Shmu

Revolving around the drum kit and sampler of Sam Chown. Shmu is more - or maybe less than a band, it's a hypothetical entity. 

Imagine, if you will, a recording of live instruments reassembled, through electronic means, into a collage of impossible live performances. Imagine this collage then taken by the author and used as a backing track for a live band. Dissatisfied with the result, the author then disassembles, and reassembles, everything once again.

This is Shmu. Shmu is a project & a person blurring the lines between the two Rather than scrapping each iteration, Sam Chown recycles The constant recycling leaves us with something that it at once both familiar and completely unique.

On SHHH!!!!, Shmu's sophomore LP, each track exists as its own entity, yet the record stands as a cohesive whole, it flows seamlessly, taking the listener on a journey of sound and color. Chown plays nearly all the instruments on the record, recording, mixing and re-recordnig each track multiple times. Many songs even contain performances of Chown playing samples live that are samples of scrapped songs or of other entire songs - performing a performances of a performance.

SHHH!!!! is an era-less pastiche of seventies psychedelic rock, eighties post punk, nineties dream pop, and modern shoegaze, filtered through Chown's sampler and spat out the other side over and over again. This distillation process leaves the end result to sound like the last four decades of popular music, compressed and remembered in a hazy dream.