My Work – Michael Beinhorn

My Work

My creative process has evolved over four decades. Here are a few examples of recordings I created using this process.

Soundgarden
Black Hole Sun

“Black Hole Sun” resulted in part from a conversation I had with Chris where I encouraged him to write songs that he’d like to hear. Three weeks later, he sent me a demo of four songs that included this one. My goal in making ‘Superunknown’ was for it to sound like nothing I’d heard before. I cross-referenced a bunch of random things, like Dutch techno music, the German record producer Conny Plank’s work and the paintings of Chuck Close, a renowned photorealist. I loved the intensity of techno, the depth of Conny’s records and the extreme detail of Chuck Close’s paintings and I tried to apply all those concepts to this recording.

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Higher Ground

Mothers Milk was a difficult record to make. I had to navigate the band through the death of one member, the departure of another, finding new members after losing momentum, and then, working up an album’s worth of songs. A few weeks in, some of the band disengaged from the recording, so I was left to make many creative decisions on my own. One afternoon, I came to the studio 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 ok’ed it.

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 imagined a revisionist version of Herbie- one who’d continued to be an intrepid explorer after making “Headhunters” and had unexpectedly discovered this new form of music called hiphop. We asked ourselves, if that collision had happened, what would the result sound like? We combined elements of hiphop with 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 he was listening to. We didn’t know ourselves, but we knew 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- superhuman, yet sinewy and gristly. A being where the meat of its human body had been indelicately grafted to a metallic exoskeleton. I wanted the overall presentation to feel very close and immediate, while simultaneously, Manson’s persona was so disturbing and repulsive. I wanted to create an uncomfortable, irreconcilable dichotomy between Manson’s menace and an underlying intimate and emotional sensibility. It seemed he wasn’t happy with how vulnerable the record made him appear and vowed to never make a recording that emotional again.

Korn
Here to Stay

When we started production, the band had lost direction and weren’t sure what to do. To help them move forward, 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 in spite of the 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 his first day of singing, but he quickly rallied and triumphed, with some of his best vocal performances ever.

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. From there, the song came together quickly, with Anthony and I singing the melody together. We spent months in the writing studio at EMI Records developing many of the songs for the record. There was so much drama that went into making it, it’s a miracle we got into a studio at all, let alone got it finished and released. This recording was the first time I literally went into the trenches with a band and fought their fight alongside them, tooth and nail.

MICHAEL BEINHORN