"BIRDS OF THE FUTURE": "MA" SOUL, AIR RAID SIREN + REWIND

Another excerpt from Skewed Visions’ 2019 live performance installation “Birds of the Future”, featuring original music and sound design by yours truly. I posted the first one here a while back. “Inspired by research into the nature of time and the combination of dystopian narratives in popular culture with resurgent political and social activism, ‘Birds of the Future’ explored what it is to recognize one’s place in a seemingly unending cycle of utopian impulses and dystopian realities,” Skewed Visions’ web site offers as a description of the show. “Rather than revel in a bleak aesthetic of apocalypse, ‘Birds of the Future’ wrestled with the possibilities revealed by chaos— among them, a new understanding of time in which each moment is open to the possibilities of a new way of being.”

Here we take a look at the musical accompaniment I came up with for a section that starts with performers Erika Hansen and Megan Mayer semi-improvisationally pronouncing the word “Ma” first conversationally, but gradually building a yelled crescendo, eventually singing the word repeatedly as lyrics to a 60s soul-style instrumental to reflect a temp track used by artistic director Charles Campbell. To me the somewhat forlorn repetition of “Ma” suggested a state of vulerability, a helplessness that no one ever arrives to rescue, and that the darker impulses portayed elsewhere in the show are grievance-borne as a result of the repetition we witness here.

I aimed to approximate classic Motown soul with the musical score, assembling an ensemble replete with a horn section entirely with virtual instruments. Eventually the frenzied ritual is cut short by an air raid siren, and the bird people scurry to safety in the provisional shelter nestled within Jess Kiel-Wornson’s wonderfully cluttered set, curling up like bugs to withstand whatever rains down on them. I even executed what I hoped to be a Eugene Chadbourne-esque freakout coda for the music once it’s interrupted by the siren. Never knew I could freak out with virtual instruments like that, but apparently I can. And as the video clip fades out, a rewind sound cue signals that our performers’ cyclical travails are about to restart.

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THEATER PEOPLE SEASON FIVE PILOT

Screening this coming Saturday September 26th, as part of MN Web Fest: We recently wrapped audio post production on the pilot for Season Five of the Theater People web series. The episode features an original musical score, sound edit and mix by yours truly. Of note is a six and a half minute back story montage, which I scored with some rustic acoustic pop that morphs “Long Goodbye”-style into diegetic country music on a bar jukebox, contemporary R&B-flavored synth pop, lilting harp to accompany a scene from “Romeo and Juliet”, and eventually back into itself. Plus I got to edit and mix dialog by some of my favorite Minnesota actors, like Stacia Rice and John Middleton! There’s also a drum solo in this episode. Don’t be afraid.

More original music by Mike Hallenbeck for film

More sound edit and mix by Mike Hallenbeck for film

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CONSIDERABLY LESS THAN ALL ABOUT THAT BASS

A huge thank you to the generous Michael Sundlin for loaning me his lovely bass!

This was an opportunity to chart the boundless abyss that is my comprehensive lack of prowess as a bass player, failing utterly to play anything resembling the bass line I’d imagined for one of the tracks I’m working on. I was going for “Pixies meets the Flaming Lips”; what I achieved instead was “this guy only knows how to play guitar, so he tries to get by playing chords on the bass, which generally misses the point of the instrument”. Totally didn’t work.

But I did mess around with another (much slower) song, plunking along mostly on the root of each chord, and that actually worked pretty well. I’ll just get somebody else to play bass on that other track. Because as it turns out, I am not even remotely about that bass.

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