Biography
Edinburgh producer Gary Caruth has created some of the most considered, slow-burning electronic music of the last few years under the name Sad City. His career, which has so far taken in three EPs in five years, has been a similarly slow builder, but with his excellent debut LP coming out on the Emotional Response and Meda Fury labels tomorrow, and blanket praise thus far for his bucolic, textured electronica, the virtue in his patience is obvious.
Born in Bangor, Northern Ireland, Caruth moved to Aberdeen for university, which is where his early experiments with music started to become a little more serious. “I first started tinkering with music back home in my mid-teens, and then in Aberdeen I began doing noisy, improvised live electronic stuff with my friend Julian Lynch (now of the band Real Estate). I gradually realised though, that you can’t really capture the feeling of that on record, and that if I wanted to actually start releasing records I needed to write things rather than just doing improvised stuff.”
With Caruth’s post-uni move to Glasgow came the beginning of his solo Sad City project. A first EP, "Gestures", appeared in 2011, but it was two EPs in 2013 and 2014 for the London label Phonica that really began to bring his name to prominence. Caruth’s music strives to create a palpable sense of “place” – something you could say about a lot of atmosphere-focused electronic music. His commitment to the cause goes well beyond that of most producers, however. Field recordings of voices, birds, tides, cars, and countless other things have long been a central plank of his production technique, and have added a striking sense of texture and atmosphere to his records that couldn’t have been achieved artificially. In 2017 comes Caruth's debut album, "Shapes In Formation". This album compiles the best aspects of the Sad City catalog thus far, but there's something about it that goes beyond mere linear growth. Across the album's seven tracks (ten on the digital edition), it would seem that he has turned a corner and found his niche. This is deep, subtly deconstructed house music, with its feet in a classic tradition and its head lost in reverie.
“I first started taking field recordings on an old dictaphone when I was about 16 or 17,” he recalls. “Hearing musique concrete a little later was what really got me into it though, in particular the work of (legendary French composer) Luc Ferrari. After that I started to listen to people like Chris Watson, whose work is more focused on pure field recordings.”
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