The Brag

Tom Vek
Man Of Leisure
By Andrew Hazard Hickey

To some observers, Tom Vek – self-taught instrumentalist and electronic wunderkind – made an unusual career choice when he decided to retreat from the public eye, but when we speak it’s easy to tell that he’s not your typical recording star. The bespectacled man is somewhat perplexed by his perceived fall off the face of the earth. “I’m used to being asked questions like this,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It feels a bit strange for me, because I was always continuing to work on stuff.”
The runaway success of his first album, 2005’s We Have Sound, transformed the mild-mannered Vek into an indie rock star, whose work appeared on The O.C. and the soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto IV. Choosing to deflect the pressure to rush a new project onto shelves, Vek opted to go back to the studio to continue honing his craft. “It was kind of tough being boxed in,” he says. “If you’re not enjoying it you’ll work a bit less, but I did consistently spend time on it. Even if that time was spent on things extraneous to the actual music process, like sorting out my equipment and setting up a studio.”

The recording process for his follow-up project, Leisure Seizures, was intended to be relatively simple. “When I first started on it, I thought it would actually come quite quickly. I was very enthusiastic until I sort of reached a point where I realised it’s not enough to be energetic, you’ve got to finish stuff off. It’s a harsh reality.” Vek tells me he hit a roadblock, thinking “right, that’s as good as I can be” – and it was tough trying to work his way back up. “I just had to get my head around it,” he says, of the transition from music as hobby to music as career – and at first he tried to take on too many responsibilities himself. “I had principles about being a real artist when I was young, and I sort of had that ringing in my head. Then I realised you get things done a lot quicker if you have lots of people involved and lots of shared interests.”

On the pursuit of musical revelation, Vek admits he’s at the mercy of experimentation. “The thing that I feel like I offer with my music is that it represents genuine experimentation. Taking something and approaching it differently. That’s why I do think of it as an art.” But the exploration doesn’t come easy. “It’s frustrating. Sometimes I can’t just go in with an idea like ‘Today I’m gonna do this,’ and then leave. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to properly compile anything, I think, for a couple of years. I was just waiting for that conducive environment. I kept changing my space, looking until I felt composed enough to compose music,” Vek chuckles.

Preparing for a promo tour for Leisure Seizures, the previously reclusive Vek is assimilating himself back into the public eye and working out how to translate his new tunes with a live band. “It’s actually quite a bit of work trying to reconstruct the tracks from the new record, trying to find a way to reform them without being too predefined, and not too different from the actual noises. I’m quite happy with how it’s working, it actually sounds like live sampling,” he enthuses. “We did a radio session yesterday, which was a little taste of jumping into the deep end, performing it with an imaginary enormous audience… It’s hard work,” he says, “but it’s exciting.”

What: Leisure Seizures is out now on Modular, through Universal