Edito de PackratName: T. Hallenbeck Raison d'etre: solo acoustic Main instruments: guitar, voice Other: cello, mandolin, mandola, mountain dulcimer Previous bands: Harm Farm (guitar/vocal), Crank (bass/vocal), Thread (vocal / guitar / mountain dulcimer) Born/raised: American Midwest Current residence: California Coast For the past two decades, T. Hallenbeck has followed a sort of zigzag path through the music scene, pausing now and then to deal with various existential disasters and the unfortunate necessity of having to have a day job. Born in Indiana and raised in the Great State of Ohio, Hallenbeck began his training as a classical cellist in the fourth grade but realized his parents' worst fears early in his so-called high school 'career' when he took all his paper route money and bought a really crummy electric guitar at a local pawnshop, after which he proceeded to make a great deal of noise in various awful Midwestern garage bands. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1988, Hallenbeck left The Great State of Ohio and migrated to the California Bay Area as guitarist, singer, and songwriter for his band Harm Farm, in which he delighted in dredging the depths of ethnic, folk, and even classical currents to create some of the more unusual sounds in the Bay Area underground of the early 1990s. When Harm Farm self-destructed after two albums and several U.S. tours, Hallenbeck switched from guitar to bass and masterminded the lowbrow viscerality of Crank, an extremely loud power trio founded on the ideal of entertainment through total introversion, which is to say that although the band had some good shows, it business sense left something to be desired. Crank's dissolution somewhere around 1997 left Hallenbeck paranoid about starting another band, or, to put a more favorable spin on it, free to explore the hermeneutics of songwriting in a solo context. For the rest of the 20th century, Hallenbeck devoted his time to reclaiming long-neglected cello chops, learning mandolin and mountain dulcimer, experimenting with low-budget audio engineering, reading a lot of science fiction, and honing the lyrical sensitivities apparent in his later recordings. He broke his self-imposed solitude in 2001 by a stint in a duo with fellow songwriter Ira Scott Levin and later by an ongoing involvement with singer/songwriters Julia Bordenaro, Barbara Griesau, and Allene Rohrer, collectively known as Thread. Drawing from disparate influences such as Richard Thompson, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Bob Mould, Joni Mitchell, the Gnostic Gospels, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Heinlein, Hallenbeck's songs walk the hinterlands of perception and the boundaries of experience. Sounds serious, doesn't it? It's not, really - his stuff is as goofy as it is thoughtful. Although a good part of his recorded material is a multi-instrumental circus, Hallenbeck's live solo performances are events of stark simplicity: one guy playing guitar and singing. Or playing Appalachian dulcimer and singing. Or sometimes playing cello and not singing. His latest album, Packrat (2006), is an attempt to find a middle ground between the austerity of solo performance and the endless temptations of studio recording. Lire la suite