My Work – Michael Beinhorn

My Work

My creative process has evolved intuitively and organically over four decades. I’ve spent the past ten years getting to understand it so I can explain it and incorporate it consciously into my productions. Here are a few examples of recordings I created using some of the same processes.

Soundgarden
Black Hole Sun

This song was the product of a conversation I had with Chris where I encouraged him to write songs that he would like to hear. Three weeks later, he sent me a demo of four songs that included Black Hole Sun. Going into this project, my goal was to make it sound like nothing I’d heard before. Instead of rock music, I used a lot of obscure references, like Dutch techno music (which was considered underground back then), the work of the German record producer Conny Plank and the work of the photorealistic painter, Chuck Close. I loved the immediacy and intensity of techno, the depth and size of Conny’s records and the extreme detail of Chuck Close’s paintings and I tried to apply all that to this recording.

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Higher Ground

Mothers Milk was a very record difficult to make. I had to navigate the band through the death of one member, the departure of another, filling those vacancies without losing too much momentum, and then, working up an album’s worth of songs. Early in the project Flea and Anthony stopped speaking, so I was left to make most of the creative decisions on my own. One afternoon, I came to the studio by myself and added some keyboards, including a track of vocoder on this song to make it more interesting texturally. The vocoder sound was completely foreign to the Chili Peppers and if the band had been there, they probably would never have approved.

Herbie Hancock
Rockit

When I made this record, I was a member of the production duo, Material. Working with Herbie was our chance to create tracks for a well-known artist using a conceptual approach. We tried to envision a revisionist history for Herbie- one where he’d continued to be an intrepid explorer and had unexpectedly run smack dab into this new form of music- hiphop. We asked ourselves the question- if that collision happened, what would the result sound like? We combined elements of hiphop with elements of Afro-Cuban music, electronic and experimental music, jazz and the greatest turntable performance in recorded music. When we first played it to Herbie, he had no idea what to make of it. At the time, we didn’t know ourselves, but we felt it was very special.

Marilyn Manson
The Dope Show

Manson had his Ziggy Stardust meets J.G. Ballard concept for Mechanical Animals. My concept was of a cyborg- a creature that was part man, part machine- perfect, yet sinewy and gristly. A being where you could almost see the borders where the meat of the human body connected with a metal exoskeleton. I liked the idea of elements in the recording seeming very close and immediate and while Manson’s persona was disturbing by design, I wanted to create an uncomfortable dichotomy between his menace and something very intimate and emotional. I think he was actually uncomfortable with how intimate the record turned out and vowed never to make a recording as emotional as that again.

Korn
Here to Stay

When we started production, the band had lost faith in themselves and weren’t sure about what direction to head in. To help get them through the self-doubt, we spent 7 months in pre-production in a variety of different situation and locales. The resulting songs took another 8 months to record and mix. The band watched as the record gradually came into focus and while it was very hard work, they were thrilled. My concept was to make the record sound sonically vast, with concussive drums and bass and guitars that sounded more like some enormous organ playing from the depths of Hell. The sound was so immense that Jonathan lost his voice after the first day of singing, but he eventually rallied and triumphed.

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Behind the Sun

Hillel had the riff for this song kicking around for a while but the band couldn’t figure out what to do with it. One morning, I woke up and realized that I’d dreamed the entire vocal melody. I brought it to the band and they loved it. We spent months in the writing studio at EMI Records developing many of the songs for the record. Considering all the drama around that went into making it, it’s a miracle we got into a studio at all, let alone got it finished and released. This was the first time I literally went into the trenches with a band and fought their fight alongside them.

MICHAEL BEINHORN