Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacob Hutto.
Hi Jacob, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was born in New Orleans in ’98, lived there till ’05 when Hurricane Katrina occurred, and found myself moving a bunch between Texas and Louisiana, at one point living in Indonesia, before returning to Houston in 2011, where I’ve been living since. While moving around a bunch, I tried playing guitar, even taking lessons, but to no avail. When I was in middle school, I really got into EDM and music technology like turntables, midi controllers, and DAWs, and even became a DJ for a brief bit. This was the height of commercialized EDM, mind you, when people were huge into musicians like Skrillex, deadmau5, etc. I made some incredibly terrible mixtapes of crappy, beat-chopped, crunchy EQ-boosted edits that probably exist out there somewhere.
I came to a weird turn in my life from 2013 to 2014, my computer broke down, so while waiting for a new one, I came back to the guitar, became self-taught, started high school, and started getting into a lot of commentary channels including Anthony Fantano (theneedledrop). I transitioned from EDM and accessible Hip Hop (ASAP Rocky, Tyler, The Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, BBNG), to IDM and glitchy stuff (i.e. Baths, James Blake, bits of Andy Stott), and further into more experimental music, specifically the avenues of experimental metal (Sunn O))), Portal, Planning For Burial, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music), ambient music (Brian Eno, Winged Victory for Sullen, Grouper, William Basinski, Dirty Beaches/Alex Zhang Hungtai, Oneohtrix Point Never), post-rock (Swans, GY!BE), experimental hip-hop (clipping, Death Grips, Danny Brown) and some sprinkles of indie music (namely “indie folk” acts like Jordaan Mason, Mount Eerie and Sun Kil Moon). It was like jumping straight into the deep end of a pool for me. Slowly I swam back to the surface into more (relatively) accessible territories of music, with an emphasis at the time on dream pop, singer-songwriters (Mac Demarco, Nick Drake, Jackson C Frank, Keaton Henson, Bonnie Prince Billy, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen), and the beginning of my fascination with the slowcore genre (Duster, David Thomas Broughton, Bedhead, Low). But that presence of experimentation still lingers, and I’ll still swim back into the murky waters from time to time as I please. I guess you could say this was my moment of Genesis to consider myself an experimental singer-songwriter.
The first things I made when I got to that phase of my music career, the phase of actual creation instead of editing, were in 2014, and since then I’ve been constantly tinkering away with songs and sounds as a solo artist. Almost everything I have done was self-recorded, with a few exceptions. I also joined the band gammawave just last year, which has been nothing short of a ride, but I’ll talk more about that later.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think most artists can agree that a livable lifestyle based around a singular artistic career is anything but a smooth road. I myself am still trying to get to that path.
Part of that, for me personally, lies in the issue of self-actualization in my own art. Only in recent years have I become more precise in the production/mixing aspect of my music, instead of tinkering with sounds and effects, and figuring out what sticks in the momentary context of the recording. I’m in no way putting down my previous recordings, mind you, I still hold a fondness for a good portion of it, and considering how many pieces of work I’ve done had achieved the aesthetic/conceptual goals of their time, I’d say there is in of itself some success. At the same time though, I wish to be more precise and conscious with my production going forward, and I think that is closer to the self-actualization I desire from my music. However, it is a double-edged sword. Because of being more precise and specific, I have also become more and more nitpicky and slow on getting recent material out there. 2021 was the first year I didn’t release a single project, not as a solo artist, not with gammawave, and every year from 2014-2020, I was able to get at least a single project uploading, out there. Hopefully, I can get back to starting a new streak this year.
The other struggle I’ve dealt with is people’s perception of me, or rather the lack of. Even by most of my own peers, I’ve often been perceived as very unassuming, to a point where it’s a surprise to most people that I am a serious musician. Like it becomes a shock to a lot of people that I actually do take it seriously when they hear me sing or play guitar for the first time. I don’t really have an image, and if I do, it’s quite a simple, minimalist one at that. Instead, I wish to emphasize focus on my actual music, my actual content. I’m someone who wants to leave enough room for interpretation in their music, but I’m unsure if anyone wants to do that. That’s the challenge I guess, trying to minimize my efforts on the image in an effective way, so I can put both the focus of myself and the audience on the actual content and character of the music.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a solo artist, I consider myself an experimental singer-songwriter at the core of it all. No two releases in my discography are the exact same in style or substance, and there is a good reason as to why. Coming off the coat-tails of my EDM phase, I started producing IDM, and ambient music, before starting to create anything resembling song-based material. Even so, I wavered through a variety of genres from straight folk-pop to no wave to dream pop to sound collage to synth-pop to vaporwave to post-rock to drone to noise to avant-folk to… I think you get the point. I was never sticking to one genre or another, and if I was, it was with such nuance and distinction that you could tell the difference between releases. Not only that, but it’s taken me to weird (in a good way) places not conventional for someone with my catalog. I joined choir my last year of high school cause I got so many requests about my singing (I didn’t even know how to read music at the time), I’ve had reviews in an online indie rock magazine and some random international blogs, I’ve had a song played on Rice College’s experimental radio station, I even ended up on playing on a popular twitch livestream talent show. I’ve had my footprint in a lot of different places, you just need to where to look.
But back to that term of an “experimental singer-songwriter”, and what I mean by that. I consider myself someone who wants to critically and tactfully translate their varying influences, create their own interpretation from said influences, and their own language, and take all of that into a largely cohesive singer-songwriter-esque package. Before anything else, I am making music to make sense of myself and externalizing what was once previously internal, and trying to do so as closely as I can imagine it, and that goal is now more relevant than ever as I become wary and inundated with music production.
A lot of those viewpoints carry over into gammawave. In 2021, I started to get back into open mic sets as things were opening up, and I found myself joining the band. And, as a member of the band, my role is a bit different from my solo career. I consider myself more of an interpreter, an interpreter of the ideas they wish to portray and figure out how I could add to them in a practical sense that doesn’t feel too overblown. Even without an official release yet, we have received a great ordeal of acclaim and interest from our peers in the local Houston scene, which is more than a good start.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Keep an eye out! You never what is coming next from me! Follow me on social media, and check out my music on your preferred platforms via my linktree. Also, want to say hi to my sister Macie, Mom and Dad!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/jacobhuttomusic
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacobhuttomusic/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacobhuttomusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsbTkniR2vryTJvViY3g9GA
Image Credits
Nathan Reeves (@nathan_reeves_)
Tony (@evil_eye_gallery)
Ivan Sydorov (@uncomfortablycandid)
Braden Erin (@bradenerin_)
Off Record Blog (@offrecordblog)
