Right Here, Right Now with Michael Hill
Photos by Miró Myung
It’s 2020 and Michael Hill is heading home to England after being on the road with Arlo Parks, who just played a sold-out show at the Grand Social in Dublin, when they are told that their boat is possibly one of the last ones to be admitted into the country because the world is shutting down. Hill dryly chuckles as he recounts this pivotal moment in his life trajectory, one of the catalysts that led him to the sun-soaked Southern California city of Costa Mesa, where he currently resides.
Recording/Mix/Front of House engineer and Sales & Technical support for PMC Speakers (USA), Hill balances many projects simultaneously. Notably, he has worked on multiple projects with beloved UK band ISLAND, toured with Arlo Parks as her Front of House engineer, and later worked as her broadcast mix engineer for television, including appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, KEXP, and more.
Underlying Hill’s accolades and resume, which also involves a master’s in Loudspeaker design, is an attitude that drives him; he is open to leaving his comfort zone and has a take-life-as-it-comes attitude. “This whole process has just been one stepping stone and then another one every time I thought, it’s never actually gonna work out, like there’s gonna be something, a barrier I haven’t foreseen yet that’s gonna make the next step impossible,” Hill remarks, “I genuinely can’t believe that I’ve managed to find this many stepping stones and have ended up in this position, so I’m super grateful.”
Recently, Hill has been mixing Field of Giants’ third album, for whom he used to play the drums. He has also been working on an EP for ISLAND frontman Rollo Doherty’s solo project, which will be released on London-based record label Lewis Recordings.
His work for PMC Speakers, the Emmy-award-winning speaker company founded by Peter Thomas (BBC) and Adrian Loader (FWO Bauch), is at the forefront of everything. For those of us who are not versed in the world of audio technology, PMC Speakers provides precision studio monitors made for professional recording studios, musicians, and listeners.
Hill comments that “we strive to deliver reference level monitoring which is high resolution, very low distortion, and transparently musical,” pointing out that “we’re most commonly known for our large ‘main’ monitors which can be found at studios like Capitol, Republic, Maida Vale & Metropolis, but we also design more compact monitors for project studios and at-home producers. They are very high-resolution monitors, so you can mix or you can master projects at the highest level. Helping others achieve that has kind of become more and more my primary interest.”
Since landing in California, Hill has been thrown into the deep end. PMC Speakers is a small, high-end company doing installs and work at some of the top recording studios in LA, like Capitol Records. It carries an impressive roster of clients and projects, including Coldplay, Elvis Costello, ASCAP, Tori Amos, Titanic, Game of Thrones, Pearl Harbor–the list goes on.
Hill smiles and tousles his brown hair as he remembers some of his first gigs here, “I grew up in Oxford, even the whole touring thing was so unexpected for the trajectory of where I expected my life to go. So suddenly, being in LA, I had major imposter syndrome when I got here. One of my first jobs was going into the Interscope Record Label studios and working on an issue there. I met their in-house tech, who’s excellent, and suddenly I’m thinking–I’m supposed to be helping this guy who’s already teaching at the highest level? Adam, he’s great, and suddenly we’re working together as a team, and there wasn’t any sort of imposter issue at all; it was like, okay, let’s work together to fix this using our skills and sharing them…it wasn’t long until I realized that Ihave some very valuable skills.”
Between the bullet points of Michael Hill’s life, there is much to hold space for; the fluid shifts of a creative path influenced by relationships, projects that still reside in the imagination and are yet to come, memories of important experiences like touring the U.S. for the first time, and everything else that holistically forms a lived experience.
Hill’s move to SoCal has come with sacrifices and gains–there is family and community, which an ocean now separates him from. Like many creative people, he is aware of the nebulous nature of this chosen path, contemplating how to measure its worth in the face of his move,
“It’s hard to rationalize how much value we put on it because when you compare it to things like family or parents or what have you–you can’t put a number on how valuable that is; you just have to follow what your gut’s saying…every twelve months I look back and think, have I actually grown in any way…it might be spiritually, it might be personally, it might professionally, it might be intellectually, but if there’s a sign of any of those things, I feel like okay, I don’t need to completely take a change of direction because I’m obviously onto something here–but yeah, I’m deeply gutted that I can’t see my little nieces as often as I’d like to.”
Hill takes his time to process and connect that fateful boat ride from over four years ago to the past twelve months living here on this side of the Atlantic and finds that “right now it really feels like I’m in the right place.”