11 Apr 2018

MIEN give a track-by-track rundown of their new album for Gigwise


It reads:

From tiny sitar seedlings, such things grow. Back in 2004 Rishi Dhir from Canadian indie rockers Elephant Stone ran into Alex Maas of Austin’s psych heroes Black Angels at SXSW, and the pair bonded over a love of the Association’s “classic sitar banger” ‘Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’’. Their many frustrated attempts to cover the song together ultimately drew in The Earlies’ John-Mark Lapham and Tom Furse of The Horrors and created a globe-straddling indie supergroup named MIEN. Releasing their self-titled debut album last week, the disparate four-piece united to run through the album for Gigwise.

'Earth Moon'
Tom Furse: I can’t remember when I wrote the original demo of this but it was a long time ago. I had met Rishi already and at some point in writing the demo I thought ‘shit - sitar! I can get sitar on this! I must get sitar on this!’. So I sent it over to Rishi and before too long he’d recorded all this amazing sitar on it. It wasn’t right for Horrors so it sat in limbo for a while until MIEN started to form. As a group MIEN is extremely fluid and open to ideas, there were very few points of conflict, and even they were minimal - and it was so exciting to hear how JM took my demo and developed that whole second movement in the track - bringing a whole new life to it...

See the rest here: Gigwise

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