Hollan Holmes The Final On Vinyl Interview

Enjoyed a good look into the work of the artisan Hollan Holmes!

Keith "MuzikMan" Hannaleck

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Transcript

Speaker 0:03

Hello everybody, this is Keith MuzikMan Hannaleck with the Final on Vinyl Podcast. And today we have a guest that has been in the music industry for uh several years now, and his name is Hollan Holmes, and he recently released Sacred Places in January twelfth of this year. Welcome aboard, Holland. Thank you very much for having me, Keith. Glad to be here. I'm glad you're here too, and I appreciate your time. So uh before we jump in on the album, which I absolutely loved and have a lot of interest in how you created it, um just maybe a little background on your your jump into a new world in the in music and how that all began and some of your influences and things of that nature. Would love to hear that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 0:53

Yeah, so I I uh grew up in a family with uh very diverse uh musical interests. My sister, of course, listened to to popular rock. Uh this is in the you know late 60s, early 70s, and my father was a country and western fan, and my mother was uh more of a contemporary, uh uh had interests in contemporary music like uh Chicago and Burt Baccarac and uh Henry Mancini, that kind of thing. So I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of music uh growing up, um, which I I think is pretty cool. Um uh one of the big things is that I grew up with a piano in my house. And uh at a very, very early age, I as a toddler, my mother said that I would climb up and I I was I just gravitated towards it. I was drawn to it. I I I just fell in love with it at a very early age. Um never really took any lessons, so I'm all I'm I'm self-taught in that respect. But uh me and some friends of mine in high school got together when we turned 18 and formed a band, and we played popular rock and roll uh of the 80s. Uh but then I I developed an interest in wanting to create my own work, write my own songs and uh and that kind of thing. And none of my bandmates were really all that we we did some, but they weren't that interested in it. And that's really where I wanted to go uh as a musician. Um and so yeah, I was in I was in a few bands over the years through the 80s and 90s, um, but again, you know, running into the problem of no one really wanting to write the kind of material that I wanted to write. So uh I basically sat out on my own. On a canoe trip in 1981, I think. 81 or 82, and this is my first year in college, so it would have been 81. I one of the guys that was uh the well, the guy that was driving the van that we were all riding in stuck a cassette tape in and this music started playing, and I was like, oh my gosh, what what is that music? Well, it turns out it was Jean-Michel Jar. And I had never heard anything like that. Yeah. Love him. And yeah, love him. Yeah, yeah. So I just really enamored with that kind of music. I'd never heard it before. I hadn't really been exposed to Kraftwork or Klaus Schulze or any of those guys. So uh Jean-Michel was my my first real exposure to that sort of eclectic type of progressive uh electronic music uh that was wildly popular in Europe at the time, but I just didn't know that much about it. And then uh a couple years later, on a rock climbing trip out in the uh desert of West Texas, uh another friend of mine uh stuck a cassette in, played it, and this time it was um it was Underwater Sunlight from Tangerine Dream.

Speaker 4:21

Another one of my favorites.

Speaker 1 4:22

Uh right. So I just it was like, where is this stuff? Where's it coming from? And it was it was kind of hard to find here in the States because they didn't they didn't sell that kind of music that much. Um, but I did manage to you know start getting a hold of of uh some of this music. And then in I think it was around 89 or 90, uh, I was I I used to have a subscription to Keyboard magazine, and in the back of uh an issue of keyboard was a tiny little they they would do these little one or two paragraph uh sort of reviews of of new music. And uh one of them was Western Spaces from Steve Roach, Kevin Burrini, Richard Bermer, and it talked about this song called The Breathing Stone. And I thought, well, that sounds really interesting. I want to know what what that's about. So I managed to find the cassette of that, and again, just totally flipped out, but just fell in love with it, and so that was my uh that was my introduction to Steve Roach and Richard Barmer and Brahini and so many others, and started exploring a lot of other artists, but that's that that I I knew at that point that that is what I wanted to do uh with my music. In fact, I knew that back when I discovered uh Jar and Tangerine Dream. I I just knew that that's that's what I wanted to do. Uh to backtrack just a little bit, I uh I was always exploring this kind of music on my own, uh, but never really finished anything, never, never put out an album, never, never made enough tracks to you know, I I didn't have a home studio per se. I had a task cam four-track cassette recorder, and you could, if you if you were careful, you could bounce it a few times and get six, seven, maybe eight tracks before it started just you know falling apart with fuzz and stretch and and noise. But I had uh and I've still got these old cassettes, they could they're barely audible now, but a lot of a lot of uh musical ideas from the 80s and 90s that I had explored and and never used. And uh every now and then I'll I'll grab one and and you know run with it and develop it and and and put it on an album. But uh yeah, that's that's where that's how I started. Uh uh so I've had an interest in this music for a very long time and didn't start actually doing anything with it in earnest until about 2007, uh when I started putting together a uh you know a formidable computer and getting the software that was necessary. If you had told me that we would be able to do what we can do now as as musicians in 1981, I wouldn't have believed you. Um to to be a musician now, it's just uh it's a wonderful time for anyone who wants to make music because it's uh all the tools are at our fingertips to create very, very high quality music and reach a very, very large audience. And and that's certainly uh been been a large part of of why I have any popularity at all. Yeah.

Speaker 8:10

That's very true, and and it's a wonderful thing. And you know, I make reference to Tangerine Dream and Craft Work a lot because I'm hearing a lot of this music over the past couple of years, and those are the first two that pop into my mind. But Jean-Michel Jary um is another great artist who set the foundation for some of the things that we hear today and the influences that you know came through to you as well. And do you have any of the vinyls like that? Do you have any vinyl? Um other artists?

Speaker 1 8:44

I I had some Tangerine Dream vinyl. I didn't have any Jar uh records, but I had two or three of the Tangerine Dream uh on vinyl, and of course Pink Floyd, Rush, some of those bands that that were also an influence to me. Like an idiot, I got rid of all my vinyl in the late 90s when it became obsolete.

Speaker 9:12

I did the same thing.

Speaker 1 9:13

Oh my gosh, I hate myself for doing that because these were these would be worth so much money now. And and just, you know, uh in in retrospect, they had so much sentimental value to me. I wish I could uh I wish I had them back, but but now sadly I I let them go.

Speaker 9:33

Well, I definitely replaced my missing albums over the years and have more than I can possibly listen to, which is uh look at it. So your album, um you know, I heard those influences obviously, and it was you know uh in fact there was one song there, I went, Oh my god, this is like Tangerine Dream, you know, just some very cool things. And uh, you know, when I wrote the review, which I'm gonna post today with this interview, by the way. Um Thank you it was the uh it really was the first four songs. Uh it pulled me in right away out of or out of chaos, and it was the first four that just really hit me like, wow, this is amazing, and it basically got me in that mindset of what was happening in in my listening experience, and I it just took off from there. And um God, I if I would have kept going the way I was going, I would have had a four-page review and then lost my audience. So I but uh you use some very um interesting hardware and software. Is is that something you're able to talk about or want to talk about?

Speaker 1 10:46

Sure, yeah. Um so all my music centers around sound design. And what I like to do is come up with I I use 90%, 95% of the sounds that I use are my own. Uh, even if I start with uh say a stock patch from Omnisphere and start tweaking it myself. But I always like to bend it sort of to my needs. But I love to explore uh sound creation and and sound design. And uh what what happens more often than not is that the sound will dictate its use and its uh sort of formation into uh a certain sequence or a certain chord structure. Um so when I listen to the sound, it sort of tells me what it needs and what it wants to do in a song, instead of thinking uh of a song and then trying to create a sound for it. I generally everything comes uh from the sound, uh more often than not. Um I I use and have in the past used primarily software to create the music that I create, but uh in the last few years I've been moving more and more into the hardware realm just because I enjoy it so much. Uh it's a lot more uh engaging and interesting to me to turn knobs and push sliders around and play keys than it is to roll a mouse around on a pad. That that's just the bottom line, is it's just so much more fun to play the hardware. Uh and and it uh and it makes me a better musician too to spend more time at the keyboard and more time. I have a uh a rather large analog modular system that I've built over the years, and and it is becoming uh very much uh front and center of of what I'm doing these days. And so uh there will be much more of that in the future. But the this this particular album, um uh Sacred Places, was done, probably three-quarters of it, uh used uh software, and that includes uh, like I said, Omnisphere, um, Archeria Pigments, uh pretty much everything that uh reason uh comes with the reason software. Uh that's my primary DAW. Um and uh I spend also a lot of time um working on sequences in the software uh just through experimentation. Um and it's weird. Sometimes a song will come together in literally in a few hours, I'll have the foundation for it, you know, pretty much fleshed out. And other times I'll work on a song over the course of of months or even years. Uh generally speaking, I can I can get an album done in five or six months. Uh and this one came together actually fairly quickly. Uh so it it just it you never know where these musical ideas are going to come from, how they're going to develop, what in what inspires me. It could it can be any number of things. Uh but it's it's it it fascinates me. It's a mystery to me where I get these ideas. I it's it people always ask me, how do you come up with this music? It I honestly I don't know, Keith. I just don't know. It it uh it's just uh you know we all have we all have uh skills in this life, and mine happens to be, I I I guess, you know, being able to think of things in a in a musical sense. And uh yeah, I I do this because I enjoy it so much. I I derive a great deal of satisfaction from this creative process. And and uh, you know, I don't know if it's ego that drives me or or what it is, but I love to share my creations and to have been able to find even a small audience for for my work is just I'm I'm just blessed beyond words that that that people want to hear what I'm doing. And I I just love making it.

Speaker 15:29

I gotta tell you, after I listened to it, I said to myself, I would love to hear this on vinyl. I would absolutely love it.

Speaker 1 15:38

Well, yeah, I would I would too, actually. That is a uh fairly expensive endeavor, but I would certainly love to make it happen one day for sure, at least once. One of the things, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I love so much about vinyl that I think is lost on this generation, is the the visual real estate that came with buying an album. You had 12 basically a 12-inch work of art if if you wanted it to be, if if the musician, you know, but like think of think of a yes album. I I can't imagine a yes album or listening to yes without picturing Roger Dean's artwork on the front of those the just the the truly beautiful art that came with so many of these albums. Um and that's uh I I don't know if you know this or not, but I'm also a an artist. I like to paint. And uh I so I have a deep appreciation for the art that comes along with uh a lot of the music that we buy. And even CDs provided that for a long time. Uh, but now CDs are going away. So how do I how do I incorporate that whole you know experience of hearing the music and seeing a visual that accompanies it, which helps to sort of form a uh uh a spiritual relationship with with the music and and and sort of spawns uh your own visualizations. I don't I don't mind that that people can listen to my music and and formulate their own ideas on on what the music means to them. I I love that. I I think that's important because that's how music connects with people. I don't want to force my opinion on anyone, but but being able to create art uh and include it in the experience of listening to my music, it's it's pretty important. So moving forward, we'll have to find ways to ensure that that happens. And one of those ways, of course, is is uh music videos, which uh I love making as well. Yeah.

Speaker 17:56

Right. All very well said, and you know, just thinking about everything that you said and not really understanding of how this happens and the processes. I I look at life like there are choices laid in front of us, and we make certain choices, and for you, you found who you were, you plugged into that esoteric thing, whatever it is, a collective consciousness, God, or whatever you want to call it, and you were fortunate enough that it actually worked, and you're blessed, and you're sharing that blessing with everybody, which is a really cool thing.

Speaker 1 18:31

So yeah, yeah. Joseph Campbell said, follow your muse. And I think that's important. Yeah.

Speaker 18:40

Well, Holland, it's been wonderful speaking with you. I certainly appreciate your time. I know the audience will love to hear what you have to say and listen to your music, and I wish you well, sir, and look forward to any releases you have coming up down the road.

Speaker 1 18:56

Thank you very much, Keith. And I'm I'm deeply honored that you took the time to to to listen to me talk, and uh I thoroughly enjoyed it, and uh I wish the best for you as well, sir. Thank you.

Speaker 19:09

You can take care now. Okay, you too. Thanks.