Dan Hillman's Blog

I've been keeping busy over the past month as I hope the picture (insert) suggests. The life of a wandering minstrel is never a steady one, but as the funk has dipped slightly, other things have peaked.

Monday nights are now spent keeping a finger to the pulse of the student population at Mosaic in Exeter by playing sax to funky house beats courtesy of 4Play Events. It appears that as the weeks go by I bear witness to more and more of the weird and wonderful. After a few sessions getting the feel of the place and putting up with the tedium of in-house engineers wanting to crank every piece of gear to the point of redline I arrive one time to see the entire ground floor covered in turf (yes, really) and another to see snake charmers plying the crowd with their serpentine friends! I'm intrigued to see what's next....

As far as my own music goes, I've been getting my teeth into dubstep in a big way having decided to remix a chilled electronic tune I've been producing with a local singer/songwriter. It looks like the cheeky, wobbly bastard child of UK garage has fallen from favour amongst the punters, but that makes it all the more appealing to me. I've been forced to learn so much about music production in this short space of time and there are so many concepts to get my head around. I also have a couple of Cinematic Orchestra inspired light jazzy tracks almost ready to go apart from needing some soul vocal samples laid down. I've had some interest from a video producer looking for soundtracks, but I'm currently waiting for more info on that one. Check my Soundcloud for more of my work.

In other news The Seahawks album I've been working on has been for trial pressings, the artwork is done thanks to the same dude who does the Super Furry's stuff and a boatload of remixes are already in the pipes. Can't wait to get my hands on a copy!

Lastly, Graham Rutherford, the jazzy swine who dragged me to Bristol to jam on a few of his tracks a few moons ago has been in the studio for the last day mixing the album down. Got a call this morning asking for some last minute additions to a tune in the vein of David McCallum's track 'The Edge'. Some big dark woodwind chords and flute tooting to top it off. I recorded a video of my first go at tacking down some lead stuff on soprano sax to get a feel for what it needed which can be seen here on Vimeo:

That's all for now, take care,

Dan.