lyrics are still ambiguous and fragmented, the tone is more direct. Another thing I’ve done on this EP is using a dream diary I’ve been maintaining, as a way of unlocking subconscious themes and narratives.
Being an independent musician can be a bit of a lonely path and it’s sometimes difficult to
say to what extent your work reaches audiences. I do hope that my new EP can bring comfort to someone out there. It’s not easy nowadays with everything that’s happening at the moment, and we need to find ways to reach out, connect and care.