Sometimes the best projects come into existence without anyone involved being
quite sure why or how, and so it is with Mien. John Mark Lapham of Anglo-Texan
acid folk legends the Earlies, Montreal-based sitar virtuoso Rishi Dhir of Elephant
Stone, singer Alex Maas of Austin, Texas’s lords of reverberation the Black Angels
and keyboard player Tom Furse of London’s consistently inventive The Horrors
might seem like a psychedelic dream team, but they never mapped out this trawl
through the inner wardrobes of their collective mind. In fact Mien, whose debut
album finds the uncharted hinterland between industrial dread, new age
ambience and cosmic expansion, was almost entirely accidental.
“It was very random and unpredictable,” says John Mark Lapham, of Mien’s
beginnings. “Rishi had contributed sitar to the Earlies’ second album, and I was
living in Rochester, New York in 2012 when I saw that he was playing with the Black
Angels in Buffalo, which is down the road. I went to go see them, and the whole
idea of us working together with Alex started floating around. The Black Angels had
crossed paths with the Horrors, so Tom was the last piece of the puzzle. It was
initially just a case of exchanging ideas. We loved the music, but we never wanted
to form a supergroup. We just wanted a fun experience. We didn’t even know we
were a band until we got the record deal with Rocket.”
“I seem to remember DJing at an Elephant Stone show in London,” says Tom Furse
on his own involvement. “Rishi and I hadn’t seen each other in a while. He started
talking about this idea for a band with Alex and I jumped at the chance. I love
collaboration, I knew Rishi and Alex were really good at what they do, and that’s
exactly what you want out of your collaborators. I had no idea what it might sound
like, but JM took the lead there. He’d developed this aesthetic that was psychedelic
without falling on any old tropes and that resonated with me massively… His shit
just sounded cool.”
Beyond Rishi using the darkness and drama of Scott Walker’s later albums was a
reference point, nobody actually knew what kind of a band this would be — or
indeed if it would be a band at all. Tom describes responding to what he was
hearing by “sometimes just adding a little sound, at other times putting on
something completely bonkers.” With the four members spread across the globe
there was no agenda and none of the baggage that inevitably comes with playing
music with people over time, meaning the ideas could flow freely without fear of
suppression. It helps explain the unique quality of sound and vision, with Alex
Maas’s lyrics combining mystery and realism as they veer from playfulness — the
nonsense poetry of Odyssey’s “tchi-tchi boy” — to reflections on political upheaval,
such as “(I’m Tired Of) Western Shouting.”
It was only when the ominous “Black Habit” emerged that everyone realized they
were on a shared journey. “That was the weird part,” says Rishi. “Nothing was
talked about. We have our own projects and our own egos but with this, if someone
felt that a song wasn’t working, we were generally all fine with it. Everything
was unspoken.”
“We would each add something singular before it went through the filter that is
Mien,” says John Mark. “It passes through all of us and ends up sounding like a
cohesive album. The litmus test was: Are we in that Mien world?”
“Apart from the sitar, it was difficult to know who played what because the tracks
would go back and forth and it ended up being the product of the same mind,” adds
Alex. “If it met the criteria of whatever Mien is, we all knew it.”
What, then, is Mien? Unsurprisingly those involved find it hard to describe, so
let me help: Mien sounds like it has emerged from the primordial swamp.
Psychedelic music typically has associations with the late 60s and early 70s,
but this is timeless. An industrial slant gives modernist heaviness, but the
sitars and sweet melodies bring an ancient quality. This is searching music,
made by people who aren’t quite sure what they are looking for but will keep on
searching until they have found it.
From: https://www.forcefieldpr.com/2018/04/05/mien-feat-members-of-the-horrors-the-black-angels-more-shares-new-single-from-debut-lp-out-this-friday/
