Kylan Hillman

Kylan Hillman

Composer, Guitarist, Improviser

About Kylan

Kylan is a composer, electric guitarist, improviser and digital instrument creator. Kylan’s work deals with mess, the beauty of imperfection and he has explored these central concepts through indeterminacy/improvisation, scrambling/destroying musical material and interrogating our relationship to time and memory. Technology plays an equally important part of Kylan’s creative practice and many of his pieces either use live electronics or are based on electronic processes.

Kylan’s recent recorded output includes Methods of Crunching which uses objects like butterknives, screwdrivers, and guitar picks to create overwhelming scratching, popping, and rubbing sounds. The guitar sounds are then turned into a large-scale cacophony by a program called Data Crasher invented by Kylan. He performed the piece at National Sawdust as part of the DBR Lab and at MATA festival 2025. Kylan’s recent series I’m Just Burning My Memories takes the degenerative sampling practice of artists like the Caretaker and William Basinski as a starting point for compositions based on cycles of reiteration, recomposition and loss of information. Smother to Reignite is a piece written for the Hypercube Ensemble in which guitar improvisations were processed using distortion, delay and audio stretching to create textures that were transcribed for saxophone, electric guitar, percussion and piano.

Kylan is currently a Doctoral student studying composition at Peabody Institute of John’s Hopkins University in Maryland.

Selected Works

This piece was created to explore a noise based, improvisatory sound language for guitar as well as demonstrate the effects processing unit, “Data Crasher.” “Data Crasher” is a multi-parameter, randomized stutter effect that plays back and reiterates small amounts of sound from the signal it receives. The piece explores a variety of scraping and sliding sounds which are grouped into the categories “perforated” and “sustained.” The performer creates these sounds by using a pick, the metal of a screwdriver, and a butterknife. “Data Crasher” is active during the entire piece and accompanies the performer with noisy glitch effects. The performer does not need to interact with the patch in any direct way but the sound of the patch is considered during passages of extended improvisation.

I’m Just Burning My Memories is a series of pieces inspired by the Caretaker album Everywhere at the End of Time. In that album, samples of recordings from the 1920s-1940s are broken down and processed until they are completely unrecognizable. I adopted this idea as a starting point for my own compositional work and began writing music based on electronic processes that distort and obscure material. The third installment of this series began as a freely written piece for bassoon midi that I scrambled using randomized playback in Max/MSP. I then notated the result, asked a bassoonist to record themselves playing it and transformed that sound into various textures, loops and drones. The piece consists of bassoon solos, electronic solos and many passages containing both.

An important part of my compositional practice is melding concert music with electronic music both conceptually and formally. How can the intricate techniques involved in digital synthesis and audio sampling be translated into physical techniques that musicians can perform? Smother to Reignite ventures to answer this question by recreating three common techniques used in my electronic music: Harsh noise walls, audio stretching, and stuttering. These techniques are taken from the digital domain and reimagined using crackling noise sounds, dense improvisational textures, and hypnotic bouts of repetition. All three electronic techniques are based on the principle of sample flipping where a producer takes an audio source and changes it to create new musical meaning. In my music this is often done to the extent that the original audio source is completely unrecognizable and becomes fertile ground for new material. Thus, the name Smother to Reignite.