SEL BALAMIR

A short biography

 

Born In London, but for a long while based in Manchester where he formed progressive / alternative rock band Amplifier in 1999, Sel Balamir has primarily been known as a guitarist and songwriter who sings of UFOs, astronauts and interstellar musings. Today, with the band returning from hiatus and sitting on a back catalogue of 30 recordings of varying sizes, he lives on England’s south coast and enjoys an epic commute from the beach to his own woodland studio to record. First came last year’s solo album Swell. Now a second, Orphans. With new Amplifier music to follow...

 

 

( )RPHANS

Another solo album by Sel Balamir

 

Sel Balamir’s woodland studio is key. “Now my studio is local, I have the opportunity to craft every day.  I follow Roald Dahl’s example of going in every day. It doesn’t matter what, or for how long, as long as I’m working on something. I’m feeling creatively powerful at the moment.”

That power brought ( )rphans, and the parentheses of the title, alludes to the album’s eclectic roots. “When I was making Swell in 2020,” he explains, “there was some stuff that didn’t really fit into it, but didn’t really sound like Amplifier, either.” Some of ( )rphans’ six songs do, of course – not least Astral Womb – and yet even that ends with a twist of piano, an instrument audible across all of the album. “I wouldn’t call myself a piano player by any conventional stretch, but I’ve been around keyboards for so long, now, that I’ve become one of those guys who sits down and does his thing.  I’ve got my own nonstyle – to me it sounds like how I play the guitar.   There’s my old upright that stood abandoned in a village hall for decades – that too was an orphan. You can hear it rattling away. I like that haunted tone” It’s on Don’t Wear The Crown as it segues into title-track, Orphans: “Orphans is a song about frustration in a world that is crazy – That sense of loneliness that you could be the only person with any sense of rationality...” ( )rphans begins, brilliantly, with Balamir’s version of Peter Best’s theme from the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee. “Obviously, I took some guitar liberties with the theme.  When I was a kid, Crocodile Dundee was probably the first film I went to see by myself. The music you hear right at the beginning, over images of the sweltering Australian Outback, really made a big impression on me – I had always wanted to revisit it. I hope that I did it justice.”

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( )rphans is released by Rockosmos on March 11th 2022

Available on digital, Rockosmos Bandcamp and from www.rockosmos.com
 

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