PIANO THEME: NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN

An excerpt from my original score on Felipe Mafasoli’s experimental film “Nowhere Left to Run”-- an abstract, associative vision of a post-apocalyptic dream world. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you can see it this weekend. The film-- which, in its final form, may or may not include this scene--  screens this coming Friday at Cellular Cinema’s Cave 4 Festival, 9 pm.

Readers may recognize the melody of this piece, which appears in different arrangements throughout the film. I’ve posted about the other versions here and here. I did my best to channel the Flaming Lips on this version, which accompanied a tableaux that evoked equal parts beauty and decay. In case anyone was curious, I dug back through the session to see what toys I used to create it.

All of the signals originate from virtual instruments. The piano is a sampled, out-of-tune “honky tonk” instrument, apparently treated only with compression and no other processing. The drone is a mandolin voice through a fuzz module, bitcrusher, another fuzz module with different settings than the first one, a whole ton of reverb, a filter to foreground some overtones, and some EQ rounding off the high and low end. The distorted  bass line that comes in is a sampled standup bass through compressor, fuzz, reverb, and then another compressor.

Enjoy!

More original music by Mike Hallenbeck

WOBBLY CHUTNEY BOWL FOLEY

Wobbly Chutney Bowl Foley is my new band name. Here I’m trying to capture a super subtle wobble to match motion onscreen, where a character plucks some particles of spice from a similar bowl and sends it spinning for a couple seconds in the process. As you’ll see, I stuck a small folded piece of paper beneath the bowl so it wouldn’t have a flat surface to return to, and would wobble all the more as a result. I tried filling the bowl with the same amount of powder as depicted in the scene, but the fun resonance of the bowl was lost when the interior was filled up. Forget realism-- I say give the people what they want, and that is chimey wobbly chutney bowl Foley!

More sound design by Mike Hallenbeck

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PUPPET SHOW, BUT NO SPINAL TAP

I’ve been editing sound cues for a puppet show. How cool is that? 

Puppet Lab describes itself as “an artist incubator celebrating its ninth year of radical, genre-expanding, boundary–pushing puppet work. A formalized process for emerging puppet and mask theater artists to advance their artistic development— to test and create new works within a supportive and challenging workshop environment. This program gives artists the time and space to test ideas, learn from others, and receive and respond to critical feedback.”

I’ve been editing audio for one of the productions in this process, Oanh Vu’s “Phantom Loss”. It premieres on January 17th, 7:30pm at Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis. Ticket info info here.

“Thuy Trinh does not get her mother, the 9th grade, or how to speak Vietnamese. None of this stops her from trying to contact her uncle Vân, who, by the way, is dead. Later, she finds herself in a graveyard talking to the wrong ghost, but vows to help him find out who he once was, because what else does she have to do? Come follow them on this journey as they work to uncover difficult truths, fight demons, and heal old wounds. Using tabletop and shadow puppetry this show uses humor to explore the dark nature of loss and intergenerational trauma. Content Advisory: References death and substance abuse.”

Check it out if this interests you! More info here.

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