MIEN

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.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of KUTX