Soundtracker of post-club twilight zone
Who they?
Semi Precious is the alter ego of Tel Aviv-raised, London-based Guy Baron, who holds down a job as a lecturer in sound studies as well as making beatific, thoughtful electronic sounds himself.
Why Semi Precious?
An alumnus of Goldsmiths’ progressive Music Studies course, Baron is also a student of London’s nightlife. After graduating, he immersed himself in the capital’s club scene and set up the Squareglass imprint with Athlete Whippet’s Robin Braum and Avi Barath. In 2014, he emerged under the Semi Precious tag with a self-titled EP that offered up a serene, soulful approach to electronic music, given a soothing quality via his enveloping vocal. It was a style that was precisely honed into the deep chill of his debut album, 2016’s ‘Ultimate Lounge’.
Tell us more…
Baron’s output is in thrall to dance music’s euphoric peaks and troughs, but exists in the strange, interstitial, early hours zone between leaving a club and the following day beginning. With his new album, ‘Post-Euphoria’, he has isolated that amorphous feeling with a suite of 10 mostly beatless tracks that play with the idea of endorphins and adrenaline ebbing away as the night out retreats into the distance. Key track ‘Second Spring’ drifts forth with reflective uncertainty, its vocal theme being optimistically focussed on rebirth as club culture prepares to emerge from lockdown hibernation, yet it also leaves a regretful imprint, as if rueing all the nights out that couldn’t happen in 2020. ‘Post-Euphoria’ isn’t just a wistful, romantic rumination as it also forms part of Baron’s doctorate into the effects of music, making this one perfectly suited to both the learned and the beautifully wasted.
‘Post-Euphoria’ is out on Squareglass
