Mike Morasky is an American composer, animator/visual effects artist, director and programmer. He is best known for his work at Valve Corporation composing the scores for Portal 2, the Left 4 Dead series, Team Fortress 2 and the original Portal. He is also known for his groundbreaking visual effects work on The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix trilogies as well as founding the seminal underground art band Steel Pole Bath Tub.
For Valve, Morasky composed the music for Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 (including composing and playing the guitar, keyboard and bass for the fictional hard rock band "Midnight Riders"), Portal 2 and half of the music for the original Portal. He also worked as a visual effects supervisor on The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix film trilogies. Morasky was part of the now defunct hardcore punk/noise rock band "Steel Pole Bath Tub", which he founded in 1986 with Dale Flattum. S.P.B.T. disbanded in 2002. On Valve's official website, his function is described as follows: "Morasky's life and career looks a lot like one of the post-modern audio collages he is so fond of creating. Guitar player in a full-time bar band in Montana as a teen, award winning experimental composer in Tokyo, audio hardware programmer in Silicon Valley, underground art rocker touring the world, 3d animator and director for television, electronic audio collage artist in France and Japan, visual fx artist on the Lord of the Rings and Matrix Trilogies, AI animation instructor at an art college and currently he is applying some combination of all these things to games at Valve." In the MP3 tags of the official Portal 2 soundtrack, Morasky is credited as "Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory".