Quantum Ironing

When you're running massively behind for a gig and you're all together in the band bus, the conversation tends to start falling apart quicker than the schedule for the festival you've just messed up.

Today's mental wanderings have tuned to ways to speed up 3 tonnes of vehicle and we've decided that grabbing the fabric of space time and pulling us along might just about do it. This of course means we'd be leaving huge crumples in time behind us making 2011 much longer, leaving 2012 with a few less weeks and generally messing history up for all of us.

Thusly to repair the damage we'd need to construct a quantum Corby trouser press to flatten things out again. What do you think? Quantum ironing sounds plausible to me. Then again I'm sleep deprived. It's probably best to leave this where it is.

Recording For Seahawks

Over the past two days I've been laying down some sweet horn sounds for the Seahawks once again. We've lived amongst a nest of cables and vintage gear putting together some crazy sounds.

Bringing flute and the whole hog of saxes in on this bad boy has been great and working with hot musos laying down Rhodes, sitar, guitar and percussion is most entertaining. Can't wait to hear the final mix.

There's talk of taking this very studio based group out on the road with their agent promising gigs up North. The fun's going to be translating it into a live ensemble.

Album to follow!

Cheers,

D

Hey hey,

New year is well under way and things are a-changing down in Cornish land. The DH base of operations has moved and I'm now set up with a new studio space that won't suffer as much from the changeable weather conditions in this lovely part of the world. The new site design is ready to upload, just need a spare hour to transfer the files across!

I'm about to head out and record some new demo tracks for the Mala Jazz Duo and will return with some lovely new material to get things going as well as then being able to finalise everything else. Maybe upload some  cool pictures too.

Anyway, just for fun, check out these two groups. I'm all about seeing bands use studio sounding technology in a live environment and these guys are a perfect example.

Caravan palace are a group of French electro-swingers, getting the balance of old school samples and dirty synths. Awesome stuff. Check this video out here.








There would be a picture here, but Blogger deemed it too much of an effort, so pictureless I shall venture forth to Hidden Orchestra. UK based and awesome, these guys have loads of different session players in on top of their MPC/double drummers setup and make some great sample sounding tunes. Listen to Wandering here.

Enjoy,

D.

Releases!

Finally some tunage out and about! I've been waiting to see these come to fruition for a while now, but here they are...

First is a slim EP released by the Jag Harps written by Graham Rutherford. Simon 'Peacekid' Dobson and myself provided some brass on this and it sounds lovely. There's talk of touring it and adding some more tunes so here's hoping! It's called Theta Waves, check it out and buy it here.

Next up is a full album by the Seahawks called Invisible Sunrise. Its's spacey as hell and clearly making some people very happy as it's apparently hit number 29 in Rough Cut Records album charts. I'm credited with wielding the 'space horn' on there due to the crazy effects we were working with, but it's sounding great! You can listen and buy it on iTunes here.





Also played on an album in production for a folk singer called Mr Paddy. Nice sounding stuff that I'll hopfully be able to demo soon.

Lastly, few more of my own up on www.soudcloud.com.dan-hillman and I've got some vocal talent coming in soon to lay their skills down!

Hope you like,

Take care,

Dan.

Videos ahoy!

Yo readers of the lost ark, here be some videos I done made of me done making music a few days ago. Your life will never be the same after watching me parp around on a baritone sax or show you my lovely samples that I tooted and thusly plonked.

I've been looking to merge my love of electronic tinkering and saxy good times for a while and came up with recording a harmonised line and mashing it about a bit to come up with new ideas. Checkum out here:

Also here's me recording the baritone sax solo in my new offering to the world. It's nice and jazzy and I thought it was a pretty good first take so I kept it and uploaded it. Videoing recording sessions is a great way for me to keep a record of what I've been up to, demo my skills and show you that there still remains a live element to my music even through the veil of electromagic. Go forth and watch:

I hope that was worth a few minutes of your life, come back next time!

D.

Taking tablets and doing art...

I bought myself a present last week for being such a good boy. It's an A6 rectangle of lovely that is the Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet. I can honestly say that it's the most awesome replacement for a mouse the world has ever seen. Not only is it completely battery free, but the tablet canvas can relate to the proportions of the screen letting you pinpoint accurately where you want to draw/click/whatever and of course if that doesn't do it for you, you can always switch to the multitouch interface instead. Mmmmm gestures....

Anyway, to get to the point I've been drawing. In an attempt to keep misery at bay for the remaining two weeks of my good lady's 3 months in India I had a go at sketching a side profile and giving it some digital wizardry. This one was heavily inspired by Diego Fernandez who has far greater skills than I. Still, the Red Baroness seems to like it and that's the main thing. I'll hopefully keep getting better as I get more comfortable with using the tablet, more to come!

Peace,

D.

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.