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 traveling 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 rights holders 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."
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