The Illinois River

The Illinois River first started off as a side project for one Mohd Hafeez to fill his spare time. Influenced by an image that he has got in his head, he crafted tunes that best played as a soundtrack to that particular 'scene'. Hafeez is a self-educated self-trained guitarist/vocalist; he picks up guitar chords by improvising on two chords that he had copied from other guitar-playing friends. Armed with a classical guitar, a microphone that is attached to his workstation, and hundreds of melodious tunes humming around in his head, Hafeez has created a distinct honest, straight-from-the-heart, stripped down sound of acoustic folk. It all first started with a recording session in the earlier middle part of 2006. Taking only one week to finish, the first recording session produced ten songs, and thus mark the birth of The Illinois River. Hafeez's approach in making music has almost always been spontaneous; he just sit infront of his computer, strum his guitar, and once he has formed a chord progression, he went on straight to record it, then add the vocal part, and that's the end of the process of writing songs for him. After finding much delight in completing his first recording session, a few months later Hafeez proceeded with the second recording session. By this though, being affected by numerous personal incidents, the outcome of the second recording session was predominantly dark, sombre, and downbeat - putting it in the same vein with slowcore/sadcore. It was a completely different sound from Hafeez as materials from his first recording session were the chirpy-cheerful type of tunes. However, from this recording session then that he had the chance to experiment with atmosphere, mood, and song structure. The Illinois River has now done four recording session with the last one being in June 2007. It wasn't until the third recording session that Hafeez decided to release his recorded materials in print. However, since Hafeez has been working on the The Illinois River project under relative obscurity and secrecy, he didn't even has a fan base to begin with. Upon the completion of the fourth recording session, and in which three of the recorded materials made up into the final tracklist for The Illinois River's debut longplayer, Hafeez resort on the Obscuro style of promoting his music; by releasing limited copies of his debut Otherlated Wonderthings among his immediate friends. After almost two month from the release of his debut LP, only by then he decided to embrace the 21st century technology by deciding to post his music on the internet and share his delightful sound to an even broader fan across the globe.