SATURDAY JUNE 8: RISING: Day Tripper at Melbourne Town Hall. Tickets & info here. SUNDAY JUNE 9: DAREBIN ARTS CENTRE with special guest Hantu. Tickets on sale here. TUESDAY JUNE 11: PHOENIX CENTRAL PARK, SYDNEY. Ballot now open.
Mistletone proudly presents the first ever AU tour by MEMORIALS ~ the new duo of Verity Susman (Electrelane) + Matthew Sims (Wire). MEMORIALS are part of the brilliant Day Tripper lineup at RISING and will also play a Melbourne headline show at Darebin Arts Centre plus a Sydney show at Phoenix Central Park.
As a duo, MEMORIALS multi-instrumentalists Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire, Better Corners, It Hugs Back, UUUU) cover plenty of ground on stage, juggling instruments in a set up resembling that of a 5-piece band. Their sound touches on the many points for which they are known, veering from melodic songwriting to psychedelic noise, free jazz freakouts, tape loops and drones, and then back again. Their debut double album – Music For Film: Tramps! & Women Against The Bomb – is out via The state51 Conspiracy label.
“Both films explore the liminal period when the 80s began to burst from the chrysalis of the 70s, and the exciting, unpredictable music of MEMORIALS reflects the wild creativity and ambition of the time. Technology was democratising music production, and what had once been wild ideas – gender fluidity, postmodernism, feminism – continued their long swim into the mainstream. For Women Against the Bomb, wide-eyed yet inspiring lyrics (“Just as winter comes to spring… We know that peace will come”) tumble over a sugar rush of guitars. Tramps! is less accessible but just as powerful, especially during the full-pelt title track or Feel of Time’s feral, grinding chaos. Each album is like a trove of tapes uncovered after 40 years, one in the city, the other the countryside. How Susman and Simms present these many moods on stage is a problem that should be fun to watch them fathom” – THE GUARDIAN
Mistletone is excited to present the great Cate Le Bon, touring Australia with her brilliant band. Tickets on sale now!
CATE LE BON TOUR DATES:
PERTH: Monday December 9 @ Rosemount Hotel. Presented by Cool Perth Nights. tickets on sale here. SYDNEY: Wednesday December 11 @ Factory Theatre. tickets on sale here. BRISBANE: Thursday December 12 @ The Foundry. tickets on sale here. CASTLEMAINE: Friday December 13 @ Theatre Royal. tickets on sale here. MEREDITH: Saturday December 14 @ Meredith Music Festival. MELBOURNE: Sunday December 15 @ Croxton Bandroom. tickets on sale here.
“Surrealist, tactile, against the grain… Welsh polymath Cate Le Bon keeps a steady, curious hand. “A ringleader who’s prepared to stake out uncertain territory”, she walks the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye” – AUNTY MEREDITH
It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned — for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date.
Grandfather-clock-like chimes occupy the first few bars of opener ‘Miami’, heralding the commencement of an album largely concerned with a period of significant personal change. Not only is the city of the song’s title the location of a seismic shift in Le Bon’s life, but it is also, she suggests, faintly ridiculous for someone from a small town in Wales to be singing about cosmopolitan Miami; a perfect parallel to the feeling of absurdity which can accompany a big life change. Such changes demand adjustment, she muses, punctuated by the continuing chime of the synth and a smattering of sax; Never be the same again / No way / Falling skies and people are bored…Oh, it takes some time / It hangs in doors.
From there, into the early morning mist sprouts gently-wrought first single ‘Daylight Matters’. Its persistent I love yous, voiced over a subtly disorderly arrangement, are not, as they may at first seem, an outpouring of affection, but rather a luxuriation in the deliciousness of self-pity; the product of time spent alone “enforcing an absence in order to mourn it” as opposed to an out and out love song — although, Le Bon adds, “love is always lurking, I suppose.” Hot on the heels of the first is melancholic second single ‘Home to You’, at once a new sound for Le Bon and yet still identifiably hers; exemplary of Reward‘s shift away from the more classical-sounding keys 2016’s Crab Day, and a lilt towards the electronic in its predominant use of synthesiser. But despite this stylistic departure, the ghost of the Meers lingers; that Reward‘s ten songs were conceived alone at a piano remains evident not by their literal sound, but rather by the feeling of closeness that they convey.
This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential studio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Though a stint in Los Angeles to try and finish some of the songs didn’t last long (“it just didn’t work…it was just too hectic, everything seemed a bit more fragmented and people were coming and going, as opposed to it being this closed off to the world-ness that I think I really seek when I’m recording”), Le Bon and co-producer and engineer Samur Khouja took to the Joshua Tree desert. “We barely saw other people and it was conducive to finding our feet with the record again.”
Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick — Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars — and were added to the album, “one by one, one on one”. The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon’s previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a relatively drastic change in approach.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh Myor critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?(4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. This skilful traversing of apparent contradictions continues to make itself known on Reward, where, from the lamenting bones of ‘Home to You’ springs ‘Mother’s Mother’s Magazines’, a song derived from “being around a lot of really fed up women” which in its loose twanginess of composition and playful lyrics, calls to mind DRINKS — the side-project which Le Bon co-parents with Tim Presley (of White Fence). Glimmers of the biting, tongue-in-cheek and often surrealist imagery found scattered throughout Le Bon’s previous works rear their heads once more on ‘Sad Nudes’ (Pick up the phone / Take the call from your mother / She really wants you to answer) and the pulsating, cascading ‘Magnificent Gestures’ (I was born with no lips / Drip drip drips). Though things take a turn for the pessimistic on third single ‘The Light’, (Mother I feel the crowd on the turn / Took out the windows / Moved the stairs / And I don’t see the comedy / Holding the door to my own tragedy / Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me), it is not without an underlying sense of humour, as Le Bon cynically ponders Where would he go for fun in this town? And after all, the light that eventually seeks her out offers the lonely artist salvation.
The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art — its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious — is evident right down to the album’s very name. “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word” says Le Bon, “and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.” The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.”
Mistletone proudly presents Swedish psych rock legends Dungen, touring Australia for the first time since 2006 to perform at the 26th annual Meredith Music Festival from December 9-11. The Meredith ticket ballot is open now.
“I love Dungen” – Kevin Parker, Tame Impala
Dungen‘s mastermind and main songwriter. Gustav Ejstes, has been making music—at first for himself, then eventually and inevitably for all of us—for nearly twenty years. Growing up in rural Sweden, he became obsessed with hip-hop and sampling. Digging through crates and searching for obscure source material provided him with an informal education in ‘60s pop and psychedelia, and soon he learned to play the bits and pieces he was sampling. He took up guitar and bass, drums and keyboard and even flute, then took to his grandmother’s basement to put it all on tape.
When Ejstes recorded his first album, he released it in 2001 under the name Dungen, which means “The Grove”— a nod to his village upbringing or perhaps a deeper reference to American folk songs like “Shady Grove.” While his music has routinely garnered comparisons to acts like Love, Pink Floyd, the Electric Prunes, and Os Mutantes, he has always emphasized a strong sense of songcraft. The music has deep roots in history, but it blooms in the present.
With 2004’s breakout Ta Det Lugnt, Dungen garnered an avid fanbase outside of Scandinavia. Pitchfork lauded the album with a 9.3 and asserted that Ejstes’s “songs are painstakingly arranged with a sense of depth, gradations, and tonal three-dimensionality redolent of something as off the charts as Pet Sounds.” Only on the road did Dungen blossom into a full band, with a rotation of musicians joining Ejstes onstage and eventually coalescing into a fully democratic band that includes Reine Fiske on guitar, Mattias Gustavsson on bass, and Johan Holmegard on drums. Starting with 2007’s Tio Bitar and 2009’s 4, the band members helped Ejstes realize his own vision while adding flourishes of their own. As a result, Dungen grew into something bigger and more formidable: one of the best and most consistently inventive psych rock bands in the world.
At the height of their powers, however, the band took a step back.
It’s been five years since the last Dungen album, 2010’s Skit I Allt, which is by far the longest interval between releases for a band that proved especially prolific and inspired during the 2000s. “We have all been away during this period for different reasons, playing music in different projects,” says Ejstes. “I have been writing songs in the meantime, so the actual recording process has been pretty short.” During the interim, several members of the band released albums as the Amazing, including 2012’s Gentle Stream and 2015’s Picture You. Ejstes himself co-founded the Swedish supergroup Amason, which includes members of Idiot Wind, Little Majorette, and Miike Snow. They released their debut, Sky City, earlier this year.
Allas Sak. It’s a short phrase with enormous implications.
Those two Swedish words translate loosely into English as “everyone’s thing” or maybe “anyone’s thing.” They not only provide the title for Dungen’s latest collection of sophisticated psychedelic rock, but explains how the band works creatively and collaboratively.
“I was told by a friend once that as a songwriter and as a musical artist, you have to understand that as soon as the music leaves your body, it is no longer strictly yours,” explains Gustav. “The listener also owns it and filters it through their personality, their thoughts and feelings.”
In other words, the music is everyone’s thing. It belongs to the band and to whoever hears it, which means that everyone is empowered to decipher the Swedish-language lyrics for themselves, to locate their own stories in the magisterial instrumental jams, to make all of this mean whatever they need it to mean. For Dungen, this communion between artist and audience is a beautiful and necessary process that makes the music mean more, not less. It becomes, in a sense, infinite. “These songs are my everyday experiences, my thoughts and stories from the life I live,” says Gustav. “I hope people can create their own stories around the music and maybe we can make music together, the listener and I.”
Allas Sak picks up where Dungen’s previous album left off, but somehow it sounds bolder and livelier, feistier yet more focused. The four of them jam with greater purpose and principle on songs like the otherworldly instrumental “Franks Kaktus” and the stately “En Gång Om Året,” while the prismatic “Flickor Och Pojkar” and closer “Sova” reveal subtle nuances in the band’s arrangements. Listening becomes an especially galvanizing experience, heady and enlightening. If psychedelic music has often been associated with drug use, for Dungen music itself is the drug: the most effective vehicle for transcendence.
The band brought in good friend Mattias Glavå to produce the record. In addition to helming records for the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Sambassadeur, and the Amazing, Glavå worked with Dungen on 2005’s Stadsvandringar, which made these sessions a reunion of sorts. “Mattias is a true wizard of analog sound engineering, but he’s more than a technique nerd,” says Gustav. “He’s the ultimate hand between my vision of a sound and reality.”
Glavå suggested the band work out songs before they entered the studio, rather than writing during the sessions. It was a different way of working, but one that Gustav found invigorating. “He suggested we come to his studio with finished songs, and we did live takes directly to tape—the old-school way. It has truly been a quite different experience from the earlier records.”
Allas Sak is about everyday matters: family, friends, the fine texture of life. Common but never mundane, these subjects anchor the music in the here and now, while the music lends a certain grandeur to ordinary moments. “Lyrics are very important to me,” says Gustav. “We know a lot of people who don’t speak Swedish who love the music anyway. Music comes first every time. I think it could be wordless if the moods in the music take you somewhere, but often the melodies are attached to words that came up the first time they were played.”
Again, it comes back to the listener. Even as the band continues to grow, the listener remains a constant collaborator, not only inspiring new songs but rejuvenating old ones. “I can definitely feel a new significance in some of our older songs, mainly because of the people we’ve met and the stories about their own experiences with the music.”
Fun Tame Impala fact: In 2007, a young Kevin Parker got in touch with Dungen and sent them through his latest recording, asking them to mix it. The band’s response? “No, we don’t have to mix it! Just put it out! It’s amazing as it is!” Prescient.
Mistletone proudly presents El Guincho, direct from Barcelona and touring Australia for the third time: this time around, as a three piece led by one-man, space-age exotica party machine, Pablo Diaz-Reixa.
