Forest Road from Azilian Fragments by Hank Midnight

I spent the summer of 2025 writing an album of songs in the context of the Caza d’Oro artist residency in Mas d’Azil, France— a beautiful region of caves in the foothills of Pyrénées, where filmmaker Chloé Mossessian and I started the production of a film that we’re making on the subject of plant communication. Inspired by the decentralized ‘intelligence’ of mycorrhizal networks, I composed musical fragments on my guitars (electric and acoustic), keys, and vocals and tracked them, along with field recordings captured in nearby mountain streams and arid hilltops, onto a looper pedal, which gave me the freedom to modulate sound parameters while sending ideas out through a battery-powered amplifier and into microphones in a variety of acoustic spaces. Zubin Hensler contributed additional arrangements to my mixes, infusing them with evolving counterpoint lines while fortifying the low end. He also mixed and mastered the album, interweaving my song fragments together into a continuous musical flow. The album title is inspired by a cave that is walking distance from the residency house, and from which the ‘Azilian period’ (roughly 10,000 - 12,500 years ago) got its name. I love walking the sinuous forest paths of this region and thinking about humans from that time period. Like most prehistoric plants, their music does not survive in fossilized form, but we can dream of what their songs must have sounded like. I tried to capture a decentralized musical form on this album-- one from which musical themes emerge suddenly and take on lives of their own, only to disintegrate into other blossoming themes. When I needed a North Star during the writing and production process, I thought of the music of trees decaying and nourishing the plants sprouting around them.

I make albums and film scores.

hankmidnightmusic.com