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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BIM BAM: CREATIVE PROCESS FOR BRANDING BUMPER

When the San Francisco-based Jewish educational resource provider G-dcast decided to re-brand as BimBam, they invited me to provide a musical arrangement for a new bumper to preface videos and marketing content. To start at the end, here’s the final product we came up with together:

The creative brief called for a focus on sensibilities like “refreshing”, “joyful”, “credible”, “accessible”, and “empowering”.

One specific idea thrown my way was to incorporate the sound of a spinning gragger:

Digging into my noisemaker collection, I found that I had not one but two graggers on hand. I duly incorporated one (opting for the wooden version, as opposed to the metal version demonstrated above), and we were off.

I came up with a few different ideas for the “blue sky” portion of the process. It seemed likely that we’d lean in a heavily musical direction, but there was a desire to hear some purely sound design-based material as well. Since I’m equally comfortable in both realms, I started off with a few different iterations, each displayed below. The first takes some flute samples and bends them around in arty ways; the second delves into a more conventional musical arrangement; and the third is a whimsical, purely sound effects-oriented approach:

The creative direction coalesced around making the piece more musically oriented. So I put together a few versions based on the second interation from the sequence above. V2.2 subtracts the accordion; V2.3 subtracts the rest of the melodic elements, leaving only a bass line and percussion. Hear the result of each in these three drafts below:

These iterations went over well, but eventually it was decided to use a phrase from a traditional song instead. So I took a similar approach to a different melody. This one got close:

Almost there, but the feedback was for the melody to be crisper and better defined. So I removed the accordion and swapped in a xylophone, and we had a winner. To bring us full circle, here’s the final version we heard at the top:

This was a really enjoyable project, and a chance to flex a variety of creative muscles to find just the right match. Feel free to peruse some other sound and music I’ve created for branding bumpers if you like. Thanks for your time!

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CONTACT

KEEP DULUTH CLEAN: CUSTOM MUSIC, SOUND EDIT + MIX FOR PSA

Duluth-based animator Brian Barber brought me aboard to compose original music, edit sound and mix this PSA for the Keep Duluth Clean project, a collaboration between Loll Designs and Flint Group. I cooked up an original music track (more on that below) and augmented Brian’s sound effects with some of my own— for the pop cans thrown into the waste basket, I eventually wound up recording an aluminum can bouncing off the two-wheel cart in my storage space, since (surprisingly) I couldn’t find the right kind of metal-on-metal impact in my library. Oh, and the guy yelling “Ain’t that the truth!” toward the beginning is me.

Below: a music-only rendition of the project. The creative direction asked for bossa nova— Esquivel came up— but the reference tracks provided were things like Henry Mancini’s “The Baby Elephant Walk” and “Why Wait” by Perez Prado, so I figured we wanted something kitschy that would match the whimsy of Barber’s characters and settings, but a bit more “square” than Esquivel per se.

A couple of minor revisions on both the audio and visual ends, and we were good to go. A quick and easy project. Good times.

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More music + sound by Mike Hallenbeck for animation

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for corporate video

More work by Mike Hallenbeck for TV spots

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