Mike Hallenbeck
is a sound designer, composer, and audio artist based in Minneapolis USA. He adopts sounds both hither and yon, brings them home to play with each other, and helps them decide what they want to be when they grow up.

Hallenbeck has designed sound and composed music for over 35 theatrical productions in the Twin Cities, including shows produced by the Guthrie Theater and Illusion Theater. Productions featuring his sound design have made it to Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal as well.

Hallenbeck's work was recently featured in the sound art exhibition "Rock's Role: After Ryoanji" at Art in General in New York City, part of the New Sound New York festival (2004). He contributed audio to Larry Austin's "Williams [re]Mix[...stallation]" at Engine 27 Gallery, NYC in 2003 (the 50th anniversary celebration of John Cage's "Williams Mix" for eight monaural magnetic tapes). Work by Hallenbeck was also featured at an outdoor installation in Vancouver mounted in honor of a visit by the Dalai Lama in 2004.

A sound map of the Twin Cities by the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota included Hallenbeck's writing, and was featured by the L.A. Times and on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered". His experimental compositions and field recordings have received airplay across the U.S. as well as in France, England, Australia, and Croatia.

Mike Hallenbeck sound design resume

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Artist: Archive

Title of release: Immersion: Water Works

Release date: 8/24/04

CD Release show at Acadia Cabaret Theater
Tuesday August 24th, 8 pm
Part of the Improvised Music At Acadia series

"Immersion: Water Works" is the full-length CD debut from Archive, sound artist Mike Hallenbeck's "musique plastique" project. Archive explores minutiae, margins, and slow changes over time, imagining new sonic spaces for the listener to inhabit.

In late 2003, when experimental label Insides Music proposed the release of an Archive disc, Hallenbeck chose water as a subject. Given its array of manifestations, water provided a wide spectrum of sound and musicality to investigate.

Hidden harmonies and rhythms emerge in "Timeshare" as gurgling lake water under a dock unravels at various speeds and tumbles through digital scrambling. "Some Other Day" evolves from lush rainfall into a chorus of overtones and micro-edited digital "turntablism" derived from individual raindrops. "Hear No Shovel" plunges the scrape of a snow shovel into a chasm of booms and crunches as audio dissolves at a fraction of its original palyback speed.

These long-form abstractions are bridged by brief untreated field recordings: dogs splash around on the banks of the Mississippi River, rain splats on a metal roof, snow crunches underfoot on a still night.

One's listening space might provide serendipitous accompaniment, as passing cars and the drone of household appliances blend imperceptibly with the tracks. Imagining music-making as a dialogue with one's environment, Archive's "Immersion: Water Works" offers an opportunity to experience an unknown world concealed within the everyday.

[ contact ]

Archive
Mike Hallenbeck
juniorbirdman.com/archive

Insides Music:
Bryce Beverlin II
insidesmusic.com
insides_music @hotmail.com
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