Where creativity meets connection
I’d not expected electronic music pioneer Halina Rice to come out with such a full-throated defence of tween-pop, but here we are. If there’s anything I should have anticipated it’s that the rising multi-media star would defy any expectations. She’s a musician who fiddles about with old kit, while utilising the latest technologies, and an artist with a clear vision for her work but wants audiences to establish their own interpretations of it. Sweeping between the comforting and the angular, Rice’s output demands your attention.
“Although I listen to a lot of experimental stuff, I also love listening to Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan,” she tells me. “They're both going back to old school songwriting. It’s really beautifully done and witty, a bit like Billie Eilish. They’ve got a clever modern edge to the vocabulary that they'll use, and the issues that they're picking up.” Perhaps music constantly draws from its past. It just seems a bit more prevalent now that there’s music tech that I recognise from my own childhood that is increasingly being deployed today. Especially those old rave sounds, which are commonplace in modern pop.
Rice starts flicking through her phone, in an attempt to find a picture of her playing a Juno 60 synthesizer aged 12. Temporarily defeated by technology, she tells me it’s her favourite childhood photo. Spin forwards a few years, and she’s still messing about with similar retro tech, recently working with a Minimoog Voyager and a Roland SH-101 in the studio. “People are revisiting all that. In my area of IDM, a lot of people will be using Prophet keyboards. I use a mixture of analogue and Virtual Studio Technology, but I don't feel I have to go back to the old school. I don't feel a requirement to have to do that. I think it's fine to use VSTS. A lot of my work is about audio manipulation and using multiple effects, which are often digital.”
A celebrated electronic music producer and audiovisual installation artist, Rice released her third studio album EVOLVE in October last year, which attracted acclaim from critics and fans alike. But it’s in a live environment where her work truly shines. She’s currently on tour across the UK, heading to places like Nottingham Rock City, Manchester New Century, Newcastle NX, Bristol’s SWX, Glasgow SWG3, Leeds Project House and London’s South Bank Centre (with the BBC Symphony Orchestra), as well as two nights at Hove’s The Old Market on Thurs 13 - Fri 14 March. “I've got a long history with them. I was doing all my own promoting to start with in 2022 and was turned down for one 300 capacity venue. He said: ‘Oh, you'll never sell the tickets…’ I got in touch with The Old Market and was asked in for a meeting.”
The Hove venue has built a fierce reputation for platforming artists who are doing interesting things on the so-called fringes but still offer massive potential. Rice fitted neatly with their Reigning Women, a freeform celebration of genre-jumping artists, first taking her work there in November 2022, which sold out in around a month. “That was my first association with the lovely team there. Then they invited me back. They had four massive vinyl screens, so they could change their traditional audience space into an immersive experience.”
Rice was one of the first artists contributing towards TOM’s In The Box shows, creating a 360 ° visual installation with them. “We also bought in spatial audio, because I work in immersive technologies as well. I introduced them to an acoustics specialist I work with, and we put in a 12:1 speaker system which went all around the auditorium. Then we just offered people to come in and see a loop of video for free.”
She tells me the Hove arts space is undoubtedly one of the more forward-thinking venues in the region. “Some of the stuff they put on is outstanding, from the AI to the immersive stuff as well. It's really interesting what they do, because it's quite a traditional venue. It's a proper theatre, but they’ve always got their eye on the future.”
In 2020 she launched her groundbreaking New Worlds project, each release comprising of both music and an accompanying unique visual environment. These are developed with a team of designers, and morph according to the music’s mood. Some are rounded, organic and strangely pleasing, while others are quite jagged. “I think there’s a sort of nice tension to all the stuff that we produce. Some of it, we do just want to be beautiful. Well, not beautiful in the traditional… It is meant to be an elevating experience. The emotional response is quite interesting, as is playing around with that and seeing how far you can push it. You can take people just a tiny bit beyond their comfort zone, then bring them back again.”
Recordings are made using Dolby Atmos, a format more often associated with cinema, to push technical boundaries and create music which envelops the listener. This transfers into the live performances, where the audience are placed in an immersive experience with complementing music and visual elements with the help of huge screens and multiple speaker placements. “I don't want it to be like: ‘Oh, there's someone onstage and there's all the lights and these flashing things’. I want everyone to be cocooned inside an experience.”
From the very beginning, Rice was influenced by pioneering producers like John Hopkins and Rival Consoles – artists who blur delineations between audio and visual. “I was also very influenced by installation artists. So there's a guy called Ryoji Ikeda who's had a number of exhibitions all over the world. He did this show in London at 180 The Strand, where you went into a huge hall with almost like a catwalk running through it. That had these moving bars projected onto it and sound surrounding you, all working in time together. People were just transfixed and almost became part of the installation.” She concedes ‘immersive’ is an overused word but is fascinated with the concept of making the audience feel like they’re inside the performance.
She also cites Marina Abramović as being really interesting and a big influence on the ambitions for her own live shows. The Serbian performance artist’s recent show at London’s Serpentine literally made visitors to the gallery an integral part of the work. “She and her helpers reposition you, so you become part of a sort of living statue. Or maybe you go into a huge room, and you all have to lie down on a bed…”
The experiential aspect to works like these doubtlessly appeals to Rice. She creates performances which are similarly mysterious to begin with. People arrive, and the venue is filled with dry ice and the lights are low; which gradually gives way to strobing effects and full-on visuals. “There is an arc to it all. People have an opportunity to just get lost and be outside of the day to day.” As her shows offer a mind-bending distillation of a techno party, AV display and installation art, they’ve seen her engage with an interesting audience, which spans both the traditional Turner Prize crowd and club-hopping ravers, and everyone in between.
“I think often the project attracts anyone who loves creative stuff. I don't think there's an age range, it's very broad, those who’ve got the sort of soul that reverberates with this kind of thing. You just don't know who's gonna love it. Perhaps because it makes you contemplate and think, and it doesn't need to have an objective. Sometimes we come out of these things and feel a bit different about life. This is a space to be, feel a bit different or out of yourself.”
Arguably, this creation of a happening draws parallels between the work of Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, whose infamous parties would mix live visual arts with truly underground rock music and a cast of diverse and curious characters. “Maybe. Then there was Club UFO, which had the original Pink Floyd gigs. If it could ever achieve that sort of status… But there is that sense of this being more than somewhere to drink and dance, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that.”
She says that a lot of music artists have a defined manifesto of what it is they're trying to achieve. What Rice prefers is something she describes as a “Close Encounters way of working,” offering how that film’s protagonist is so affected by the mental imprint left by alien visitors that he starts building huge models of the mountain where they hope to make first contact with humanity.
“He doesn't know what he's making but has a message that he needs to express. I think, with a lot of artists, it's the same. It doesn't matter what they do, whether it's film, or whatever, but it creates a community of people or a feeling. It doesn't matter what the medium is, it can only be articulated in its expressions.”
Rice is one of the main attractions at a cutting-edge festival at Crystal Palace. On Fri 2 - Sun 4 May, Polygon Live LDN will bring two fully immersive venues to the London park, filled with unparalleled sound, stunning visuals and ground-breaking electronic artists. “It’s run by a company who build stages at festivals which use spatial audio. Obviously, I do a lot of work in that and played with them before Christmas at a festival in Thailand. What they have is this incredible dome that's covered with LED lights. It’s the most phenomenal thing. If you're in a festival, you just see it sort of shining in the distance.” Mounted in this structure, which accommodates around 2500 people, are nearly 100 speakers to create truly immersive audio. The reasoning around having such a complex speaker set-up is that sound tends to dissipate faster in open spaces, meaning organisers need to use larger systems or get creative.
“I'm performing on the Saturday… And John Hopkins, who's my absolute hero, is performing just before me. I'm going to try and avoid fan-girling too much, but I'm so excited to be going there.”
Rice’s work with spatial audio has brought her into collaboration with L Acoustics, working expensively with their L-ISA audio software. “There’s no commercial relationship, but we do cooperate on a number of events. I played at Earth in Hackney in 2022 and they have 17.1.8 systems. You've got seven speakers around the audience, and then you've got eight speakers that are overheads. That was a really exciting first big project with them. Since then, we've had a really productive relationship. As an independent artist, I feedback to them about how I’m using their technology.”
“I think, if I get excited about something, I want to share it with other people,” she admits. “For me, it's about ideas. What I really like is when some people come to the show, they go: ‘I came away inspired to go and do my own project or think again about stuff’. It's about passing on interesting ideas. We all love ideas. That's what the Andy Warhol thing was about... It's a challenge to accept an artform that you could just screen print something and still sell it for a lot of money. So, yeah, is there an end to this? I don't really know.”
Halina Rice comes to Hove’s The Old Market on Thurs 13 - Fri 14 March and Polygon Live LDN on Fri 2 - Sun 4 May 2025. Her new album, EVOLVE, is available now.
All images by Michal Augustini
Stuart Rolt
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