Meet the guys behind Vulture Sessions

Nick Hampson and Jack Saville are showcasing musicians in Oxford, the UK, and across the pond. Fed up with the rigid and stale magazine format, they built Vulture Sessions.

Describe the moment you first thought to create Vulture Sessions.

It was a response to frustration with the magazine format in Oxford. Whilst the University is full of publications on every aspect of culture, there didn’t seem to be a way of reaching a wider audience than just the magazine circulations, let alone reaching them instantly, rather than termly.

The channel is devoted to providing a platform to student musicians, but with that aside for a moment, who would be your dream artists to feature on the channel?

A big part of the plan for the channel is trying to foster collaboration between artists, and combining genre. So we’d probably like to see Kanye West giving us his take on “Flower of Scotland” being backed by Sigor Ros. That would be ideal actually, as we’ve always wanted to film a session on a volcano.

What are some of your favourite YouTube channels at the moment?

We’ve really been enjoying the Boatshed Sessions recently. They really concentrate on making sure all their films look absolutely perfect and cinematic. They invest in getting really high quality sound which is exactly what we’re trying to do.

Another channel we’ve been watching closely is Sofar Sounds. Their whole thing is creating communities around music, and you can really get a sense of that in their “Songs From a Room” series of videos. Again, it’s exactly the kind of thing we are interested in building around Vulture Sessions, just with musicians who are young, uninhibited, undiscovered or whatever you want to call it.

Do you think up and coming artists at Oxford are afforded sufficient platforms to showcase their work?

When we started the channel it was exactly because we felt that there wasn’t. Oxford seems to have platforms for poets and for actors and other art forms, but aside from irregular gigging opportunities, there isn’t a coherent community around young musicians or a way for them to get their work out there.

There are small events in Colleges such as open mic nights but there is no University-wide music platform – something we feel may well be the case at a lot more Universities than just Oxford.

What can we expect from Vulture Sessions this coming term?

We’ve spent the summer building Vulture teams in Universities around the world.  This week we will be launching Miami and Indiana in the USA and Manchester in the UK.  We have other Universities on standby to enable a steady expansion as the term and year progresses.  Each of these new locations will be submitting content regularly allowing us to oversee one sessions channel with content from Universities all over the world.

Do you have any plans to expand to something more than a YouTube channel?

We do see live shows as a part of the future of Vulture. We’ll be putting on live events starting this term in Oxford.  The plan is to showcase some of the finest artists who come through the Vulture Sessions system in concert, but still in very unusual and interesting locations, just for our subscribers and the people on our mailing list. We like the idea of secret gigs too, or even pop up gigs around town.

You make use of some beautiful Oxford locations in your videos. Do you think the environment informs the music the artists create? 

Absolutely. We see this as one of the most unique features of our channel. We wish to celebrate both the artist and their environment in each video. Every University looks completely different which is a beautiful thing when combined with the different music we’re finding in each place too. We love the idea that someone can watch a music video set in a 14th Century cloister, immediately followed by a backdrop of palm trees or a forest in Indiana.

You let artists organise their own locations, but if you had a say in the next video’s location, what would be your dream setting? Why?

We’ll feel content once we have sessions in a desert or by some snow-capped mountains.  That would be very cool. We just want to be in as many contrasting and unique places as possible to create a network with as much depth as we can. Where people can find amazing content and meet wonderful people, with a huge variety of musical styles and influence to suit as many tastes as possible.  That’s the dream.

Would you ever feature an electronic producer on your channel? 

We actually have a couple of electronic artists in the diary which we are very excited about as it will be very different to anything we’ve done so far. However, it remains important to the aesthetic of our channel that the location is interesting so there is definitely a balance to be found between what we are physically able to record and what suits the vibe of our channel.  But we are certainly not only interested in acoustic music.

Vulture Sessions on YouTube