Currently based in Brighton, UK, with his partner and three sons, Sam Beste has collaborated with artists as diverse as Amy Winehouse, Beth Orton, Joy Crookes, Matthew Herbert, and MF DOOM, and has been releasing solo music under the Vernon Spring name since 2019. His distinctive sound merges jazz, soul, ambient, and contemporary electronic production.
With Under a Familiar Sun, Beste works with producer Iko Niche to tackle an atmosphere that is filled with glitches, samples, and sonic interruptions, while retaining a sense of warmth and keeping with what he describes as “a love letter to my nuclear family” and a sense of moral responsibility in a time of global uncertainty.
Opening with the unsteady, ambient blast of “Norton”, the album gradually transitions into the lo-fi, melodic notes of “The Breadline”, a collaboration with Max Porter, featuring his spoken-word poetry. It’s mysterious and brooding, but also warm and hopeful.
Speaking of Porter, collaboration abounds on Under the Familiar Sun. Niche gets co-billing on the odd, soothing “Mustafa”, which pairs a delightful earworm of a piano figure with soulful vocal turns and an undercurrent of samples and found sound. Aden, a Brooklyn-based vocalist, producer, writer, and astrophysics candidate(!), contributes vocals to the tracks “Other Tongues”, “Counted Strings”, and “Esrever Ni Rehtaf”, the latter something of a centerpiece for the record, as its longest song and the one with the most curious twist and turns.
Under a Familiar Sun often gets downright playful. The title track seems to be a solo piano improvisation that often becomes jittery but remains heavily textured, aided by choir-like vocals. That aesthetic is carried over into “Fume”, but strikes a more atonal chord before transitioning to dance/pop undertones. Beste is an artist who seems hopeful but restless.
There is a quiet intensity to songs like “In the Middle”, which brings a relatively uncomplicated calm, framed by vocals, piano, and strings. Likewise, on the piano-based ballads “Requiem for Reem” and “Known”, which close out the record, the effects take something of a backseat to Beste’s treated piano.
There’s always a sense that the record is beamed in from another world, but not without a sense of humanity and a genuine feeling that music can be unusual and experimental while still tugging at the listener’s emotions. For an album as ethereal and otherworldly as this, Under a Familiar Sun is the Vernon Spring’s bid to capture hearts and minds, however mysteriously.