We recently connected with Nic Danielson and have shared our conversation below.
Nic, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)
One of the best investments I’ve made as a composer/musician, and small-business owner, was uprooting and moving to Los Angeles, which I did in 2022. Prior to that, I’d lived the last 21 years in Seattle, playing keys/drums in bands, and writing custom music for ads (e.g. Coca-Cola, DC Comics) and the occasional short film. I’ll always be a Washington boy at heart, but I wanted to really see what would happen if I was to turn everything upside down and fully dive into one of the big musical nerve centers. “Can I find a life there?” was a massive concern of course, but ultimately there was only one way to find out. And I HAD to find out – it took some time to realize it, but creatively, I’d been in the midst of a long burnout stage over the prior few years. I was the proverbial frog in a gradually boiling pot. So at one point during the dark Pacific Northwest winter, I made the decision to leap into a new environment. 5 months later, I was in an LA apartment surrounded by music gear, my jungle of houseplants, and a couple of stowaway Seattle garden snails that are now my pets.
Initially I took some time to relax in the sun, started up a daily journaling habit (I can’t recommend this enough), and feel out where I’m at with making art. Now that the dust has settled, I’ve found myself in a more productive period than ever before, and I’m incredibly thankful for it! There is so much music to make, ideas to explore. Also I’ve met such a killer network of friends and creative types here – it’s been incredibly welcoming. I love it.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My career has been a fairly winding path. I grew up in a musical house – my Mom is a gigging violinist, and my Dad is a scientist and instrument luthier. I started playing piano at age 3, and eventually I decided to pursue a classical piano career. So I went to music school, where through a domino effect of weird circumstances, self-imposed pressure (and the resultant over-practicing), I had a musical injury. Looking back, it was almost a comedy of errors, but considering it resulted in a total derailment of all the plans, it felt as serious as a funeral. After a couple years of efforts to resolve it, I had to face reality and started looking for another path. I actually considered physics/astronomy for a hot minute!
Luckily for me, I’d picked up playing drums in high school and brought them with me to college. They use such different muscle groups that they didn’t trigger the injury, and so drums became the main instrument, and a way to stay musical without pain. So I moved to Seattle and started playing in bands. I returned from a US tour, and the guitarist and I formed a thing of our own – there I was full circle at the keys again, this time writing indie rock songs with my buds Charles Larson and Alessandra Rose, for The Kindness Kind. Thankfully by that point I didn’t have the same issues with the pain thing. I also played keys for Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden, and joined the backing band for the Seattle Rock Orchestra – this allowed me to meet a ton of amazing singers, some of whom I still do things with. One of those singers was Director/Editor Dark Details (aka Christopher J. Cunningham), and I ended up joining his dark indie band Ravenna Woods. Chris is to this day a main collaborator on all sorts of projects, whether for custom music, or me occasionally wandering into one of his surreal music videos as a bunny with an axe or something.
Along the way, I became interested in film music as well, attending the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, which I left part-way through for a tour. But in 2016, on a whim, I entered a film music competition as part of the Zurich Film Festival. I’d never written for orchestra before, but I submitted a recording and written score for an animation – cut to a couple of months later, and I had a call from Switzerland saying that out of 100’s of applicants, I was a finalist and they’d like to fly me out to be part of a live film music concert! What a crazy experience that was, and I learned how much I really enjoyed the feeling of putting music to picture, not to mention getting to work with such a mind-blowing group as the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. I decided to enter the Marvin Hamlisch film music contest the following year, and made it to the finals for that as well – at that point it was like…well damn, maybe I should do more of this?
Now that I’m here in LA, I’ve played keys for the artist Frogi at SXSW 2023, and composed the music for this year’s official Seattle International Film Festival trailer. The trailer was co-directed and edited by the aforementioned creative madman Dark Details. He brought me onboard in the conceptual phase, which gave us the opportunity to toss ideas around before any scenes were even shot…and I’m super proud of how that one turned out. Currently I’m finalizing a set of piano pieces (recordings and printed scores), and am looking forward to playing some experimental noise shows on modular synth, continuing to work on an album of surreal/gritty tracks, and hunting for a film to score.
Have you ever had to pivot?
My pivot is that I started a small musical electronics company called Blood Cells Audio in 2020. I’d always liked tinkering with electronics gear, but at some point it began to feel like a distraction from making music, so I packed up all the equipment into a box and shoved it into a closet for a few years. But during COVID lockdown, I became obsessed with modular synthesizers, which is a system of small electronic modules that you can mix/match together to create a complete and totally custom synthesizer. It’s such a powerful animal, and the unique, potentially chaotic nature of it REALLY pulled me in. At the time, I was looking for a specific sort of module for my setup, but it didn’t seem to exist out there in the market…so as a lockdown project, I took the electronics box back out of the closet and made my own. I was forced to order five of them, so I kept one for myself, and within a week had sold the others online. And that’s what really launched Blood Cells Audio! I also came to the conclusion that I should just embrace that tinkerer side as another facet of creativity, rather than some sort of distraction or identity crisis.
At this point I’ve sold hundreds of those modules, and continue to make other gear, at least initially driven by what I want to use myself. And the modular synth community the world over is full of awesome people: electronics weirdos, experimenters, chill folks who want to hook up sensors to plants and listen to what they sound like, you name it – it’s a really diverse and rad community to be a part of. In fact, I met one of my best friends in Los Angeles (Swedish Composer/Artist VAAAL) while I was still up in Seattle….we’d become Instagram penpals after he got some Blood Cells Audio stuff, and now here we are in LA, collaborating on a wild soon-to-be-released synth module called Mangle.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nicdanielson.com
- Instagram: nikubroadcast
- Other: www.bloodcellsaudio.com
Image Credits
Dark Details Abby Williamson