Smote

Last Summer, Daniel Foggin, guitarist, writer and chief architect of Smote, uprooted himself from his usual home in Newcastle to live and work in a farmhouse in Kelso, near the Scottish border. “Through the summer when I was working up there, myself and Rob (Smote drummer) would finish work and go sit by a small river and have a couple of beers in the sun, and it was the best thing ever” he relates “So I guess the philosophy is that to some people it looks like any other stream, but to us it was supreme happiness. That can be applied to a lot of things in life”. Hence came the title of the fourth Smote album proper, one largely recorded in this same farmhouse - A Grand Stream.
It’s an album that’s the truest incarnation thus far of his vision for this band - a full scale psychic voyage into the ether and a drone-and-repetition-fuelled series of incantations that takes simple, primal ingredients and utilises them for the purposes of aural sorcery, summoning spectres and revelations aplenty in its wake. What has emerged from Foggin’s sojourn in the Borders may be imbued with a rich rural intensity but it’s also perhaps the darkest and more foreboding work that Smote have made to date. As he notes himself, the rawness of this record occurred in tandem with its recording process.