Peter Hamer Productions 2015-2020

Since I spoke with Piero, Luca , and Paolo about the first three Victim Of Illusion releases Italy was, for a time, the COVID19 hotspot with the harshest of lockdown laws contrasted by neighbourhood karaoke from the windows. But this didn’t stop Signor Hamer collaborating on “The Place I Left My Heart” with Katie J on vocals, Luca Imerito on bass, and Giampiero Ulacco at Hologram Studios on the desk.

On 24 April 2020, Peter announced, through the VOI  Facepage, the forthcoming release of his side-project “The Place I Left My Heart”. Now, whenever an artist works outside their usual field or project, the outcome is usually somewhat similar to that for which they are better-known in the original collective (RAMMSTEIN side-projects Emigrate from Richard Z Kruspe, and Till Lindemann and Swedish producer Peter Tägtgren on Lindemann are good examples). May 8 saw the release of this dark, moody, chunky, bass-laden industrial grind-core in the style touted by RAMMSTEIN, Emigrate , and Lindemann but with the touches Peter adds through the influence he has created through Victim. This is a really good song which I could hear Carmilla, Unveil, or even RAMMSTEIN covering it quite comfortably.

But the surprise when researching this piece was first discovering Peter’s Bandcamp page and his other work, comprising a video-game sound track, two EPs, and another collaboration dating back to 2015. Let’s look back at these chronologically:

“Wholes” EP : December 2015 

• Dark Images – Starting as a TV-show theme under the opening credits would, it moves through what would be described as an overture of what we can expect, perhaps, from the rest of the record, including an electric-didgeridoo effect during the closing minute.
• Caldera – More thematic constructions; perhaps for a video game or dramatic mood-music for the aforementioned TV-show. Great driving music as well.
• Prophecy – The title alone hinted at the prog-themes demonstrated by Victim Of Illusion’s work and the vocalisations that merge from Gregorian-styled chants lead female-vocalist soloist and choruses carry this forward. My son found a video game on Xbox which had a soundtrack similar to this, and I could imagine playing something adventurous or quest-based with this in loop during different parts of the journey.
• Planet Smash – An uplifting tinkling intro morphs into nightmarish dischords, only to shatter the mood with a hard-rocking riff as Peter has demonstrated through his VOI work and revisited later in Left My Heart. A slight mood restoration with introduces more bass-laden keyboard accompaniment to finish a fine debut collection.

 “Two Drops in the Same Ocean” with Anthya : August 2017

Written in collaboration with Italian vocalist Anthya, this is an ethereal mix of gentle guitars and Kate Bush / Natalie Bassingsthwaite-styled drifting vocals with tags including ambient, cinematic, and epic. Described as video-game soundtrack music, this one stands alone quite nicely. The more I listen to Peter’s work the more I want to find! Thank the deities for these music streaming sites!

“Ancestral Disorder” EP : June 2018

• Star’s Teardrop – Opening with a title such as this, one expects more of the Anthya / Two Drops-styled musings. Instead we’re treated to a synth-pop/rock piece along the lines of some of Queen’s “Flash Gordon” soundtrack-work as well as releases that celebrated the Ultima Thule footage from the New Horizons space-probe. But the whole way-exceeds the sum of these parts.   
• My Unknown Battle – This is what we’ve come to expect from Mr. Hamer through his VOI work: rockier, more metallic with time-signature and stylistic changes in the prog tradition with the same tinkly music-box from Planet Smash in the middle-eight. A truly rhapsodic battle piece.
• A Tale Called Life – Life, as we know it, brings ups and downs; now, more than ever. Here, after the title which demonstrates an internal battle, we have what Peter wants us to see from the outside. Calm, soothing, but with a steady beat under more choral / vocal effects ion another operatic / rhapsodic movement.
• This Unbelievable Horizon – Opening like a wavering lo-fi Eastern-European film soundtrack, we are soon treated to a Mike Oldfield / Ultima Thule opus to close out this remarkable work. To choose a stand-out from these pieces would be difficult, as they all have their individual qualities, but I do quite like this one and Life. So, what can we expect from his next venture? 

“Water Ride Express” video-game sound track album : March 2019

• Monster Ride – Straight-ahead electric/acoustic-guitar incorporating slide/blues rock that could stand alone very well. Opening credits soundtrack?
• Downhill – A reprise of Monster but with a country/western up-beat.
• Surfing Wave – Acoustic guitar with The Edge/U2 echo effects .. Streets Have No Name but quicker. It’s hard to pick the basis of the game from these three tracks. This one could even be the closing-credits track.
• Two Drops in the Same Ocean (instrumental) – Drama-building ethereal mood-music as per that had me waiting for the beat to drop .. cue 84th second. Love that drop-tuned bass from c.2:45! Rapidly becoming my favourite from Peter’s work to date.
• Boundary Exception - Hope (Instrumental) – Prog Rock in ⁶₈ to start, morphing into other signatures I couldn’t identify, then back again. Action-sequence backing track.
• Victim of Illusion - Dewdrop (instrumental) – Space / jungle-mood dischords with the space-mood being overridden by jungle drums into an epic rock beat and Simple Minds-keys and more of that drop bass.

Marketed as a video-game soundtrack with tags including cinematic, epic, and soundscape, any musician would be pleased to include this in their discography without the distraction of a video game. It could even work on its own in conjunction with (the space tunes on previous release).

Now, in my experience, when an artist has a BandCamp page, there is usually also a Soundcloud page! And Peter Hamer is no exception. Not only is The Place I Left My Heart here, but you’ll find both vocal and instrumental versions of Two Drops, and selections from “Wholes”, “Ancestral”, and “Water Ride”, including the collaboration with Judy Kang on My Unknown Battle. Peter Hamer is an amazing musician and these collections are simply sensational! But which is the side project, this work, or VOI?

Having reviewed all of his audio-only work it was time to see if there was a YouTube channel. And whilst I was disappointed that most of them are shorts and trailers, there are still full-length videos for some of those songs including, like a good artist, work there not available elsewhere, including Escape from New York, Profondo Rosso, The Exorcist, Anesthetise, and a showreel of his work to that point. We also learn why some of the releases on the other platform/s are “no covers”, with the cover-versions appearing here instead.

“Both albums ‘Wholes’ and ‘Ancestral disorder’ are made of 6 tracks with 2 cover songs on each”, Peter explains. ”Since I cannot post cover songs in Band Camp, I did a ‘no covers’ version, but if you go on Spotify, Amazon or any other streaming platform you can find the full version of the album”. And as an added extra bonus, there is also a collaboration with Jes Hudak on an Imogen Heap song Hide and Seek, as well as more output from side projects, including the female-fronted Boundary Exception from whom I would love to hear more, based solely on the teaser on his website, and Mohai Experiment. There seems to be no end to Peter’s creativity!

Those cover songs include:

• Escape (metal-styled cover version of the John Carpenter movie theme labeled as, perhaps, a recoding from the “Wholes” project): Had me envisaging the scene where Roland Deschaine and his troupe were walking through New York, crossing the long-rusted pedestrian bridges, to meet Blaine the Super Train that would take then to Topeka. I know this isn’t Carpenter but it has the same desolate, apocalyptic, doom-laden epic journey that was EFNY (I imagine- I haven’t watched it but I’m familiar with Carpenter’s work as a filmmaker).
• Profondo: Another cover from the “Wholes” project, this one has Mike Oldfield meeting Sky in a sometimes ¹⁵₈ time signature with a huge church-organ a la Toccata and Fugue / Thus Spake Zarathustra / Rick Wakeman thrown in amongst the drop-bass and multi-kick drumming. Wow!!
• Exorcist: And speaking of Mike Oldfield, here is Peter’s take on Oldfield’s contribution to the Exorcist soundtrack from the “Ancestral Disorder” project. The video is the aural spectrum under the album art showing the track-position within the album with a rhapsodic piece whose time signatures alternate between ⁷₈ and ⁸₈.

I have to thank Amanda Easton, who valued my opinion and supported my writing since we first back in the 1990s, for getting me back into this for her Christmas 2019 release and our subsequent interview (and you're not going to hear the end of this, Amanda!). The availability of music today is much more ubiquitous than it was back then when you physically had to go to a bricks-and-mortar store to part with your hard-earned for a silver disc in a plastic box. This is as good as it is bad for 21^st century musicians because, while it gets their work into more ears than ever before, it doesn’t necessarily pay them any better. But that discussion is for another day. As I trawl the Interwebz with thanks to my Twitter feed, I will keep bringing you the treasures I find with the hope that, one day, these people will bring their show to our shores and you can physically go out there and support them!

PG (Jacky) Gleeson
30 July 2020

Meresha : Artist. Singer. Songwriter. DJ. Producer. Multi instrumentalist

Meresha : Artist. Singer. Songwriter. DJ. Producer. Multi instrumentalist from Poland via Florida. Since 2014 she has been recording and posting to social media.

Meresha reached out to me in October 2016 but I didn't see that DM until I started researching this piece in July 2020 due to the bot that manages my Twitter follower requests. Hemy did the same two years earlier and I didn't see his message until late last year. This hasn't gotten in Meresha's way, as she has grown prolifically in that 3 1⁄2 year space with more than 50 tracks available across BandCamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, Deezer, Spotify, and anywhere else you can imagine. Some of her work is only on one platform while some is accessible almost everywhere. It all reflects an amazing and exponential growth in popularity, creativity, depth, and breadth over that very short time. 

So it is only natural that we start at the very beginning to follow her work through the years. You can track her musical, artistic, and technological development through the different platforms that culminate on a YouTube channel that includes a fan video of one of her crowd favourites. 

Her very first track, Fool Don’t Be, uploaded to her BandCamp in June 2014, shows a remarkable maturity and incredible funkiness! Over the next five years, until April 2020 at least, the acid-house drum/bass Acid Bass mix of New Revolution, the heart-felt realisation that My Love Has Come, the trancy Enter the Dreamland, the dance floor-anthemic Violet Night, and the electro-pop Game of Video were put here in various iterations with other tracks that don't appear anywhere else. This is all Meresha: all the music, all the words, all the instrumentation. The only variation is the producers or engineers for the remixes of songs. 

Turning to her SoundCloud page, and her earliest post check check, a demo/jam featuring self- harmonies over a honky-tonk piano-effect, is followed by Infinitenergy1111. These tracks give the impression that perhaps this was the more experimental channel for her musings. But we then reach Fool Don't Be and August which are anything but experimental; the latter being very similar to where Amanda Easton has been recently. We see more appearances by Violet Night, My Love Has Come, Enter The Dreamland, initial appearances from Lemonade City, Jungle Potion, and Thinkin’ About You, and SoundCloud-only tracks that include hya, beach day vibez, and mor than. 

It's here, also, that we learn of her first two EP releases: 2015's "new revolution" and 2017's "Enter The Dreamland". Artfully illustrated with the lady bedazzled by disco glitter between the back and front panels of her keyboard, lemonade city opens her debut EP with a slow, saltry salute to summer in the city which is all forgotten at the night-club under the doov-doov of new revolution. One of the boys in lemonade city meets the girl from new revolution and their meeting is celebrated in you, while the Summer is celebrated once again in the closer august. “Enter The Dreamland” is another summer soundtrack with august recreated both by the seaside cabins on the cover and the mood of Stardust as the opening track. Jungle Potion dials it right back, as steamily as one would expect conditions in a jungle, but with added brass and, of course, those jungle drums. My stand-out so far. Violet Night makes a reprise, while the set is wrapped aptly by Lights Out, swapping tempos midstream to emulate what happens when the lights are turned off after all this steam! 

But it's on her YouTube channel that Meresha really shines. Not only do we see different versions of earlier releases on the other platforms, we are introduced to Meresha in full flight with the various bands around the world, including Lights Out live in Berlin. There's a mixtape in there as well as Led Zeppelin, Alicia Keys, Queen, Sam Smith, and Paramore covers accompanying audio-only and lyric videos of now-favourites Enter the Dreamland, My Love Has Come, Stardust, and Game of Video among many, many others. 

How, in such a relatively short time, such an artist has blossomed, astounds me. I am only sorry I missed that message 3-1⁄2 years ago to be able to witness all of this as it unfolded. Meresha is my pandemic surprise-package discovery and I only hope to be there when she reaches out again, hopefully to be a part of her next release in one form or another.

Unveil - 2004-2020

What is it about the northern climes that inspires this style of music? Since May, I have been listening to, and loving, Carmilla, but next on my list is Unveil, a few blocks closer to town but on the same side as The Beast.

Unveil describe themselves as "Somewhere between Evanescence, Halestorm and Birthday Massacre". They comprise Alain on guitars and vocals, Mr. Lee on bass and vocals, Pom on drums, and, since 2011, folk-rock singer and front-person, Jow. Their debut EP, "Codex Noctem", was released in 2013 to critical acclaim, followed five years later by the full-length "The Deep Sleep", all independently created and distributed.

So, with Evanescence already well and truly scrubbed from my mind by Carmilla, let's have a look at Unveil and their "Oblik Sessions" on YouTube. This is the band in full flight as they prefer it to be: live, no overdubs; you can compare the result here to the BandCamp version of the same songs, and even buy them through BandCamp or at the low-low prices as determined by the band on their website.

There is a certain, je ne sais quoi, about this four-piece. Their standard rock'n'blues set ups (a Telecaster, a drop-tuned J-bass, five-piece drum kit, and some added keyboard for depth as part of the effects suite, three capable vocalists, and well-established look and feel) belies the metal tag. They are similar in musical presentation to but somewhat cleaner than Carmilla in their influence by the darker side of the afterlife: as their bio suggests; probably a little more accessible, more rock-oriented than metal but retaining a heavy edge, and definitely "seasoned", having been around the traps since 2004!

The band's YouTube channel goes on to offer more versions of what appear to be favourite songs from the repertoire, including Camera, Winter, and Empty, all of which show that whatever has been created in the studio is masterfully recreated in any setting. And the band doesn't appear to have a set stage profile either, with many configurations being shown on each of these videos.

Unfortunately the only music we have from Unveil is the three releases. I say unfortunately, because a band that has been performing since 2004 would be expected to have a litany of releases. But quantity doesn't equate to quality, as their 2013 debut "Codex Noctem" can attest. I am in awe from the Eastern-influenced opening track Hide, through Camera, Why featuring another vocal for the first time (Alain and Mr. Lee are credited as other-vocalists in the bio), Empty (with the Evanescence-styled intro), The Fall, to the closer Winter, with all the feel of its namesake season; something with which these Quebecois would be more than familiar.

The word "accomplished" in no way does justice to what this group has achieved on this record. A depth and colour is achieved with a limit of instruments and effects as opposed to other bands in the genre that use banks and banks of guitars, effects, and technicians to create a pallet that emulates the sounds of their compatriots. That Jow comes from a folk background is the biggest surprise and we look forward to exploring the rest of the back catalogue to see where the band goes from here.

When a band is between releases, or even during the promotion of a new release, their tours include invitations to local radio stations, and to bring a guitar with them to demonstrate how versatile they can be by converting their full-production to a voice or two with acoustic accompaniment. The term versatile doesn’t do justice for Jow and Alain’s performances during three appearances and performances on Sherbrooke community radio station CFLX and Sherbrooke University radio station CFAK. Brings back memories of my own of hosting both acoustic and full-band appearances and performances on community radio in the 1990s!

One of the tracks on their SoundCloud page is Sarah’s Theme which links to the trailer on their YouTube channel for The Story of Sarah. Both productions hint at more mystery and darkness, but is it a darkness we want to know about? They have certainly tapped a gothic horror vein with their work and have extended that to their other creations! And now that they have announced the commencement of work on their next album, can we expect more of the same, or can we expect growth and change after the isolation and lockdown that has stopped the world? Time will tell, but hopefully there won’t be too much time to wait!

But in the meantime "The Deep Sleep" is as big a misnomer as any in popular music. Sleep won't come to anyone putting this record on- I could even hear myself turning it up beyond 11 and entertaining the whole suburb as I go about my business, regardless of the time of day. Burn opens the account with more Evanescence than anything thus far with an industrial intro and outro, followed by straight-ahead rock in Deceiver and more of that drop-tuned bass in Dare To Live.

The title of Captain's Flesh immediately suggested to me an Ahabesque tribute, which was confirmed by the sounds of the sea under the intro. The pace slows for a heart-felt lament from the sole survivor of a ocean-bourne tragedy; conversely, Calling To The Night follows with as pop as these guys get but still with the steady beat that we've come to know and love.

A chunky riff with some tempo-play keeps you guessing through Listen To Yourself, complete with screaming solo, and Infinity brings out the Lesley/Hammond organ, more chunk, and double-kick work from Pom to suggest that someone in the band had been listening to Deep Purple during the lead-up to this record!

Leaving starts winding the album down but instead presents an opus as varied as any metal/prog outfit. Changes in pace, mood, and signature not only taps a vein already traced through Deceiver and Dare, but a subtle hint of the Jon Lord keys from Infinity maintains that classic metal feel. The stereo won't go up high enough! Addicted To Lies rounds the album out with this punter wanting more with an all-too-familiar hook the brings us full-circle to the "Oblik Sessions" that lured us here initially!

Lock-down has hit these guys' creativity hard but they swear in a recent website update that the juices are well and truly flowing and we won't have to wait too long for another album.

Good! Bring It! And soon!

PG (Jacky) Gleeson
3 July 2020