Musician Patrick Hawn wants you to remix his debut EP to your heart’s content

1 hour ago

Nick Spacek,

Hawnest. // image courtesy the artist

Musician Patrick Hawn’s debut release under the name Hawnest, the You Come Here Often? EP, is a fine example of “genre bending soundscapes inspired by early 2000s sampling, folk infused R&B, and indie pop.” When it dropped earlier this month, we were immediately taken in by the way Hawn’s music evokes both Frank Ocean and Bon Iver simultaneously, all woozy production and heart-on-the-sleeve confessional lyrics.

The four songs that comprise You Come Here Often? should easily make more than a few chill time playlists this spring, but what really got us was the fact that you can do more than listen to the first Hawnest EP. Hawn created an online media player for his website where listeners can isolate stems, apply production effects such as reverb, delay, and chorus, while also offering options to speed up and slow down, pitch up and down, reverse, and loop the audio.

The media player is an endless playground of options, allowing listeners to turn these tracks into whatever their hearts desire. We immediately created a chopped and screwed version of the first single, “Reggie,” and definitely lost an afternoon of productivity to fidgeting with as many possibilities as we could.

“I was trying to explore what could be the next evolution in streaming,” explains Hawn via Zoom one evening. “Because I feel people get one version of a song and then, you’re stuck with that version of the song.”

Additionally, Hawn says, he sees the media player as a way to make music production accessible to folks who don’t have a music background. As he notes, he certainly doesn’t, having picked things up over the years.

“I was like, ‘I think it would be cool to try to create a tool that allows people a deeper engagement with the music through changing some high-level functionality on the music,’” Hawn reflects. The player and the music come about as a combination of Hawn’s personal interests and his educational background. The musician graduated from Kansas State with a degree in industrial engineering at 23, but transitioned over the last four or five years into software development.

“Basically, I have been doing web development for the last four or five years,” says Hawn, while noting that he’d had no prior musical experience before picking up a guitar after graduation. “That was when I started cutting my teeth and being like, ‘Okay, I think I know enough to be dangerous in building this thing.’”

The idea behind the concept of a real-time mixing console is a way for Hawn to promote both skill sets that he has.

“I’ve just, over the years, built on the music knowledge, built on the software development knowledge, and tried to find that middle ground to come up with something unique,” Hawn offers, and he’s quite right in that assessment. It helps, though, that the music of You Come Here Often? stands on its own, beyond the technological sheen of the web player.

As Hawn explains, the four songs on the EP all deal with relationships, aging, and the tension and the ambiguity of it all when you graduate college. When you start a life following the formalized route of “go to college, get a degree,” the spectrum of life experience blows wide open in terms of where people are at and what they’re doing.

“My friends have started families, dating’s a lot harder the older you get, and so I think I wanted to have music that packages that,” Hawn continues. “But also too, I wanted to just get stuff out.”

It’s been a “slow burn” journey to this EP from starting with an acoustic guitar, Hawn says, describing it as “tinkering away” over the years. When he was unemployed during Covid, Hawn got a copy of Ableton and started sinking his teeth into learning it and recording. It took a long time to get to here because, Hawn says, he didn’t really do arts in high school or college.

“So, I just held a lot of this stuff within,” the musician says. “I was a big consumer of music, but I knew the next phase in my journey was like, ‘I wanna try to make it. I wanna try to add to the conversation and’–I don’t know, just make good music.”

Hawnest. // image courtesy the artist

Messing around with what Ableton could do, Hawn began making beats and chopping up samples, and got good results, but the downside was that he couldn’t release any of it due to copyright. With that realization, Hawn taught himself to record his own guitar, and from there, essentially sampled himself.

“On ‘Vince, Be Cool,’ that initially started out as me just playing some piano chords and then guitar, and then I chopped it up like I would with a beat,” Hawn says of his process. “I resampled myself singing, as well.”

Hawn wanted to bridge the gap between making beats and his singer-songwriter side, and that encapsulates the music that is Hawnest. Think Dijon, but all recorded in an apartment and learning as you go. Add in Bon Iver to the equation, and you can see the music of Hawnest as being a perfectly natural way of approaching music, with both of those artists starting out as one person with a guitar before finding their way into pop music, hip hop, and things like that.

Another interesting aspect of the web player for You Come Here Often? is that it’s led Hawn himself to hear his own music in a new context. When we mention our chopped and screwed excursions, he notes that what he’s been doing, too.

“A lot of these songs I never messed with the BPM or the pitch when I was making ’em,” Hawn admits. “So when I was playing back ‘Reggie’ on the website, it was like, ‘Oh shit, this sounds pretty good at 95-100 BPM.’ I kinda like it more upbeat and I’m like, ‘Damn it, I should have sped it up a little bit.’”

While the web player is fun, we wonder aloud to Hawn what his end goal for the project and ask him if he hopes that, by being able remix music on the fly, folks will engage beyond a surface level response of, “It’s a bop.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the goal, hopefully,” Hawn says. “And it would be cool to inspire someone to also get into music production, just based on a website that encourages someone to take one more step forward and learn more about the different components of making a song or whatnot.”

It’s an approach Hawn himself has learned from artists like Dijon.

“Just his humility when he makes music,” Hawn continues. “He’s very clearly going on Zane Lowe and being like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m figuring it out,’ and it’s–man, I feel the same way.”

Hawn says that while he doesn’t have a formal background in music, he finds there’s just so much joy in creating.

“I find it reminds me a lot of playing with Legos as a kid,” Hawn says. “I think I’ll always be making music. It’s a way for me to express myself and get the stuff that I bottle up out in a healthy way.”