So excited to finally release my new album Atmospherics!
Mike Sheridan (born 1991) has been a part of the Copenhagen electronic musicscene since the mid 00’s. He entered the scene, barely in his teens, with his landmark debut album I Syv Sind (In Two Minds, 2008). Sheridan pursued an ambient and dreamy approach, and with limited tools at hand, he constructed a teenage masterwork that few could have predicted. Among the first in his generation, he launched his career to high acclaim, effectively crossing over to mainstream audiences.
A shift in tone occurred for Sheridan in 2010 when he stumbled on the mysterious French Cristal Baschet; a sound sculpture, invented as an acoustic complement to the 50’s electronic Musique Concrète and later formed as its own instrument by its inventors, the French Baschet Brothers. He immediately embarked on an intense study of the instrument eventuall y becoming one of only a handful of individuals in the world who can call themselves a Christalist.
Shortly after finishing his second album Ved Første Øjekast (At First Sight, 2012), Mike was introduced to the Danish master trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg - famous for his Grammy awarded composition Aura, performed by Miles Davis in 1985 and his numerous recordings on ECM. Despite being born 50 years apart, the two musicians struck a profound friendship and stage camaraderie. This became formative for Sheridan, who developed his Cristal playing style from improvising and collaborating with Mikkelborg.
Onwards from 2015, Sheridan turned to almost exclusively working on commission, composing for theatre, radio - drama, and performing as a musician and collaborator. Film and theatre proved to be an exciting challenge for Sheridan who consequently had begun to re-orientate himself and his processes.
For Mike Day‘s 2016 documentary feature-debut The Islands and The Whales, Mike was recommended by composer colleague Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969-2018), as a contributor for the score and Australian composer Anthony Partos and Mike jointly scored the film. The Islands and The Whales was Emmy nominated in 2018.
In 2017 director of The Hamlet Scene, Lars Roman-Engel, comissioned Mike to score Shakespeare’s Hamlet at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore. Sheridan developed and fine-tuned his stage-scoring technique for a year, specifically for the play. The two collaborated again on The Hamlet Scene’s 2019 production of Richard III.
In 2021 Mike received his first Danish Academy Award nomination as a score composer, for his work on Persona Non Grata (2021). The feature film, directed by the debuting talent Lisa Jespersen, had a great reception with audience and the critiques, making it one of the most seen and best reviewed films of the year. The film won the prestigious Film of the Year at the 2022 Danish Academy Awards placing it amongst notable titles such as The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg) and Antichrist (Lars von Trier).
Recent projects include a feature on techno giant Kölsch‘s album Isopolis (2021) and performances in Nicolai Howalt’s exhibhition A Journey: The Near Future at Gallery Martin Asbæk (2022).
Now, in 2023, Mike has taken the task to find and express his own inner sound. The result is the album Atmospherics, where he has created a body of work out of everything he finds interesting in life. It‘s an invitation to join him on a crystal clear musical journey.
By the age of 18, Mike Sheridan had achieved everything he could imagine. He had built an audience, he had graced the front pages as the new prodigy of Danish music, he had won awards. It‘s the kind of entrance that many dream of, but they were also dreams that were limited. So Sheridan went on to pursue other avenues and spent the next several years in the worlds of film, theatre and sound art. He moved through the dark night hours of the club and the reverberations of the concert hall. All with the desire to get closer to the sound he heard in his inner ear.
„After my second album, I went exploring for new inputs. From creating my music in a basement room with a couple of speakers, I went out and let myself be influenced as part of a larger musical life. It was important for me to develop my tonal language if I was to return to the album format, which is where I express myself most directly,“ says Mike Sheridan.
Three years ago, he began to create what is now the album Atmospherics. The term refers to electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, such as during a thunderstorm, which can interact with and distort wireless signals. Here, the title refers to both the sound of the album itself, where computer collages, classical instruments crystal clear melodies and heavy rhythms collide, and to the electronic processing and reworking. But really, he thought it would be a quiet release, almost devoid of melodies.
„I had an idea of this controlled piece, and then melodies and colours came out, and I thought, ‚Hey, that wasn‘t the plan.‘ It became a great gift, where I allowed myself to be much more dramatic. There was an energy where I thought, ‚Can the music carry this? And I held on to that energy,“ says Mike.
Being a self-taught songwriter and producer, he worked intuitively. And this time, he got further than he first realised. So far, in fact, that he encountered his 14-year-old self.
„I thought, ‚what happens if I embrace my childish fascination with sound? If I try to make all that buzz tangible?‘ In a way, Atmospherics is the album I‘ve been waiting to make. I took on the role of the adult who could capture the ideas of the child I was forever ago. Atmospherics is a meeting of the two, and together they cultivate and amplify all my darlings,“ he says.
The idea of cultivating rather than killing darlings cuts across both the musical and thematic aspects of the record. It‘s a collage of subjects that Mike Sheridan is passionate about - an experimental space pieced together from impressions from film, art and all the good stuff from his bookshelf. Megaparsec is about so-called orphan stars - stars that have been ripped from a constellation and are hanging alone in space. In reality, there are far more of these lonely stars and their combined light shines the brightest in the universe, so the track is a tribute to the outsider. A track like Minds I is inspired by the myth of Orpheus retrieving his beloved Eurydice from the underworld, but the compromise is that he must never look at her again - in Sheridan‘s case, it becomes a song about digital mirror images.
This is how themes and music slide in and out of each other on the album. There are moments of dub, techno, pop and modern compositional music.
There are sounds and beats that crackle, dissolve, replace each other, or connect with each other in new ways.In this way, Atmospherics can be listened to as a long exhalation from an artist who has dared to hold his breath longer than most.
