hill of iamhill PRACTICES THE KONMARI METHOD ON NEW SINGLE FROM FORTHCOMING ALBUM SELLOUT
LISTEN TO KONMARI | WATCH KONMARI HERE
SELLOUT TO BE RELEASED JUNE 3, 2022 VIA TEXT ME RECORDS
"The video is obviously not meant to be considered in its literal sense; there are no references to toilets in KonMari. However, dragging something that heavy (that toilet was really heavy) across some barren wasteland did feel a bit similar to hauling all the “stuff” you’ve bought from one place to another when you relocate. I’ve moved many times in the last five or six years, and each time, my load gets significantly lighter. And honestly, I barely notice what I leave behind," says hill. "Does this item bring you joy? When you’re broke it’s hard to tell."
The song takes its title from the minimalism-inspired approach, the KonMari Method, founded by pro-organizer, Marie Kondo. The process assists in organizing items category-by-category rather than room-by-room, including six basic rules, ranging from the commitment to the act of tidying, to acknowledging an object's purpose in your life, asking if it continues to fulfill that purpose (or rather, cultivate joy) before surrendering it.
KonMari was written and produced by iamhill and Mike Schlosser (John Orpheus, Arlo Maverick, Kendal Thompson, Curtis Santiago), mixed by Brad Smith (aka Mr Smith), and mastered by Reuben Ghose at Mojito Mastering. The visual was filmed and edited by Travis Nesbitt (@travisnesbitt).
hill has always used music creation as a means of catharsis and Sellout is no different, standing as the most aggressive collection of songs she has made to date. Sellout is centred around the way our lives have become increasingly non-human. The idea that humans were not built - nor have we evolved - to manage this shift around human life intermixed with western values is a driving force behind the sound and story. The album embodies her anger and frustration in one place, while centred on a relevant, timely subject matter with full agency and a dash of good humour.
Sonically, Sellout has a signature rawness, complimented by hill and Mike Schlosser's alt approach to songwriting, never colouring within the lines when it comes to production; from the Wurlitzer used in the intro to I Need to Cry, to utilizing an Oberheim analog synthesizer, and creating their own samples (which can be found in their signature sample pack available anywhere you source individual samples, such as Splice, Reverb, etc.).
Collaborating with an instinctual process, hill works on the lyric and melody writing, while Mike is the brains behind the music. Mike and hill created the album pre-pandemic in hill's downtown Los Angeles loft, where she was living at the time. Amidst endless noise, sirens, people moving and voices all around, the team tracked all of the vocals in the living space, with emphasis on ensuring they were real rather than pristine.
Previous singles include, Fat Free, featuring Dallas, TX group, Cure For Paranoia. The song was inspired by an episode of Sharp Objects, based around Munchausen by proxy, where a mother figure is seeking attention/validation via the sickness/care of her daughters (and is poisoning them to keep things this way). Sellout kicked off with Side D, a dark, energizing jam written about a woman’s right to explore her own sexual freedom and options. While the title is literal, it's not meant to be taken seriously, or for the faint of heart. Listen to Side D here and watch the visualizer here, created by Taylor Oakes: (aka "Tiny Taylor").
Last month, hill dropped an acoustic version of her previous single, Side D, in NFT format. This radically-different version was arranged by hill of iamhill and mixed by Mike Schlosser, and the artwork created by Caitlin Boyle. This is not the first NFT hill has worked on, but it is the first NFT of her own music, under her own name. While the technology that allows artists to “mint” (in other words, create a new block on the chain with your file’s information/data) their work is still emerging, hill has grown passionate about the NFT community and it’s intrinsic potential.
hill of iamhill is a Canadian writer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. Upon releasing her debut album as ‘iamhill’ in 2018, she was immediately climbing viral Spotify playlists (such as Young & Free and Canada Viral 50), reaching hundreds of thousands of streams and travelling around the globe to write songs with new producers and artists. hill released her 2019 EP, Gimme My Life Back, on Antifragile Records out of NYC. In 2021, she released an album that was deconstructed and distributed as a sound pack by Black Octopus Sounds, who launched their adjacent record label Black Octopus Music in order to release the source album, Nobody Wants to Be My Friend.
Stay tuned for more audio and visual from hill as she prepares to release her next album.
DOWNLOAD - KonMari Artwork
Photo by Travis Nesbitt | @travisnesbitt
DOWNLOAD - Hi Res Press Photo
About hill of iamhill
hill of iamhill is a Canadian writer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. She grew up in the Canadian North, where winter reigns for 8 months a year. Before cultivating her specific taste for alternative pop music, her urge to create alternate universes was already thriving. She was regularly scolded growing up for daydreaming incessantly, but may never have fully landed in “reality." Music was always her way of escaping into the current moment while simultaneously holding life at arm’s length. hill began playing piano by ear as a kid, and had picked up guitar and drums to accompany her obsession with singing by the time she was 14. Songwriting followed not long after, which began as an exercise in catharsis for hill and remains that way whenever she gets an opportunity to work on her passion project.
What appears to be the result of spending most of your life longing for a different one is the universe hill has been building since the genesis of iamhill in 2018. Upon releasing her debut album as ‘iamhill’, she was immediately climbing viral Spotify playlists (such as Young & Free and Canada Viral 50), reaching hundreds of thousands of streams and travelling around the globe to write songs with new producers and artists. During this time, she drew inspiration from artists like Frank Ocean, James Blake, Kanye West, and queen of sad-core Lana Del Rey. Informed directly by her eagerness to embrace darkness and her constant yearning for the future, the environment hill has developed over time is increasingly futuristic and industrial.
This seminal album, Give it a Rest, went on to be nominated for a Juno in 2019 (Electronic Album of the Year), while hill finally accomplished her lifelong dream of moving to California to live under the sun and find her full artistic expression among so many fellow creatives. That year, hill released her sophomore EP, Gimme My Life Back, on Antifragile Records out of NYC. The visuals that accompanied the EP were shot in Thailand, with the city filth of Bangkok front and centre.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, hill of iamhill has leaned into her fascination with technology. As the clubs she used to perform in closed their doors, she began diving into frontend web development and landed a job as a contracted engineer with a startup out of California called Pex. Pex is a digital rights technology company that enables fair and transparent use of copyrighted content at the scale and speed of the internet. Their mission is to empower creators, platforms, and rightsholders alike, which is perfectly aligned with hill’s vision for the future of the global creator’s landscape. Spending five years in a Publishing deal with Ultra Music, a Sony subsidiary, left hill with a new appreciation for creative autonomy and IP ownership. More to that end, in the fall of 2021, hill co-produced and co-released her first audio-visual NFT with a team of creatives out of Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and has already onboarded to platforms such as Catalog, which prioritize the minting of music NFTs.
Over the past year, hill also found the time to release an album she co-produced and wrote with her now-counterpart in the iamhill project, Mike Schlosser. What made this album unique is that it was also deconstructed and distributed as a sample pack by Black Octopus Sounds, who launched their adjacent record label, Black Octopus Music, in order to release the source album, Nobody Wants to Be My Friend.
hill is currently working with an independent label, Text Me Records, out of San Francisco to release her forthcoming album (also co-created by Mike Schlosser). The project will see iamhill diving deeper into how "our lives are increasingly non-human." Says hill: "We were not built - nor have we evolved - to manage this shift."