Halina Rice is an electronic musician and AV artist creating emotive electronic music ranging from evocative soundscapes to beat-driven tracks.
Her live shows have been described as “part-rave, part art-happening” taking audiences from immersive experience to dance-inspired tracks.
With her last album ELISION released in 2022 to critical acclaim, her music has been described as “sublime and infectious” by Electronic Sound magazine and as “modern electronic music at its finest” by Headphone Commute.
As Rice states “my main focus is to present compelling, emotive and innovative music and visuals in order to move the audience outside of their day to day experience. I want people to come away from the shows feel invigorated and inspired.
Read our interview to discover more about Halina’s work and insights.
As an artist who aims to move the audience outside of their day to day experience, which emotions or reactions do you hope your music and visuals evoke in your listeners?
When I think about what I'm trying to evoke in listeners, I'm not really very prescriptive about it because I think everyone one kind of comes with their own experiences and things will resonate or they will react in different ways depending on their own individual experience.
But what I tend to find is that if there's something that I create musically or something that I create working with one of the visual designers, if something resonates with us or kind of excites us, then that's often going to create a reaction in the audience as well. So we tend to go for stuff that makes us feel something. I think it's a really individual way that people react to the events.
How do you prepare for large scale events?
For instance, I had a show at Village Underground on October 3rd. In that instance, it's just mainly about the technical side. Planning is probably the most important way that I prepare because in my shows I'm running the audio, the visual jewels and quite a large proportion of the lighting. It's making sure that I've done all the relevant site checks and understand what the venue capabilities are and checking that my setup is going to interact with their setup OK. Also, that I'm completely in line with the promoter for all the details about the event.
Then another aspect is when I run spatial sounds. In some gigs, I'm running multi speaker systems with sound coming all around the audience. I have a show coming up at Ade on Thursday, October. The 19th at a venue called The Other Side, which has just had a 14.1.5 speaker system installed.
And in that instance, there's a little bit extra planning, which is that you need to receive their speaker layout in order to be able to reprogram your sound so that it's coming out into the formation of speakers in their venue. So it's really just about planning and lots today.
What is the central theme or concept that ties all the tracks on your upcoming EP New Basis together? How did this theme influence your creative process while working on the project?
I think possibly for New Basis, the creative theme is something about contradictions. There's a kind of a clash of classical and more experimental forms.
Definitely I created chord structures that have quite a sort of long, almost recognizable contemporary classical structure, but then they would be presented in a sort of electronic instrumentation and I never really wanted those shapes to be 100% recognizable. Things twist and change throughout and there are builds of distortion. Then we kind of reflected that in the creative process.
Working with visual designer Frany Anthony, we actually used scans, 3D scans of natural objects. But then we kind of took those, recolored them and twisted and distorted them so that the visuals were matching the music. Organic and inorganic juxtaposition is what lied through the whole creative thinking behind the EP.
How do you stay inspired and innovative in your music and visual art?
One of the ways that I'd stay inspired is to go and see other people's shows, works or art presentations. For instance, there's a venue in London called Eclectic which is just in Waterloo and it's non profit making so they'll platform quite experimental ideas, students, etc who are just sort of trying things in quite a raw format. And that's really interesting because it can kind of trigger ideas or developments from that. And I'm lucky enough to also play at audiovisual festivals. I was at MUTEK in Montreal a few weeks ago and there was just a huge number of fantastic presentations from around the world.
Sometimes it's seeing other people's work but also just being in venues. For instance, being in a dome projection venue and just thinking this is really interesting and what would I do in this space? So yeah, just sort of getting out and about and having a bit of reflective time while you're absorbing other audience of visual events and you.
What advice would you give to emerging electronic artists?
The advice I'd give to emerging electronic artists is to connect with other like minded people in your area. If there are meetups of electronic, electronic or AV groups, it's a really great way just to share information and learn. Maybe you're going to collaborate or work with a few people that you meet there. And also, in a lot of these groups you're just performing maybe for other people in the group. It can be a really non judgmental place for you to trial before you take that in front of a ticketed audience, for instance.
And I think also it's great to feel like you're connected to a wider community because it can be quite an isolating thing to do. It's good to be able to call on other people as you solve production queries, as you work your way through what the right kind of format and setup is for you.
