Mike Sheridan - Atmospherics (2023)

The composer behind one of the most sensational breakthroughs in Danish music invites you on a crackling, ever-changing and deeply personal journey.
His third album Atmospherics drops after a decade in which Mike Sheridan has searched deeply to find and capture his inner sound.

Films, theatres and art museums have benefited from Mike Sheridan‘s sense of sound and melody for the past 10 years. An album has been a long time coming because, in the wake of his breakthrough at the age of 16, he needed to listen extra closely to his inner sounds.

With Atmospherics, he unfolds the music in a meeting between who he once was and who he is today.

Three years ago, he began to create what is now the album Atmospherics. The term refers to electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, such as during a thunderstorm, which can interact with and distort wireless signals. Here, the title refers to both the sound of the album itself, where computer collages, classical instruments crystal clear melodies and heavy rhythms collide, and to the electronic processing and reworking. But really, he thought it would be a quiet release, almost devoid of melodies.

„I had an idea of this controlled piece, and then melodies and colours came out, and I thought, ‚Hey, that wasn‘t the plan.‘ It became a great gift, where I allowed myself to be much more dramatic. There was an energy where I thought, ‚Can the music carry this? And I held on to that energy,“ says Mike.

Being a self-taught songwriter and producer, he worked intuitively. And this time, he got further than he first realised. So far, in fact, that he encountered his 14-year-old self.

„I thought, ‚what happens if I embrace my childish fascination with sound? If I try to make all that buzz tangible?‘ In a way, Atmospherics is the album I‘ve been waiting to make. I took on the role of the adult who could capture the ideas of the child I was forever ago. Atmospherics is a meeting of the two, and together they cultivate and amplify all my darlings,“ he says.

The idea of cultivating rather than killing darlings cuts across both the musical and thematic aspects of the record. It‘s a collage of subjects that Mike Sheridan is passionate about - an experimental space pieced together from impressions from film, art and all the good stuff from his bookshelf. Megaparsec is about so-called orphan stars - stars that have been ripped from a constellation and are hanging alone in space. In reality, there are far more of these lonely stars and their combined light shines the brightest in the universe, so the track is a tribute to the outsider. A track like Minds I is inspired by the myth of Orpheus retrieving his beloved Eurydice from the underworld, but the compromise is that he must never look at her again - in Sheridan‘s case, it becomes a song about digital mirror images.

This is how themes and music slide in and out of each other on the album. There are moments of dub, techno, pop and modern compositional music.
There are sounds and beats that crackle, dissolve, replace each other, or connect with each other in new ways.In this way, Atmospherics can be listened to as a long exhalation from an artist who has dared to hold his breath longer than most.

Atmospherics features both Danish and international guests such as Agnes Aldén (a singer, songwriter and producer from Falun, Sweden), Indra Rios-Moore (a singer, songwriter and arranger, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan), BYLJA and Janus Rasmussen - as well as a host of Sheridan‘s regular musicians.

The artwork for Atmospherics is created by visual artist Nicolai Howalt.