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{Biography: Mark Halliwell}The year is 1989. A cold winter wind howls through the streets of the seaside town of Warrnambool, Australia. An unassuming adolescent by the name of Mark Halliwell is given his first acoustic guitar by his parents. It is an event that will re-write music history.Fast forward to the present, and much has happened to shape and distend the landscape of popular music. The fleeting phenomena of Seattle grunge, Britpop and other generic aberrations have given way to the desolation and din of an embarrassing sonic mediocrity. As always, it is left to the underground to rescue mainstream pop from itself. Enter Halliwell’s latest studio effort: Aural Sculpture Volume 1 (www.myspace.com/auralsculptureband).Like an ice-cold bottle of Melbourne Bitter perched atop of Halliwell’s Marshall Stack, ‘Volume 1’ stands ready to be cracked open to satiate the thirst of people shouting out for something to put the swagger back into their step. A whirling conundrum of paranoid psychedlia, infectious rhythms, chiming guitars and haunting string sections, this album proves to be an arresting and brilliantly crafted work that does exactly that. Lyrically, Halliwell effortlessly invokes the biting satire of Iggy Pop, the delusional musings of Maynard James-Keenan, and the menacing post-punk despondency of Ian Curtis. From the inspirational tale of rebirth in ‘The Hitman’ to the mesmerising splendour of the closing track, ‘Opium suite opus,’ ‘Volume 1’ bends space and time in a manner that would confound Einstein.It would be unfair to describe ‘Volume 1’ as a purely solo effort. An arch-collaborator, Halliwell is well-known for drawing on, and complementing, the talents of his contemporaries. For the Aural Sculpture project, he recorded and sampled a hazy jam session with his band-mates from Warrnambool cover-specialists, Fun City. Through the lens of Aural Sculpture, Halliwell applied his musicianship, studio knowledge and flashing imagination to disguise a seasoned commercial covers band as crazed merchants of hallucinogenic rock n roll. A bit like the Beatles re-inventing themselves as Sgt Pepper’s? Well, not quite. But you get the idea.Halliwell’s first serious studio effort was 2003’s Trips of the Trade. As hinted at by its shimmering title, the album is layered with (apparently) chemically-induced imagery and a soundscape reminiscent of Bowie and Dylan at the height of their powers. Tracks like ‘The Smoke Song’, ‘The Solar Trip’ and the title track all demonstrated the potential of a song-smith who was reluctant to allow a natural drive toward guitar-virtuosity to subvert a cutting-edged creativity.The promise of ‘Trips’ was promptly fulfilled with the majestic bombast of Disjointed Themes in 2004. This collection of manic hard rock and art-metal provoked everything from casual intrigue to unhinged excitement across music industries based in Warrnambool, Melbourne and beyond. Halliwell is inclined to refer to ‘Themes’ as his “concept albumâ€, yet the tracks on this album are as separate as they are united (a paradox heightened by the inclusion of the ‘disjointed’ descriptor in the album title). But from the moment the disc is spun, semantics become unimportant as the listener is pounded by the Sabbath-laden riffs of ‘The Black Sense’, seduced by the rhythmic incantations of the ‘Concentric’ compositions, and transported by the folksy sunset cinema of ‘April Evening.’ The popularity of the latter track lead to the release of the limited edition April Evening/Ballad of Resolve EP in 2006.If Aural Sculpture Volume 1 can be described as Halliwell’s flagship of the moment, it is worth noting that there are many other vessels in the Halliwell fleet currently charging across the high seas. He is a permanent member of Warrnambool folk-rock troubadours the Chosen Few, performing live at gigs and festivals, and contributing to the Chosen Few’s whimsical ‘The Seed’ EP. Additional performances along side the extraordinary Heidi Gass, admired for her stunning vocals and haunting piano-driven melodies, has provided Halliwell with still another perspective from which to create new musical visions.Halliwell’s musical obsessions are many and varied. This perception is borne out by an enduring fascination with heavy metal music, and his admiration of both legendary and obscure figures in metal culture throughout the world. Halliwell is more than capable of suspending his pop intuition in favour of the instinctive primal aggression that is the hallmark of all other-worldly heavy metal brilliance. Local death metal legends, Stranglehold, could not have built their voracious following or released their self-titled EP without the frightening riffs and musical direction contributed by Halliwell. In a similar vein, Halliwell is a key driver of the progressive-metal project, Illuuminus, and death-rock act, Mundus Vult. Both bands exhibit a head-turning potential to lift Australia’s burgeoning hard rock/metal scenes into the stratosphere.Is it gratuitous or nonsensical to suggest that Halliwell may yet leave an indelible stamp on western civilization in the manner of the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan or even Elvis? Well, probably yes. Is it a bridge too far to say that Halliwell may yet redefine pop culture? That depends on who you talk to. Do we really care about such conjecture and pretensions? Not really. We can be certain of only one thing: Halliwell has come a long way since that wintry day in 1989 when he first picked up the ubiquitous piece of string-bound timber. Where to from here is anyone’s guess.{Craig Nixon
November 2007}