When I first heard Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus I started learning to play the acoustic guitar. I was an avid listener of Bob Dylan as well.

French house
Electro house
Turntablism
Punk
Pop-punk

Hordasken

In 2008 I started a deathcore band called Hordasken, we dipped our toes into a number of genres including Nintendocore.

Wheatus

In 2009 I was recording a post-hardcore double-album, somewhere between then and late 2012, that objective changed as my taste in music drastically changed, I think a lot of that was due to the genre becoming done-to-death.

In 2010 I’d recorded a two electronic tracks and uploaded them on SoundCloud, both covers; Moonlight Sonata and When You’re Gone, a few months before this I was working on some chiptune tracks, my friends at the time who were MySpace scenekids who liked heavy metal didn’t really understand what I was going for.

After that I didn’t give myself a lot of time to work on music anymore as I found a huge amount of success in business, I also had a huge amount of self-loathing at that point in my life, even to this day I struggle with it. I would much rather help someone else than help myself, that’s my hamartia quite honestly.

I started publishing old bad quality demos from the last decade on my @hammyhavoc Twitter, these got an amazing response and even some donations from fans wanting to encourage me to do some more. It was around this time I realised that the heavier genres lacked a lot of skill and originality, it was the melodic yet easy-listening that people wanted to listen to, they wanted lyrics they could remember rather than screams and guitar riffing.

Lack of self-confidence

One of the biggest and most unexpected things to happen was breaking my Maschine, searching Twitter to find a new one and stumbling across Lost & Found’s Twitter profile, from there I took a look on his SoundCloud, his music just resonated with me. Long story short, I got in touch about the Maschine, mentioned how much I love his music and we started having more and more to do with each other. I made him a website in exchange for his original Maschine once his Maschine mkII had arrived.

In December 2012 I was in for a quiet Christmas so switched from Pro Tools HD to Studio One Professional just for the ARA integration of Melodyne, I advised that Lost & Found do the same, this was a game changer for our workflows and we became much faster at doing things.

I started mastering Lost & Found’s music, it really made such a huge difference to his tracks and made a great track even better.

The Orion Correlation Debut Release

Eventually Lost & Found brought me out of my shell, it actually felt really good to share something I’d made with someone who has made such a huge impact on my life.

It felt a little strange for my first real release to the world at large to be a remix, yet at the same time, it felt right because this was a record that I had worked on at every level from production, mixing and mastering to artwork and promoting it, if people didn’t like it then there was always the fact that I could tell myself they didn’t like the original track, that was a big reason why the remix that was released wasn’t completely different from the original.