Sam Holloway is a producer from Bristol, based in London, who makes downtempo atmospheric music as GREYFIELD WOODS, which he releases on the Fearless Few collective's Bandcamp page.

Shadow Boxing (feat. CliveTV) was first heard at our Bok Bok event at Corsica in London. Listen here to Shadow Boxing.

“This is one of my favourite songs I’ve worked on. It began as a speed production challenge, arranged by the Fearless Few collective that I’m a co-founder of, with the rules set by the powerhouse Norwegian artists and brothers fnonose and GOLDLY. They created a really nice lo-fi sample pack for our members to use to make chilled beats. Having grown up near Bristol, I took ‘chilled beats’ in a darker trip hop direction, which naturally involved lots of tasteful rim shots.

I wanted it to have a sense of space in the mix, so I used spacer effects and plenty of hard panning, and an understated sub bass to keep the listener’s attention on the other elements. The production got increasingly haunting and trippy, thanks to granular vocal MIDI sounds from Logic’s Alchemy plug-in, spectral gate on the hi hats, ‘ultra dub’ tape delays and warped reverb on the vocals, and my favourite ‘rhythm ghost’ Delay Designer setting on the guitar sample.

The vocals are by my legendary artist friend Clive Browne, who once described his timbre as “more Seal than Seal”. It inspires me that he works incredibly fast, and he recorded his whispered sprechgesang in less than 15 minutes. He has this cool trick of freestyling every other line in one take, then freestyling the lines in the gaps on the second take. There’s so much lovesickness and hedonism in the lyrics. His line “When you leave, I wilt” hits me deep everytime.”

openCDR is your chance to share with the world your Work In Progress. At each of our in person sessions, there will be opportunity to hear your tracks on the club soundsystem and receive feedback from the music community. 

Whether you’re just starting your journey as a producer or you’re a seasoned DAW user, contributing to openCDR is a great way to see your development in real time. For details on how to submit before each artist talk, check out the sign up page for each artist.   

For any questions, advice or just general chit chat, please email info@createdefinerelease.com

You can follow GREYFIELD WOODS here.