8 January 2021

Mix: ‘Hidden Music’ by Dan Ecclestone

A delicate piano-centric album, ‘Hidden Music’ is another successful collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Dan Ecclestone.

Production

Hidden Music is a vocals and piano-driven delicate and beautiful album featuring a more intimate songwriting by Dan, with whom I’ve been successfully collaborating since 2018. The production team was the same as the last Ember Rev album: Sam Inglis recorded, I mixed, Ian Shepherd mastered.

This was the first full-fledged album that I mixed using Reaper after I switched from Pro Tools last year, and also the first work after I temporarily moved to Italy.

I realised these six songs worked together both lyrically and musically after three albums with Ember Rev but these songs were conceived at and for the piano and wouldn’t work if reconfigured for different instruments. Also, I had little desire to perform live such intensely personal downtempo ruminations on family, fatherhood, status anxiety and the memory of ambition. So it became this: a solo album of music for headphones, music for contemplation, music that is, and has been for many years, hidden.

Dan Ecclestone