A Lifetime of Music
Whilst Hammy has been creating music his whole life, his debut global release came with a remix of Amanya Amariel’s Love Clouds.
When not creating music for himself, Hammy can be found scoring TV, commercials and films. His first real venture into recording a record was shortly after the divorce of his parents with a three track EP at the age of nine years old with his first band, The Base Line, two of the songs were original and one was a cover of Green Day’s When I Come Around,
“In my teens I was a big MySpace user, I listened to a mixture of alternative rock like The Hold Steady along with heavier typical death metal, doom metal, deathcore, hardcore and various other ‘cores, I also listened to a growing amount of hip-hop, electronic and experimental music. I started listening to UK grime shortly before leaving high school, people in my high school didn’t really understand how you could look like a rockstar yet listen to music like that.
I started piecing together a studio in the mid 2000s for my internet radio station and for monkeying around with a bit of my own music, MySpace was an untapped goldmine for independent music artists and I wanted to show off my favourites. Over the years my studio grew and grew, I invested what I made doing freelance programming into my studio.
When I’m working on our electronic music I tend to lay it out as if it were a rock song with verses, choruses, all that kind of thing.”
Discover my music, my inspirations
“One of the tracks that really got me into electronic music production was Mr. Oizo’s Flat Beat, I noodled around in Cubase for hours per day in the 1990s learning the ins and outs of sequencers usually imitating SNES or Game Boy soundtracks, I was a big JRPG fan and the music I was into like that of a Pokémon and Seiken Densetsu (Secret of Mana over here in the West) was very melodically complex. Andrew Green (Now a wonderful lighting tech) played a huge part in musically educating me about Rod Stewart, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Oasis, Elbow Jane, “Weird Al” Yankovic and of course Daft Punk amidst a lot of other artists. Andy also got me heavily interested in the production side of bands like Linkin Park and frequently knew what software an artist was using, in fact that’s how I got into using Cubase at such a young age.
Around this time, I was a pretty fat little kid from having spent so much time in front of the computer, a big contributing factor to why I spent less and less time outside was the UK weather, in the North-West of England it was very rainy around this time. I played a lot of video games online starting with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, I’d always been a fan of the franchise, but with only with the third game that I started paying attention to the music, then when Tony Hawk’s Underground was released, my understanding of music was turned upside down. I found myself listening to a lot of things I never thought I’d like, I started enjoying going against the societal convention of only listening to one genre of music. I started listening to a lot of turntablism; things like DJ Qbert, Anacron, Busdriver as well as all the rock and hip-hop on the soundtrack.”