INTERVIEW: Smote

Last summer, Daniel Foggin, the mind behind Newcastle’s Smote, found himself alone in a farmhouse in the Scottish border town of Kelso. With only alpacas and chickens for company, he set about writing and recording his fourth album, the 70-minute plus ethereal opus that is A Grand Stream. “My previous albums have largely been recorded in practice rooms, so it was a nice experience to know no one was around. That calm attitude probably helped a lot with the creative side of it. I had a few snippets beforehand for the record but most of it was written and powered through that week in the farmhouse, working until 4am some nights.”

It’s impossible to pin Smote’s sound to a genre, with elements of drone, noise, doom and folk blended to create a kind of primal sorcery that feels otherworldly and ceremonial. For Foggin, it’s more about creating a feeling. “All the records revolve primarily around atmosphere. I find it hard to put into words, but a lot of my inspiration comes from cinema; lots of the films I like aren’t necessarily big on narrative, they’re about creating feeling and building a world.”

All the records revolve primarily around atmosphere

Though Smote is more widely inspired by folklore and Pagan ritual, Foggin is reluctant to talk about any further meanings or concepts behind his records. “I’ve never publicly put a narrative on any record because I don’t think it’s necessary, it’s up to each listener to take what they want from it. I suppose if I had to talk about what inspired this record, some of the ideas revolve around rural living: manual labour and how it fucks you up when you’re older as there are a lot of older farmers out there, rural living on your own and how it makes you go a bit loopy and maybe experience things that aren’t there. Also, in terms of the weirder, folklore side, there’s the Linton Worm, which is a Scottish Border legend like our Lambton Worm. There was a church around the corner from the farm with a plaque above the door dedicated to the Knight who killed the Worm, John de Somerville. I suppose the area around the farmhouse did inspire me, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.”

The rural landscape that inspired the world of A Grand Stream is more dark pastoral than golden cornfields. There’s a sense of the ominous throughout, with tracks such as The Opinion Of The Lamb Pt. 1 & Pt. 2 leaning heavily on monomania to create a feeling akin to infrasound: a ritualistic voyage filled with foreboding. Foggin admits he definitely leaned into making a darker record. “I wasn’t trying to make an accessible record, I didn’t worry so much about making happy psych rock songs that would get a lot of Spotify plays. It’s all about atmosphere. It’s about creating suspense and catharsis and the way to do that is to drag stuff out as long as possible and push things as far as you possibly can through repetition. Of course, you get the old fellas outside your gigs saying ‘It sounds like someone has smoked too much weed in their practice room, I could do that,’ but it’s really not that easy to restrict yourself, to force yourself to stick at something for ten minutes and upwards, but when it works it works and it feels really good.”