Blake Bastion is the project name for all my songwriting. The sound is focused on vocals and guitar playing. I started this back in 2015. After releasing my debut album on distictive records (iLL AUDiO – know no boundaries) I got totally burned out from studio life and electronic music. I had been living in studios for 6 years in the run up to getting that album deal and had gone all in, quiting all day jobs and moving into a shabby industrial unit in Bermondsey to hit music full time. I put a band together and we played a ton of festivals, did remixes for some of my favorite artists, and by chance encounters managed to collaborate with a lot of incredible people on that album. I worked for two years on it, producing and mixing the entire thing on a computer with cracked software and some broken speakers.
For a lot of different reasons, that album did not get released properly. I didnt have the energy or support to push it like it needed to be pushed following that, and so I had to say f* it i’m going to go out and play in the streets instead. So thats what i did, and I toured all over the UK playing every city I got to using a bunch of loop effects and a solar panel strapped to the back of a trailer. From there I got into europe and even did a bunch of shows around Uganda. It was a life changing experience, and I’ll go into more detail about it in future
I finally ended up in Brighton and fell in love with the busking scene. At the same time Arcadia picked up on the iLL AUDiO sound and wanted me to create music for their Glastonbury Spider show. So I was making mad electronic music for a fire breathing spider and also playing calm acoustic music in the streets. That polarised creativity has been hard to juggle over the years since, and I’m still trying to find out how to do both.
Managing multiple aliases as an independent artist with no financial support, coming from a working class background, now a husband and father to two – all means resources are getting really stretched. With the threat of A.I about to destroy much of my (and many if not all independent artists) income streams in music, I’m bringing everything together under one website (here) so I can keep people updated more easily.
For now, as I’ve said on other socials, email list is the best way from here. Hit subscibe on the form below and lets stay connected