Building Beyond the Noise with Greg Surmacz

Leeds’ music scene, and by extension its fruitful music college, has birthed the careers of many, but for every festival headliner and mercury prize winner, there are countless others who achieve similar artistic greatness, without necessarily appearing on the front page of NME. Greg Surmacz, who has been floating in and out of the prolific jazz scene in West Yorkshire since moving there 22 years ago, strolls up to a quaint cafe in Meanwood to discuss how the city shaped his musical journey, and how he arrived at a point with two studio albums under his belt, and finds himself poised to embark on a run of UK shows with a full live band behind him.

We start at his initial musical education, where and how the seeds of his creativity were sown, as he explains that he followed the well-trodden path of piano lessons, which led to clarinet, and then onto the saxophone - but his formative music-aware years weren’t just spent in the classroom, “Even in primary school my parents would bring me along to gigs they were off to, it’s only now that I look back and can see that’s slightly unusual”. He goes on to tell the tale of a trip to Reading Festival at 15-years-old without a phone, and acknowledges the shock that this would bring nowadays. 

He methodically discusses his musical adolescence where he found his feet playing in his local scene’s jazz bands, but it seemed to have become clear quite early in his life that he would have to seek pastures new to scratch the itch. When asked about the availability of electronic music in his teenage years spent in his hometown of Wolverhampton, he admitted “you’d get the odd experimental thing here, but nothing so much in the way of dance music. One of my earliest exposures was hopping on the train to Birmingham to watch DJ Shadow back when he was touring” - you could certainly do a lot worse, as introductions to electronic music go. 

As we move through his musical adolescence, Greg recounts the times spent in a club at home, the owners of which he and his friends vaguely knew - ‘vaguely’ meaning they knew them well enough to persuade them to play the odd bit of jungle or “ninja tune-esque electronic music” on the quieter nights. But the somewhat comfortable feeling of being your hometown’s resident music nerds quickly turned to something much more humbling when he began studying at Leeds Conservatoire (then Leeds College of Music) in 2003. “It was a bit more competitive than I thought it would be. Where I’m from, all the competitive people did sport or even remained in academia - to me, music was never like that. There was a lot of ‘who can play that venue first?’ or ‘who can secure this booking first?’ and initially it did kind of ruin it for me a bit”.

He goes on to concede that the saxophone may be “one of the more show-offy instruments”, but that this should never take away from the beauty of playing with people rather than competing, “at that stage, the point of it isn’t to play good music, it’s too impress your peers - and that’s quite the culture shock”. 

The transition from small town to big city was far from being completely doom and gloom, as it quickly became clear that musical education in Leeds is not limited to its university campuses. “Lots of clubs were playing music I’d never heard before, which was exactly what I wanted. This was in the early 2000s when dubstep was taking off, being in clubs where the music was just so loud, and also it sounds like it’s come from space… it was totally mind blowing. That’s something that still grabs me to this day, I want to hear stuff I’ve never heard before. The idea of music falling out of the sky and not knowing what to make of it - that’s such a cool feeling”.

When it came to moving away from collaborations and focussing more on his own solo output, this didn’t take full force until the “cursed year” of 2020. He cites that the duration of lockdown was the longest he’d been without gigging since he was 14, which caused him to look inward creatively, albeit while being acutely aware that this revelation wasn’t exactly unique to him. He speaks of creating a make-shift routine during this period, which involved spending his daytimes experimenting and creating music, downloading it, and then taking to his local park in Meanwood to listen to what he’d made and self-evaluate - though from more of a reflective perspective than a critical one. “I’d realised that most of the projects I was involved in up until this point were directed towards a specific goal, whether that be an album or achieving a certain sound - but the only plan for this was simply to do it”. 

This eventually landed him in a position where he was sat on a whole pile of unreleased music which, following the positive feedback of some of his trusted contacts, was ready to make up his first release under his own name. “It felt like the first time I’d properly put all of myself into something musically. Even the people in my life who aren’t particularly into music had said that they could ‘hear me’ within it, so it definitely made sense to release it as myself.”

The next challenge that presented itself once this was decided was giving all these recordings their own names, “I listen to a lot of instrumental music, like Mogwai for example, they take their music very seriously but they’re also proper jokers, and you can see that reflected in their track titles sometimes… it’s part of how you present the work”. 

It’s clear that this is something ever-present throughout Greg’s artistic vision, he is a musician who believes in the beauty of creating music for the sake of it, while ensuring there’s always part of you which is thinking of the bigger picture behind it. This stretches from the recording, to the naming, sequencing, all the way to the live show. “There’s a studied aloofness which can work sometimes, you know, if you’re Burial or something. But mostly when I go to a gig, I want to hear what they’ve got to say. Even if they’re awkward or don’t have much stage presence, that can be really endearing - it’s about presenting your authentic self.”

This ultimately culminated in Greg finally putting himself out there as a solo artist in a recorded format, and this arrived in the form of a three part project entitled Timelines, which was released across both 2021 & 2022. But these projects were certainly more than a dump of previously unreleased music, as they allowed him to think about his output in something close to an album for the first time - the seeds of what would become his two triumphant studio albums were sown across these projects.

As most musicians know, among the many things that come with formally releasing music for the first time, is the dawning realisation of classifying your music in terms of genre. Many will say genre has no place in artistic expression, whereas others will highlight its utility when it comes to discovery - but does the modern age of music consumption demand it? “I think jazz is the elephant in the room when it comes to this sort of thing, because there’s lots of different stuff which is hit with the jazz label. It might be that there is a trumpet here, or a saxophone there, and a lot of the time it isn’t really jazz. But once you do that, you have to ask, ‘well what is it then?’ - you can tie yourself in knots if you think about it too much”. 

What seems important in regards to his artistic output is clear though, “genre as an idea should almost always be an external factor, in terms of which radio DJ you send it to or which playlist you pitch to… for them to ignore. It’s much more applicable to how it’s received rather than how you make it.” Despite this, he does go on to explain his own glee when Bandcamp had dubbed his early releases as ‘giddy experimental jazz’ - which, admittedly, is a perfect example of how genre labels can be used for good.

Following the successful rollout of the Timelines series, Greg released What We Can Assume in 2023 and began to gain some traction in terms of taking his music out of the studio and into a live setting. West Yorkshire non-profit Launchpad arranged a show at Howard Assembly Rooms which ended up being the live debut, and many support slots around Leeds followed shortly after, with Greg being given the opportunity to warm up crowds for Ishmael Ensemble, corto.alto, & James Holden among others. 

While these shows evidently taught Greg a lot in terms of presenting his work to a live audience, he realised quite quickly that only so much could be achieved on the stage alone, and he needed to work towards getting a full band together. Following the quick recruitment of his bandmates, featuring Leeds’ best in class, he recalls the moment they came together for the first time, “we did a few videos for promoters, which was the first time we’d all been in a room together. There was a point which I’d had anxiety dreams about,  of ‘what if it sounds shit?’” - needless to say, it didn’t. “I just didn’t want anyone to feel like they’d wasted their time. But when we played for the first time all together, after a few seconds of silence there was applause from people in the studio, and I think we knew then we were on to something special. From that moment, nothing felt like an uphill struggle.”

This moment brings us to where Greg Surmacz is today as an artist, as this year saw the release of his magnificent second album Building Beyond The Sky - honing the truly unique sound that was riddled across his previous projects, but doing so on a larger scale than ever before. The musical inspiration is as wide and varied as the sonic palette, “I was listening to a lot of afrobeat at the time, and I’d also become totally obsessed with Parliament and their approach to rhythm” he cites, as well as the work of prog-leaning groups such as Battles, and their unorthodox approach to composition and songwriting.

Greg’s ambition surrounding this project wasn’t limited to the music either, as he enlisted illustrator Joe Boyd for the album art, resulting in a striking explosion of colour, which rewards closer inspection with excellent attention to detail. 

He discusses the inception of their working relationship, which saw him compose a piece of music for an animation Joe was working on, leading to Greg being certain they would work together again, but stressed his reluctance at the time to not restrict him stylistically in any way. He recounts some of the earliest joy that album artwork brought him in his youth, and how the finer details in this creative process can be so rewarding for an audience, “I remember buying a CD by The Roots with liner notes, which almost felt like a letter to you as the listener - like Questlove was speaking directly to me. As a fan of music, I want to know how it’s been made and what went into it”.

Expanding on this, he goes into the deep thought that went into what his full live band should look like, “How should we dress? How should we be stood on stage? Not just practically, but how do we want it to look? I like when you can tell that a band has thought of that kind of thing” before closing that remark on the most unlikely of influences, fondly recalling seeing footage of an early Slipknot performing in a pub before they got their break. “Can you imagine? Firstly, there’s nine of them, and secondly, one of them is hitting a bin. But it’s fully formed and they’re all in gear - you can’t play the saxophone with a mask on unfortunately but that’s not for the lack of trying.”

With Building Beyond The Sky, Greg Surmacz has achieved something sonically spectacular. From the breakbeat drums of Rust And Glass to the triumphant saxophone of Diversion Ends, there are simply countless reasons to love this record - with a new favourite inflection cropping up from the mix with every new listen. To create a sonic palette that will make you smile as frequently as it gives you a screwface is a tall order, and this is achieved with buckets of flair. 

But what seems more important is his determination not to lose focus on why he’s doing it - for no one else but himself. “The industry is a bit of a rigged game, so you can’t define yourself by the rules of that game. Realising this can be very liberating and allows you to be ambitious without breaking your core ideas”, he says before alluding to what that ambition might entail if not restrained, “would my band ideally be made of ten people? Absolutely. But I can’t afford that, so let’s focus on what we can do, and make it as good as we possibly can”.

Greg has clearly arrived at this point following a lot of work, both in the studio, on the road, but also in his own head. He is blatantly appreciative that not everyone can have the luxury of becoming content with where they sit on the industry food chain. “Doing these gigs, selling a few records… even having a record in the first place. It’s all a huge step from the beginning of this project - which was me going mad in an attic”.

Greg Surmacz’s latest album Building Beyond The Sky is out now, and is available to buy here.