"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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BEN AND DOPEY: SOUND + MUSIC CONSULTING

Lately I’ve been serving as a sound and music consultant on the feature film “Ben and Dopey” by animator John Akre. It’s a lot of fun listening to the original songs John’s been writing and making arrangement recommendations, plus suggesting areas where his homespun sound effects work might come in handy. I’m enjoying helping an artist realize an aesthetic through sound and music, using his own visual sensibility as a style guide.

The film tells the 1987 story of a Minneapolis street musician and his relationship with an animated duck created by his mother, an underground animator who seems to have disappeared. The movie takes place in the neighborhood that used to be where the Minneapolis Convention Center is now, as well as the original Nicollet Mall.

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for animation

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THE BEAST: NEW FILM SOUNDTRACK RELEASED TODAY

Today I’m releasing a collection of soundtrack work compiled from my original music and sound design for “Nowhere Left to Run”-- a dreamlike, post-apocalyptic experimental film by Felipe Mafasoli. This collection reconstitutes the raw materials I generated and documented for the film, layering them into a new configuration for an experience facilitated exclusively by listening. Click on the link below to hear it.

HEAR “THE BEAST” HERE

The collection isn’t concerned with COVID-19 specifically-- I created the soundscape for the film in mid-2019. But the 2020 edit and mix process has proven serendipitously appropriate for a polarized interval of both stillness and frenzy, reflection and panic, of a simultaneous longing for the social and the solitary. Mafasoli requested a soundscape with an elegaic quality, a memorial to a world lost forever. I have no idea what anyone else will take away from this collection, but to me it sounds like memories preserved in amber, shot through with the glitches of operator error.

These tracks coalesce around two disparate elements: 1) iterations of a fragile melody evocative of a lost past, and 2) a shifting landscape sourced from analog synth overtones, glacially swept into horizons of reverb and shifted pitch. Mafasoli wanted the soundscape to include incidental sounds of what life used to be like pre-apocalypse, so it made sense to incorporate field recordingse of outdoor environments from my neighborhood years ago and from a city street downtown, where I documented my performance of the theme on a piano placed on the sidewalk for people to play in public (the recording also captures wind, passing vehicles, and snatches of overheard conversation).  

Stream for free, purchase if you like. For May and June of 2020, all profits will benefit The Food Group, a Minnesota food shelf.

More music + sound by Mike Hallenbeck for experimental film

More original music by Mike Hallenbeck for narrative film

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MORE WORK UNDER THE “ARCHIVE” MONIKER

I’ve put out several “musique plastique” releases under the name Archive over the years— more recently appended with my given name, given the number of other artists out there using the same nomenclature. Searching for previous releases is making me realize that some things have gone missing, and I’ll have to re-up them! But here are some tracks to give you a taste in the meantime:

Silent Night (Shepherds Quake) (Dark Winter)

That Will Be All (from the “Music in Black & White” release, Dark Winter)

Eventualities: Voice (extrapolated from vocal performances by Bryce Beverlin, Insides Music)

Eventualities 02: Guitar (extrapolated from guitar performances by Charles Gillet, from The Material (Insides Music)

Living Daylight Savings Time (Insides Music)

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