Welcome to my website, I assume you know at least a little bit about me if you have actively searched out my site. If not, let me get you up to speed. 

 

I am an electronic music producer, audio engineer and DJ located in Worcestershire, United Kingdom… somewhere between the cities of Birmingham and Worcester. 

 

I am 30 years old, the youngest of three children and the only son in the family. I ride motorbikes, enjoy snowboarding and drink ale. My favourite animal is the dog, and, I support Liverpool Football Club. That pretty much sums me up in a nutshell.

 

Those close to me will know that this isn’t my first venture into the music industry; I used to release trance music and perform as a DJ under a different name. My last release was in 2010, a remix for UK based Mondo Records, and it was fairly well-received around the globe. By this point, I’d had a few releases under my belt and was beginning to make a name for myself as an up and coming trance music artist. Then, out of nowhere, I vanished, never to release another track under my old stage name. Why? well, for numerous reasons, but, for the most part, university took priority and I began to fall out of love with trance music and the scene I found myself in.

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Like many university graduates, after completing my degree in 2012, I ended up working a couple of mundane jobs in the years following; neither of which satisfied my creative nature. I never lost my passion for producing music, though it became more of a hobby, mostly, due to the lack of time I had to dedicate to music. It wasn’t until 2015 when I started to seriously think about giving the music career another go. I was becoming bored with my career in the events industry. I knew that if I didn’t give the music career another go, I’d regret it later on in life. The dilemma I faced was that I was bored with trance. I had no idea what I wanted to create, and I found myself in somewhat of a musical identity crisis. From the age of 11, I had been listening to trance music, Linkin Park and Yellowcard non-stop, with very few other artists or bands managing to creep into my collection. I needed something new.

 

I decided to make the effort to explore a wider range of music in an attempt to find a new genre (or sub-genre), that I could take inspiration from. Before I fell out of love with the trance scene, I was very much a trance fanboy; I had the mindset that anything that wasn’t trance wasn’t worth listening to, unless it was Linkin Park or Yellowcard, of course. An immature stance, and completely the wrong attitude to take if you want to succeed as a music producer. I’ve always been a huge fan of Above & Beyond, deadmau5, and Simon Patterson to mention just a few, and I’ve always loved a good melody. Though, as time went by, and the more I explored, I found myself gravitating towards deeper and darker styles of electronic dance music. Deep house and techno started to take my fancy, and dominate my Spotify playlists. 

 

*I should point out that I have since rediscovered my love for trance music*

 

As I started to discover more and more music in other genres, I began to find new inspiration in the studio. I spent more of my time developing the production techniques needed to create music in these different styles of electronic music. Though I always ended up drifting back towards more melodic based ideas. This frustrated me somewhat, as I was trying hard to nail these deeper vibes that relied less on melody, and more on rhythm, bass and more complex percussion. I’m sure many will think that trance, techno, deep house, progressive and minimal are all similar-sounding genres, and, in some ways they are, but, I find each genre relies on a different set of production techniques and approaches. Being a perfectionist, I found it difficult transitioning from the pristine and hyper polished sound of modern-day trance music production to the more raw and organic imperfections of the deeper sounding genres. After a couple of years of experimentation and trying to combine my melodic style with deeper vibes of electronic music, I finally settled on a progressive and melodic house/techno style of production.

 

That brings me to the present … 

 

I’ve been working on my new illywhacker project since the end of 2016, my sole intention is simply to create music I love and not limit myself to any set of genre defined rules. I think this is why I became bored of making trance way back when. I felt like I was pigeonholed into only allowing my creativity to be expressed within the rules of the trance genre, under my old stage name, for fear that I’d be shunned by fans of that genre and shoot myself in the foot if I had tried to branch out into others. As I’ve become older and more experienced, I care less about what other people think; I would rather create music that resonates with me, rather than creating music just to satisfy a set of criteria for any given genre, or because someone tells me so. If I create music that I love and enjoy listening to, chances are, there’ll be at least a handful of others on the planet that will enjoy it too! That’s good enough for me. 

 

That being said, you can expect my future releases to contain any mixture of complex drum and percussion rhythms, plenty of (hopefully) catchy melodies and infectious bass-lines, spanning the various sub-genres of house, techno, electro and trance.

 

If you happen to be reading this before the launch of my first illywhacker release, be sure to check out my podcasts to discover the music that influences me. It'll provide you with an insight into the kind of music I'll be releasing in the future.

 

I look forward to you joining me on my new journey, and I can’t wait to share my new music with you! 

 

:)

 

 

p.s. If you’d like to learn about how I discovered my passion for making music, head over to my blog and check out the post titled ‘Eureka’. 

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