Published by Alessandro Violante on February 2, 2024
During the last five years, the Italian producer Hålbå has released music with several labels such as Phage Tapes, Subverted, Several Minor Promises and so on. He has also done the mastering for music released by labels such as Brutal Forms, Lethal Curse and Autonoma Industriale. Today we talk with him about his music and much more.
Hi Hålbå, would you like to talk with us about you and your music?
Hello Alessandro and first of all I would like to thank you for inviting me.
My project Hålbå was born in February 2018 with my first release on Obskure Records, although I officially joined this game already in 2013 by attending my first courses in music production (to name a few, D. Carbone, Ascion and Daniele Antezza) and my first releases under different aliases.
Hålbå was born as Techno from dance-floor, clean but with that touch of industrial.
Over the years, as a result of new influences combined with the attendance of more and more specific courses especially related to sound design and mix, my style and my vision of music have changed dramatically, arriving at what is now the project, based on experimentation and emotion to be transmitted rather than dancing the audience in a club.
I don’t know how to define my style and I don’t have a precise pattern when I produce. I go more on an idea that goes through my mind at a certain time, inspired maybe after hearing a particular song or a soundtrack, by the emotional state of a certain period, by a memory, or maybe by a drastic event that happened somewhere in the world.
The element that all my productions have in common, however, is my vision of the world, in particular of human horror and all the ruin that follows.
Over the years, following various experiments, I found an almost optimal result in the interpretation of my emotional state combining industrial sounds immersed in apocalyptic landscapes.
The instrument that allows me to achieve an excellent result in a short time is the use of the modular system. Based on how I studied and assembled it, it allows me to acquire external signals (for example taken from the computer, from contact microphones or field recordings), to sample them, manipulate them, and destroy them as I see fit or according to the needs of the case.
Once I have recorded all the sound sources created with the modular, I conclude with the editing and mix part on Ableton.
What has been your latest release? What can you tell us about it?
My last release was the single track “Evolution Gone Wrong” released on the Beryllium label.
This was a track that I had already finished for another label almost a year ago but in the end, following my needs, I decided to leave it to the guys of Beryllium.
Before this track I released “My Veiled Cry”: single track for a V.A. on the System label in Minsk.
The label had asked me to make an “intro” for this various artists of hard-techno industrial genre.
In between, they also chose it to make the video teaser of the release (small satisfactions).
Before “Myveiled Cry” I released another single track called “I Dream a New Skin” for the Barcelona collective Neuro Habitat. I really care about this track because it was the first produced completely full-modular.
Hålbå
About last year you started doing mastering for many interesting labels. What could you tell us about it and about your mastering process?
Yes, it was all born in November 2022 after a request made by my dear friends Øperat that wanted to know if I could give him a master on the fly for a track. I hadn’t mastered it yet, however, even though I knew very well the process behind it. So I accepted the challenge, reaching in my opinion a very satisfactory result both for me and for them.
From that moment I had grown the desire to learn seriously also this part since up to that moment I had not given much weight to us. So in the first place in December I went to do a private workshop by one of the best Mastering Engineer in Italy, Tommy Bianchi (White Mastering Sound).
I chose him because I like his vision of how sound must be processed during mastering, that is, how to preserve transients and how to maintain the identity of the material to be processed.
Then, towards February 2023, I attended a mastering course held by Daniele Antezza (Dadub Mastering), which I consider one of the best mastering engineers in the electronic genre in Europe.
My work officially started in January 2023 when I mastered the first works for the label Brutal Forms. From there was slowly expanding like wildfire of the requests that came to me during the year: to date I think I’m close to 200 tracks mastered and I had the opportunity to work on tracks for high-caliber artists like those of Swarm Intelligence, Violet Poison, Second Spectre, Nigh/T mare, Donna Haringway, Martin Dolgener, The Undertaker’s Tapes, Kenny Campbell and Incendie to name a few.
My main goal is to have the version mastered as faithful as possible to the premaster delivered by the artist while maintaining both the dynamics and the artistic choice given by the artist.
The final work always tries to reach the right compromise between power and dynamics.
This unfortunately is not a standard respected in most cases in today’s market as it always tries to get in every way to levels unheard, effectively destroying the work produced by the artist over-compressing it and, consequently, killing the artistic soul. Before starting to work, I always listen in full to all the work in order to identify with the artist and his ideas.
In my process I always try to do as few interventions as possible in order not to “stress” too much the work to be processed, perhaps leading it to ruin rather than improve it. With regard to these interventions, they are all of an implicit nature: I take off on the one hand to make another one feel better.
The most important step for me is, for every step within my process, to always check (equal to Loudness) with the original track to see if what I’m doing improves the work or not.
In other words: I prefer transparency to colouring and I prefer dynamics to over-compression.
What are you working on Actually? Could you tell us something about it?
I recently delivered the last track commissioned for an Various Artists for Mnemosyne, while I’m waiting for my track on the next Various Artists by Voidance Records and my latest EP in collaboration with Exome on Phage Tapes.
Currently I don’t have any more commissioned tracks and I’m going to not take any more work because I would like to dedicate my energies to the conception of my first album. The idea is to make the listener travel through the various tracks as if it were a sensory and emotional journey. For the moment I would not say much because I am quite superstitious since the last one I wanted to do did not go through in the end.
I’m just saying there will be some big collaborations. I hope to have it out by the end of next year and bring it live.
As for other works, in February I will play live in Verona for the crew Brutal Forms and in June I will return again to Berlin for a mentoring session for the crew of Subverted where I will talk about my production process and conception of a live with a modular system.
What could you tell us about your live shows? Do you like to play live?
It took me some time to conceive a live but, above all, how to integrate my modular system.
A few years after the birth of my project I had enough material to design a live show. What I had to study was how to integrate the modular system but above all without the danger of getting lost in unnecessary or too cumbersome actions.
I found the right compromise and put it in place in November 2022 for the occasion of my first-ever live show that I presented in Berlin at Mensch Meyer. The feedback was amazing and I honestly didn’t expect so much positive feedback.
So, as you can deduce, I just started to officially take out my live. As I said at the beginning, I was waiting to have enough material from the tracks I produced to be able to completely merge them into a live that had a logical sense with a story-telling behind it.
My second (and last) live was in November 2023 again in Berlin. For that occasion I had a full-immersion day: in the afternoon I held a mentoring session at the Electronic Music School on my way of producing with modular and how I implement this method in my live performances.
In the evening instead I did the opening live at the Untertage for the 3 years of the collective Subverted (which I thank very much for the confidence shown to me).
Right now, my live is very simple with a structure already built on Ableton and the improvisation part assigned to the use of the modular processing sounds from Ableton or external instruments such as contact microphones or noise-boxes.
I would aim to move further and further away from the pattern given by the structure already set on Ableton, thus allowing me more moments of experimentation.
I like playing live even if the previous days brought me a bit of stress (maybe due to the little experience) but in the end, the result is great and the feedback reported by the listeners is positive.
Would you like to suggest to our readers some Italian new interesting projects you appreciate?
It would be to do another interview about it because the names are too many but I will try to indicate some interesting names that deserve to have more visibility than they currently have:
Holy Similaun: Alberto is really good at what he does, both in production and in mixing and mastering works. What truly sets Holy Similaun apart is her extraordinary ability to transport audiences into ethereal and engaging auditory landscapes.
His compositions are not simple songs but intricate odysseys, inviting listeners to embark on a fascinating journey through unexplored realms of sound experience.
Lorenzo Abattoir: founder of the electroacoustic collective Mare di Dirac with whom he realizes performances based on the use of environmental recordings, natural reverberations and particular ethnic instruments. His solo work blends noise and musique concrète with a strong ritual and performative imprint.
Exome: Lorenzo in my opinion is a force of nature. His wickedness is penetrating for the eardrums but at the same time a panacea for the soul. In my opinion one of the best in circulation in the field of Power Electronics in Italy and beyond, both in terms of production and live performance.