Artist
Utah Saints
Why we feature this artist Utah Saints: sampling as a way of writing new songs Utah Saints make recorded fragments behave like the beginnings of new songs. Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt bring industrial music, hip-hop, house and pop into arrangements where a brie…
- From
- United Kingdom
- Sound
- Electronic, house, breakbeat
- Active
- 1991–present
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Why we feature this artist
Utah Saints: sampling as a way of writing new songs
Utah Saints make recorded fragments behave like the beginnings of new songs. Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt bring industrial music, hip-hop, house and pop into arrangements where a brief borrowed phrase can become a fresh melodic centre. Something Good is the clearest introduction: familiar vocal colour, a new rhythmic setting and a hook that seems to arrive fully formed.
Two routes into the same studio
The pair met through the club world around Harrogate and Leeds. Willis came towards electronic music through industrial and EBM influences, while Garbutt’s background included DJing, hip-hop and turntablism. Their first-hand accounts describe a small studio and limited equipment, with the records growing from practical experiments rather than an unlimited bank of sounds.
That approach made the sample a writing tool. In interviews, the duo have described preferring a small passage that could acquire another purpose instead of simply borrowing somebody else’s chorus. The difference is audible in the early records: recognition is an opening, then the arrangement has to make something happen around it.
Something Good keeps finding another life
The self-titled debut arrived in 1992, with its original UK album release following in 1993. Two, released in 2000, extended the catalogue beyond the initial run of singles. The longer gap between albums did not erase the project’s interest in contrasting materials and strongly shaped electronic arrangements.
Something Good returned in a 2008 release through Data and Ministry of Sound, with a newly forceful setting and an official video built around dance. The different editions make the duo’s method easy to follow across time. A recognisable phrase can remain useful, but the surrounding production has to give it a reason to be heard again. Utah Saints treat that as a creative task, not a substitute for one.
Essential releases
Utah Saints
The original debut brings the duo’s sample-based writing and contrasting musical backgrounds into a full album.
Two
The second album develops the project beyond its first run of early-1990s singles.
Something Good ’08
The Data and Ministry campaign places the familiar central idea inside a newly identified electronic treatment.