THE PREVIEW:
Conforme comentamos na semana passada chegou o momento de uma entrevista exclusiva com Patrick Samuel e um preview de sua nova compilação.
Semana passada você curtiram Patrick Samuel no HOLIDAY SHARE com um single maravilhoso e intimista para Rain.
Patrick Samuel está preparando o lançamento de uma compilação de remixes inéditos chamado The Gift Of Love e para aumentar nossa curiosidade o remixer cedeu um remix inédito como uma preview para esse super lançamento.
O remix excolhido é Get Together, Patrick deixou de lado a identidade dance da faixa e a trabalhou de maneira que ficou mais tensa, teatral. O remix é fantástico e deixa no ar o que ouviremos no novo album. Get Together é um lançamento exclusivo, não estará presente no album.
A entrevista com Patrick foi muito especial, Patrick fala sobre sua vida, remixes, pintura, lutas pessoais e sobre como foi trabalhar com Dubtronic em Isaac; 1º single de The Gift Of Love. Uma entrevista muito sensível e especial.
Patrick, my friend, thank you for your support and amazing remixes.
THE INTERVIEW:
Welcome Patrick, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Where do you live and what do you do?
My name, as you know, is Patrick Samuel, I live in London with my two best friends including a lively 3-year-old Belgian Malinois called Chase who provides a lot of fun and mischief. What do I do? I create art; sonic and visual, using a range of materials. I’m on the autistic spectrum, I have Asperger’s Syndrome so my work is quite sensory-based and I find that’s an integral part of learning to cope with my condition when living in a city that can be overwhelmingly loud, crowded and intrusive. Thankfully I live on the outskirts where there are enough green spaces such as dense forests and parklands and quiet spots like libraries, churches and cemeteries that I can always take refuge in when those other things get too much.
What can you tell us about how you got started?
I’ve always been creative. From an early age, I think my mom recognised I was different but couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She taught me how to paint and draw. I guess it calmed me as I was hyperactive. I remember doing things like potato prints with her and sticking rice and macaroni onto card to make collages. My early life was filled with creative pursuits and it was positively stimulating, unless I had to mix with other kids.
At school I was the same. Gifted with a 164 IQ on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, but sadly never really challenged because it was my lack of social skills that held me back. High IQ coupled with low EQ scores don’t make for happy kids. I was hyperactive, frustrated, anxious and short-tempered so teachers and other kids had little patience in dealing with me.
With music I was self-taught. At high school I liked to sit at the piano and create patterns, codes and palindromes. No one ever taught me how to play but that never prevented me from composing my own music for my own pleasure, and often therapy. In the early 90s I used to cut up the reels from cassette tapes and splice them together to create my own dub mixes and whilst doing that I figured out accidently that I could flip the reel and the tapes would play backwards. That got me interested in musical compositions with string arrangements, woodwind instruments and percussion that could easily be reversed and played around with.
Eventually I progressed on to vinyl and then CD decks for my mixing, but it was the arrival of digital audio workstations (DAWs) that really changed how I worked with music. The internet allowed me to share my work for the first time on platforms such as Napster, MIRC and AudioGalaxy where I started to earn a following. I was the first to create concept remix albums in the Madonna online fan community with The Day of Creation (2001), a collection of remixes featuring The Beast Within, If You Forget Me and I’m not sure what else was on there, it was quite a while back. I followed it up with The Second Coming (2001) and a collection of instrumentals on The Drowned World (2002).
By 2005, with Metatempus, my output was quite vast but looking back on it, a lot of it was rather disposable in technical terms. The audio wasn’t really mastered, bass was usually too loud and sometimes the tracks were just too long. I was doing events as well (film and music related) and tried my hand at being a DJ, but found the experiences overwhelming as people would approach me to talk or ask for things to be played. I didn’t really enjoy the social aspect of it. Oftentimes in situations like this I’d have a meltdown and involuntarily self-harm. It takes someone with a lot of patience and strength to handle me as my condition is complex and my behaviour can be challenging. Thankfully, I have a friend who’s been giving me this kind of care and support for the past 15 years. And Chase is trained to provide emotional support too. I’m very lucky there.
My last real project was in 2010 with Dream Sequences (which took 3 years to complete), sadly it didn’t get the promotion it deserved because I was so busy working on other things like Static Mass (an online academic film journal and community), a short film 1428 Elm Street (an excerpt was included on the bonus disc for the official Nightmare on Elm Street franchise documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy) and its accompanying soundtrack score.
What have you been up to in recent years?
In 2013 I started work on some new remixes, but I felt in no rush to put them out there. I like to take my time and let things develop. That’s something I’ve learned with my work; don’t rush it because you want it out there. I don’t mind if people forget me or my past contributions to the community. If it’s good, it’ll be remembered. I also don’t like to compose music over existing music so I prefer to wait for multitracks or vocal stems to leak so I can use them. In a few cases I was able to obtain some expertly filtered tracks which I was able to use. The project is now complete, and has been since 2016. Altogether there were over 30 tracks remixed since 2013 but only 19 of them will appear on the album. It’s called The Gift of Love.
I’m almost ready to release it, what’s also keeping me from putting it out is time. The past 12 months have been the hardest of my life. There’s been a lot to cope with and to recover from, including PTSD and a suicide attempt in December. I’m quite open about it now and I don’t care if it makes others uncomfortable. For a long time, I couldn’t express verbally what was going on with me, but since December 23rd I’ve been doing daily Art Therapy which has been helping me with coming to terms with how my brain works and how I need to change the way I do things. I now focus solely on creating art; day in, day out. Once I started to forget about myself and let things go, I saw how it inspires and affects others who have been experiencing similar difficulties, and through that I started to change.
I’ve been exhibiting my paintings and drawings. First at an exhibition organized by Orchestrated Acts of Kindness to raise awareness of autistic spectrum disorders called Art for Autism, then a few other festivals. I have my first solo exhibition coming up at the Dugdale Centre in North London, it’s called ‘Escape and Return’ and it will run from 7th of November to 2nd December this year. I’m very excited about that. My album, Beyond the Spectrum will be officially released on August 8th, the CD contains 19 songs as well (I like prime numbers!) and is housed in a beautifully designed digipak featuring my paintings on the front, back, inside and on the disc itself. Thanks to the kind folks at The Disc Factory for that, they made my dream come true there and I’d highly recommend their CD duplication service to anyone looking to get their music out there on physical releases. I’ve also been giving interviews and have become somewhat of a motivational speaker, my first talk was at the Autism Show in London in June and there a few more coming up in the autumn. So somewhere in between all of that, I’ll have to nail down a proper release date for The Gift of Love and the first singles, Isaac, which was a collaboration with my friend Dubtronic. It’s an epic track with complex layers and intricate textures and I learned a lot from this collaboration with him. He’s a great guy!
Along the way there’ve also been other remixes I’ve produced this past year. Massive Attack’s Teardrop, Britney Spears’ Alien, Radiohead’s Creep and Cher’s Believe. I call them anti-mixes as they’re completely stripped of anything that sounds like the original tracks. They’re much more symphonic. I like to call it ‘music for the neuro-diverse’.
So there’s been a lot of things happening. A complete turnaround from where my life was at a year ago and that’s thanks to a huge amount of emotional support, creative sponsors and a lot of Art Therapy.
What message do you have for the Madonna fan community?
To have an open heart and an open mind. To listen without prejudice. To think before we act. To celebrate our differences and embrace each other for the gifts these differences bestow upon us. To recognise neuro-diversity and to practice kindness and humility.
I hope they will enjoy The Gift of Love, I chose that title specifically because I felt that’s what the songs were, gifts of love. I also hope that this time round I’m more able to interact with them. So please, do send me messages, leave me comments, write to me, and together with my friend, we’ll do our best to respond to everyone.
The National Autistic Society website has a wealth of information and resources widely available to everyone. There’s so much that people don’t understand when it comes to autism, starting with the fallacy that we don’t have empathy. We’re overloaded with empathy and a desire to connect with others. I know I am.
I’d also like to thank everyone for their support, their understanding and patience. And thank you Inco, for waiting for me! It’s been a long time coming but am glad to have “made it through the wilderness” to be here and share my story with you and your readers.
patricksamuel.net
nas.org.uk
