It’s a modern-day origin story, a group of musicians that have never all lived in the same city and have rarely been in the same place at the same time. Yet Mien (pronounced ‘mean’, a word defined as ‘essence’) release their second album, Miien, on April 18, extending both their vowels and their textural psychedelic repertoire.
Their lead singer, Alex Maas, is well-known to Austinites. He’s fronted the Black Angels since they began in 2004. Alex and drummer Robb Kidd (who plays in Golden Dawn Arkestra and on Alex’s solo endeavors) are both based in Austin, yet John Mark Lapham (The Earlies, The Late Cord, The Revival Hour) lives in Abilene, TX, and Rishi Dhir (Elephant Stone, The Datsons) calls Montreal home. Yet for today at least, they have all gathered for an Austin show and Studio 1A session. But how – and why – did Mien get started. Was Alex really in the market for another psychedelic band?
“I ran into Rishi at least 20 years ago,” Alex recalls, “during South by Southwest, right around the same time Black Angels started. I was at a Brian Jonestown Massacre show on Sixth Street. I remember a fight almost broke out. Then Rishi busts out his sitar. I hadn’t seen a sitar, especially with rock and roll. It just worked perfectly, so that’s how we first met.”
John Mark picks up the story. “I was in a band called The Earlies in England, and I think Rishi’s old band, the High Dials, opened for the Earlies one time. And we became friends. We kept in touch over emails. And I had this idea for a cover song that I’d been thinking about. I had it in my notebook, and then one day on some social media, Rishi posted that same song. It was by the band The Association from the 60s. I’d never heard anyone else mention or play this song. So I sent him a message, ‘I can’t believe you like this song. We’ve got to do a cover of it.’ And Rishi said, ‘We could get Alex from the Black Angels to do the vocal.’ It was just random. We weren’t really thinking we’re going to start a band. Let’s just record this song. We never even recorded the song, of course, but we started recording our own. So that’s how it all got started.”
The outcome of their first experiment, a song called “Black Habit”, gave them all the enthusiasm to go further. “When I heard ‘Black Habit’,” Alex recalls, I was like, ‘that’s a sound.’” It was. Veteran psychedelia mixes with Lapham’s swirling, Eno-esque electronics. It gives them a unique sound, and from the outset, Mien made clear they were interested in reaching beyond psych’s borders.
“It became a blueprint for how we work,” John Mark recalls. ”Not only the methods, but also just the sonic direction we were going to go. We weren’t initially thinking about being a band. We’d record a song. And then when that song, ‘Black Habit’, started coming together, we thought we should do more. It just kept going until we finally said, ‘okay, I think that’s an album’s worth of material’.” The album was assembled piecemeal, sharing files, each of them working from their own locations. Each of them were busy with other projects so there was not much time to support the album. But they were happy with the results and more than willing to do it again.
“We were like, okay, now we’re a band,” John Mark recalls. “We’re going to record another album. But Covid hit, so we would have Zoom meetings like everyone else. And we were all so scattered and our heads were in so many different places. So we started setting goals, like, okay, we’re all going to do a little piece of music. It could just be 20 seconds, but we’re going to do something and it has to be done within a few days or a week or whatever, and we all had to present it to each other as like a show and tell type thing, just to to kind of motivate people. We had to fight through the Covid haze a bit, but we finally got there.”
All of them were writing, contributing ideas. “I might have a melody and some vocal lines that may or may not make sense to anybody else,” Alex says. “For me, it’s easier to find melodies and ask, ‘Hey, what do you hear when I sing this?’ It takes a certain trust for me to be able to do that, to hand it off. Like, ‘here’s some literal gibberish. But the melodies there, what can you do with that?’”
“That’s what I love about working with Alex” John Mark continues. “He’ll record vocal sketches that are not actual words, but he’ll do his melodies and his whole cadence and everything, and it sparks off so many lyric ideas for me. It’s really fun to be able to go through and start writing around that, filling in those spaces. Like the first time, everyone brings things to the table.”
Two years ago at SXSW, after months of working on these demos, they arranged to actually all get together for an actual recording session. “We had this concentrated time,” John Mark says. “Rishi was going to be here anyway with his band Elephant Stone. We had, I don’t know, 2 or 3 days in the studio to re-record a lot of stuff. A lot of times we’ll build songs with samples or loops. Sometimes we’ll keep that stuff and other times we’ll come back in and replay them with a live feel to it. That was one of the only times I’ve ever done that, where we were in the studio recording together.” Alex laughs. “It was crazy and mental.”
Essentially, the band had re-learn what they had recorded. And in the process of actually playing live, new ideas began to emerge. And now, given their geographic distances and busy schedules, they are planning what was previously unthinkable. The Austin show is a kickoff. But suddenly, Mien seems like more than an internet recording project.
“We did one European tour to support the first record,” Alex remembers, and not much after that. And we just did 2 or 3 weeks in Canada. It was right after we had Luca on my son, literally a month after. My wife was really thrilled about that. We went over there and that was kind of it. We all had so many projects. And then Covid happened and at some point our hands were kind of tied in terms of what we could do. When you have something like this, a project where there’s four people living in different places, it’s just weird. To get everybody to commit to 2 or 3 weeks of touring, it’s almost impossible. Very tricky.”
Yet they seemed to have pulled it off. Their website has numerous European dates listed for April. “We just got a support tour,” Alex says. “I can’t say it is, for now. What it involves is everybody just being calm and clearing their schedules for everything, and just prioritizing it all.” From:
https://kutx.org/sessions-interviews/studio1a/from-an-internet-recording-project-to-an-actual-band-the-evolution-of-mien/
