A WESTBURY musician’s dance album, which was three years in the making, has been impressing top industry names.
Tom Hendry created Digital Mania in his bedroom studio and describes it as “17 tracks of hard dance music featuring singing, piano riffs, hard dance lead and arps, punchy kick drums with an overall feel of Happy Hardcore or harder styles of electronica.”
Uploaded to Soundcloud a few weeks ago, the album has already attracted the attention of online 90s rave podcast R.O.A.R which features interviews with some of the biggest names in hardcore, and a big record label in London.
And on Tom’s Youtube channel, tracks from the album have received “brilliant feedback” from some big and successful hardcore artists including Archefluxx and DJ Sparkz.
Tom, who has Tourette’s Syndrome and symptoms of autism or Asperger syndrome says, “I have been interested in the creation of musical projects since the age of about nine or ten. I first wrote a piece of rapping in year five at Bratton Primary School when I was asked by another student to construct a verse to perform in front of my class, which I was even at this time recognised as doing quite well for a child of my age.
“I remember using my Yamaha DJX keyboard at the age of 12 to create a dance tune which I called ‘Storm’ and which I then sent in to several record labels.”
Tom continued to use the keyboard to make music throughout his secondary school years. By the age of 16 he had turned his attention to developing his rapping skills, inspired by Eminem, Dr Dre, and The Streets.
He created his own poetic takes on the pitfalls and highs of teenage life in his own predominantly black comedy-based rapping to express how he felt, still using his DJX keyboard for the backing beats.
“I found myself even at this age very passionate about the life of being a recording artist and would pay to record my lyrics in a professional studio over in Devizes at least once a month,’ Tom told White Horse News.
Recently he has based the majority of his music on the electronic music (or EDM) of top hardcore producers of the early 2000s such as DJ Gammer, Breeze and Styles, and Scott Brown.
Tom has been learning the art of digital computer-based music production on the program Cubase on his laptop for the past ten years and in 2015 went to study an ND in music technology at college. He achieved the equivalent of three A-levels and received a total of five distinctions.
“Not all of the tunes I have made are featured in the completed album because I wanted it as a whole project to be almost entirely based around Happy Hardcore as the primary style of EDM on it, although it does also feature tracks from other style of electronic music such as Bassline House and Electro.
“Each track on the album I would say on average takes three four-to-six hour sessions in the studio to complete.”
In the last few weeks he has uploaded to Soundcloud a new electro remix of his ‘Tourette’s Song’ which can be found on Youtube by searching for The Tourette’s Song Electro Remix.
During 2010/11 Tom featured in newspaper articles in Wiltshire, Somerset and surrounding areas after releasing four tracks of his rapping in several small shops.
“Also I was generally interviewed about my own developmental condition and what it was like to live with Tourette’s Syndrome and its relation to my own creativity that I claimed it had,” he said, “However this has become more clear to me over the years that this is more of a connection to my symptoms of autism or Asperger Syndrome that inspires this level of individual talent or special obsessions and developing skills in certain creative areas.
“At several points at this time, alongside being interviewed by the local BBC station, I was also featured on BBC Wiltshire’s Introducing show – a show for unsigned talent in which they in turn played a couple of pieces of my own rapping.”
To find Tom’s album search on Soundcloud for ‘Tom Hendry Digital Mania’.
