#mink mussel creek

[daisyknife]

Progtober Fest 2022 day 18: pick a subgenre of prog and just infodump on us, we can take it!

I know nothing about anything, I am an ignorant appreciator because I haven’t been able to retain information successfully for about 5 years on account of depression becoming chronic 🪦

The closest I can get to infodumping about a subgenre is telling you to check out psychedelic pop/space prog band Pond and all its orbiting projects. It’s basically the same group of musicians who were also involved in Tame Impala switching instruments and formations to make different bands. We all know Kevin Parker’s timeless dreamy stoner like pop, but that’s absolutely the tip of a delightful iceberg. Nick Allbrook who used to play bass in TI fronts Pond. Jay Watson is (was? Is Does Tame Impala still include anyone apart from Kevin? Again, I got that swiss cheese brain) in both bands but also fronts Gum and they all love prog. They did a cover of Genesis’s Misunderstanding that makes me wanna hug them all and when I saw (and met #humblebrag) Pond, Jay was wearing a very cool Yes shirt. Also before any of those bands existed they all made an album called Mink Mussel Creek under the same name. And it fucking rocked. It opens up with one of my favourite guitar riffs of all time and “Makeout Party Girls” makes me want to go feral. Honestly this group of absolute grumblos is enough to warrant coining the term “Perth scene”.

[gnomepilled-gnomepilled-gnome]

The Australian psych rock scene SUCKS for recommending music to people solely due to the incredible names of the bands/projects

"Yeah bro Mink Mussel Creek are normal"

"You should totally listen to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard they're really cool and talented songwriters"

"Psychedelic P0rn Crumpets-"

[fartofthesunrise]

opinion on Mink Mussel Manticore by Mink Mussel Creek? (Kevin Parker and Nic Allbrook)

Never heard of it would it be better to listen to while sober ?

[letithappeneverafter]

Freo Groove - Musicians of Fremantle

Kevin Parker is pounding along the coast, between the sea and the great shattered ruin of the old South Freo Power Station, his mind buzzing with musical possibilities. He's always said you can make great music from anywhere - that place isn't a big deal. But the front man of successful psychedelic band Tame Impala recognises that Fremantle has shaped his musical journey: from his first exploratory jams with future band-mates to the modest weatherboard in South Fremantle that he's converted into a recording studio. 

`I used to say that I could be anywhere in the world, and I still like to believe that, because I don't believe that the quality or the style of the music that someone makes is dependent on where they are. However, there are many things that seep into your music and one of them is where you live. 

`Making the last album, Currents, I was stuck, sitting in the studio and my four walls. I got to a spot where I just wasn't feeling it and the music wasn't very evocative. I got my iPhone and headphones and walked along the beach down to the power station in Coogee. I couldn't believe how much the music opened up and spoke to me, made me feel all kinds of things again. 'A lot of the songs on Currents have passages that were directly inspired by the power house and doing laps of it. It is scary and confronting, but such a beautiful thing. I had one of the songs I was working on at the time on repeat and I wrote a lot of the lyrics down on South Beach. I suddenly remembered the value of being somewhere serene and beautiful and getting inspired in that way. I don't like to think of it as a necessity because music can be written for the purposes of escape. But so much of Currents was mentally conceived between here and the power station all along the coast.'

Gravity

He grew up in Perth, got drum lessons while in high school, and played rhythm guitar with his father, Jerry, playing lead. He went on to play music with Dom Simper, whom he met in high school. The two formed The Dee Dee Dums, the precursor to Tame Impala. Somewhere around the age of twelve, he began fooling around with cassette recorders; bouncing tracks and layering sounds, building a creative methodology that still endures, although the technology is worlds apart. His Fremantle musical story began when he was about twenty and he met the guys from the band Mink Mussel Creek. 

`I was in a different band at the time, but I started hanging out and jamming with them. I was living in Subiaco then. I would leave Subiaco on Friday evening and go back on Sunday night. It was like a time warp, like another world. We would have a lot of fun and get up to mischief and make music. I thought it was amazing because it was like being in a parallel universe. It was just this black hole of the weekend when I'd be around Freo. 'It was just such an intoxicating environment, the absolute tunnel vision of the music. It was the centre of how we lived our lives. Everything was based around that. Going out for them was going out and playing a show, and we would start drinking and getting stoned in the afternoon. At some point in the night the show would happen. The show was just part of the evening. That was kind of what our lives revolved around and I just felt such a sense of belonging. A newfound identity.' 

It was an intense period of short-lived bands thrown together as fluid musical experiments, with several bands running at once comprising different line-ups of the same core set of musicians. Often, he'd play two gigs a night - one with his old band, The Dee Dee Dums, and then just stay on stage for Mink Mussel Creek. There were gigs at The Swan Basement, The Railway Hotel, Mojos, and the Newport, but the Norfolk Basement - and its bar manager -provided the opportunity for Kevin to take his work to a new level.

'The Norfolk became our second home, because we met Jodie [Regan] and she fell in love with Mink Mussel Creek. She was the bar manager downstairs, and we just thought she was great. She was enchanted by us young, scruffy stoners, who were obsessed with music and didn't have any kind of ego about it. She was like, "Hey, I'll manage you" and we thought, Hey, we've got a manager! We'd go down there during the day and rehearse. The bar wouldn't open until later and I ended up doing a lot of recording down there. They had microphones and mic stands. So I could just go down there for as long as I wanted, which was a dream because up to then I had nowhere to record drums. `The first gig we ever played under the name Tame Impala was at Mojos. It was like a new and exciting time for me because it was just another step of me consolidating what I wanted musically. `There weren't a lot of people, but that didn't matter. Until I first started hanging out with those guys - hanging out in Fremantle - would care a lot more about the audience: how many and how much they were into it. After, it was, well, "they are there or they are not". Our attitude was, we are doing what we are doing because we love doing it. We're not out for approval or validation.' 

A Fremantle share house provided a base for a while. Then as Tame Impala enjoyed wider success, Kevin was based in Paris before moving back to South Fremantle. 

'I think it was a no-brainer. I had a lot of friends here. I bought a house and lived there for a while and then tore all the walls down and turned the entire thing into a studio and then I bought another house and moved there.'

Complexity

Kevin Parker's approach to making his own music is intense and solitary, although he has had long-standing working relationships with different local musicians. He composes in isolation and works with others to create the live performance. 

'Tame Impala on the albums is just one person. It is just me multi-tracking; so basically, me recording wherever I am. 'Because I make music alone and it has got so many different parts to it, there is never a verbal conversation about it. When a band plays music, they are constantly having to talk about it to communicate it. So just from that process, just talking about it out loud, you work out what you like and you don't like. When that entire conversation stays in your head, it is just a thinking process, and you never really work out what you like and don't like and what strategies you like. It just happens. I don't have a framework. I have been doing it for that long it is something that kind of comes naturally. 'I potter in the studio even when I have other things to do. I might record a song or I just go around going, "hullo, what is this?" Unplug this...plug this in. Find a better way to record - kind of like a mad scientist. A cross between a mad scientist and an old lady in the garden pottering around. Somehow songs come out of that. `I make things more complex than they need to be. I would love my music to be simpler. I call my music "kitchen sink music". I just throw everything at it. I will think of a keyboard line - put it in. Think of a guitar line - put it in. Two different vocal melodies - put them in. As I get older I am trying to develop a musical discipline.' 

Following the phenomenal commercial success of Tame Impala, Kevin's instincts and production skills, honed over countless hours and through endless musical experiments, are in high demand. As well as working with local bands, including Koi Child and Pond, he's been approached to produce a number of American artists in Los Angeles. 

‘I like that I have two lives as a producer. One is doing my friends' stuff in Freo, the other is iconic artists that I've always dreamed of working with. I am suddenly in the same room. It's kind of two extremes.' 

As for another Tame Impala album, Kevin will only say that there's some paint on the canvas, but he doesn't know what the final result will be. 

‘The change in styles is one of the only things you can bet on. I don't think I would bother doing the same thing again. That is one of the only rules I put on myself. It has to be different and has to have evolved in some way.'

- Freo Groove - Musicians of Fremantle by Bill Lawrie & Claire Moodie. 

Photo by Jeff Atkinson. 

Published by UWA Publishing.

[mrwilliewonka]

Pond/Mink Mussel Creek: *distorted noise* Me: This is awesome

[randolphstevens]

old Mink Mussel Creek interview <3

[cipppi]

[wolkovitzky]

Bro, listen to this: "Meeting Waterboy" by Mink Mussel Creek https://ift.tt/2xste0r

[daisyknife]

Progtober Fest 2022 days 6 and 7: your top ten more obscure prog bands and songs you wish were 20 minute prog ballads

Day 6:

1)Pond

2)McDonald and Giles

3)IQ

4)Acqua Fragile

5)Haken

6)Perigeo

7)New Trolls

8)Marillion

9)Kikagaku Moyo

10)Yonin Bayashi

Day 7 (is such a fun question! 🤩 I could spend all day thinking up more of these):

dodie - When

Radiohead - Sail To The Moon (along with countless others by them)

Marika Hackman - Cannibal

Arcade Fire - My Body Is A Cage (uncle Peter even put it on “Scratch my Back” and I love it)

XTC - Rook

Yo Yo Mundi - Theme Of Sciopero

Peter Gabriel - those cool outtakes that are so much better than some of the stuff he actually put on albums lol. Examples include and are not limited to “God Knows”, “Funny Man” and “Why Don’t We”. Also applicable to stuff from pre studio release Genesis, like “The Shepherd” and “Pacidy”

Björk - Undo

Elbow - Snowball

Pond - Sunlight Cardigan

Bonus: songs I wish were full on suites, Thick As A Brick style (again, I could spend hours coming up with more)

Field Music - A House Is Not A Home

Strangelove - Time for the Rest of Your Life

Deftones - Diamond Eyes

Mink Mussel Creek - They Dated Steadily

The Beatles - Happiness Is A Warm Gun

Pond - Midnight Mass (At The Market Street Payphone)

[sannelirio]

Tagged by @llunamaria <3

rules: you can usually tell a lot about a person by the type of music they listen to! put your music on shuffle and list the first ten songs, then tag ten people. no skipping!

1. Tame Impala - Music To Walk Home By

2. Fugazi - Waiting Room

3. Minor Threat - Minor Threat

4. Meeting Waterboy - Mink Mussel Creek

5. Time Will Tell - Bob Marley and The Wailers

6. The Bird Song - King Gizzard

7. Mountain - Meatbodies

8. Sense - King Gizzard

9. Doomsday - MF DOOM

10. A Corner - John Frusciante

I don’t have any Tumblr friends hahaaaa!! Just @sjowee

[anxai]

Listen #free in #Spotify: "They Dated Steadily" by Mink Mussel Creek http://ift.tt/1S8rNvm

[inclusivefenders]

Cat Love Power - Mink Mussel Creek

[mrwilliewonka]

Latest vinyl purchases 😎

[asinskare]

thank you for tagging me @loudway  💛💛💛

RULES: We’re snooping on your playlist. Set your entire music library on shuffle and report the first 10 songs that pop up. Then choose 10 victims

1. wait a minute by willow

2. visions of angels by genesis

3. drowsy by banes world

4. cave of brahma by the sorcerers

5. havana by camilla cabello and young thug 

6. dance of the illegal aliens by brand x

7. in the flesh by pink floyd (no question mark)

8. every day by steve hackett

9. right there by anderson .paak

10. cat love power by mink mussel creek

i tag: @yutoba @virieu @aviesaurum @galacticlust @serpenst @diorede @onakas @gonzago @whiskywolves @euflorya

[letithappeneverafter]

Came across Nicks essay about living in a far-away country and what it means to be a creative human at the arse-end of the world. This comes from a past edition of Griffith Review which is a pretty impressive literary essay magazine. Full of cultural and thought-provoking stuff. Go Nick. I probably shouldn’t just copy’n’paste but I did borrow it from Brisbane library to read in the flesh. Just wanted to share with all you Tame Impala and POND fans.

Creative Darwinism by Nick Allbrook

- This is my city and I’m never gonna leave it. Channel 7 News 

WRITING ABOUT MY experience of making music in Perth is a strange thing, because as soon as a ‘scene’ is bound and gagged by the written word it is finished, petrified, swept up into the Rolling Stone archives and forever considered ‘history’. It might be revered and glorified, but it’s still long gone. This could be a very restricting view to take on a community like Perth, which is still just as inspiring and productive as it ever was. I can’t pretend to understand where ‘music scenes’ begin or end. It seems a futile and narrow-minded pursuit. So before I begin, I want to say that this is merely a reflective exercise. There was never a ‘golden age’, and if one does exist I can’t see it, because it’s floating all around, invisible and omnipresent.

For years I suffered serious cultural guilt as a Western Australian. The orthodoxy and banality made me feel isolated, relegated to the company of eccentric long-haired ghosts singing to me from inside my Discman. Every birthday and Christmas, Dad would give me a care package of CDs. This blessed nourishment of Jethro Tull, Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie shone a light into the murky tunnels of my future. Playing music and generally being a flaming Christmas fruitcake became my sole purpose, and me and a few other school friends – Steve Summerlin and Richard Ingham of Mink Mussel Creek, and many other brilliant but criminally under-recognised projects – revelled in our little corner of filthy otherness. This outlook was key to our musical and creative development. We railed against the boredom of Perth not with pickets or protest, but with a head-in-the-sand hubris that made us feel invincible and unique. We found more comrades along the way – Joe Ryan, Kevin Parker, Jay Watson – and together we erected great walls of noise and hair and mouldy dishes around our Daglish share house commune citadel on Troy Terrace where we incubated, practised, recorded, talked and grew. A friend stick’n’poke tattooed a spiral shape into my arm to represent that way of life (which I’d lifted from Hermes Trismegistus and other alchemical mumbo jumbo I learned at university). Look inside and the world can be whatever you want. Look out and it’s ugly and shitty. In Perth, use of public space is regulated to the point of comedy, and Orwellian restrictions on tobacco, noise, bicycles, alcohol and public gatherings breed a festering discontent and boredom because no one likes being pre-emptively labelled a deviant. Being trusted enriches the soul – you can see it on the face of the child who leads the family trek. You can see the flipside on the faces of disenchanted detainees. On weekends, this restlessness is unleashed across clubs and pubs in Northbridge and Subiaco in an avalanche of Jägerbombs (17mL of Jägermeister dropped into a larger glass of Red Bull and then consumed with haste) and Midori and violence and cheap sex. When the Monday sun staggers over the horizon, people rub their eyes and heave a great sigh and the city reverts to its utilitarian state – the ‘bourgeois dream of unproblematic production’, as The 60s Without Apology (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) puts it, ‘of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’. That this description of pre-revolutionary 1950s and ’60s America is so apt for Perth is damn scary. Or hilarious. I can’t decide. I guess it depends on the depth and colour of your nihilistic streak, or if you actually live here. Whichever way you look at it, it does not paint a picture of a city conducive to creativity. Art is the antithesis of logic and functionality – it is romance and wonder and stupid, pointless lovelies. As good old Mr Vonnegut so often said, it’s an exercise to make your soul grow. So how, in a super-functional and conservative environment whose every will is bent towards digging really, really big holes in the ground, have I seen and heard and felt some of the most brilliant, pure and original creativity in the world? I USED TO dream about living in a cultural powerhouse like Paris or Berlin or New York, but after spending time in these places I’ve realised that the emptiness and isolation of Perth – boredom to some – was a far better environment for creativity. The ‘cultural capitals’ are so rich in art and wonder that it can feel pointless to add to it. Maybe just being in those ‘cultural capitals’ fills us up with wonder? Strolling through Berlin at night, ducking into a bar with fish nailed to the roof, skipping across the cobblestones for some cheap beers in a record shop in a Russian caravan in an abandoned peanut factory…that kind of stuff fills the romantic void. Having a Ricard and a few Gitanes on the terrasse of Aux Folies; stumbling through Camden after a lock-in at the Witch’s Tit or the Cock’n’Balls or the Cancerous Bowel or whatever you call it; recollecting a possible conversation with Jah Wobble over a pint…Perth? It has no secret tunnels to romantic fulfilment. For me, music and art have always been a way to manufacture that romance lacking in upper-middle-class Western Australia. To be honest, if I had lived in New York I probably would’ve been so damn hung-over – or busy ensuring that I would be later – that a whole lot less creation would’ve gone on. Mundane and discouraging places like Perth create a vicious Darwinism for creatively inclined people, where survival of the fittest is played out with swift and unrepentant force and the flippant or unpassionate are left behind, drowning in putrid mind-clag. You have to really need it, and without the mysterious and poetic benefits of a vibrant city culture this has to come from deep inside. Amber Fresh, otherwise known as Rabbit Island, is one person who produces constant streams of music, drawings, essays, poems, calendars, videos and photos from her home. She fills her world with little pieces of homemade, lo-fi, photocopied beauty and magic. They don’t have funding or precedent or material ambition – and the result is something fresh and original. Mei Saraswati does the same thing, although completely different styles of music. She has produced, mixed, mastered and illustrated scores of albums in her bedroom and then released this other-worldly electronic R’n’B brilliance onto the internet with no fanfare, simply to turn around and start making more. These are just two examples. There are many more. SOMEHOW, BY BEING a cultural long-drop, Perth lit a fire under my arse. In more scholarly terminology this could be called a ‘spirit of negation’ – a margarine version of the same zeitgeist that has catalysed most worthwhile movements throughout history, from dadaism to punk to all the intellectual and artistic wonders of The Netherlands freshly unchained from their dastardly Spanish overlords. Being isolated spatially and culturally – us from the city, Perth from Australia and Australia from the world – arms one with an Atlas-strong sense of identity. Both actively and passively, originality seems to flourish in Perth’s artistic community. Without the wider community’s acceptance, creative pursuits lack the potential for commodification. There’s no point in preening yourself for success because it’s just not real. It’s a fairytale, so you may as well just do it in whatever way you like, good or bad, in your room or on the top of the Telstra building, which – as anyone with any common sense will attest – was built for that one potential badass to drop in on a skateboard and parachute off. Growing up in the Kimberley and then Fremantle, the true machinery of the music business evaded me. It was about as real as the Power Rangers and twice as awesome. Led Zeppelin and U2, all the way down to whatever was on Rage that morning, was just a pretty dream. But if I grew up in a city where success in music was common and highly visible, I reckon it would have been far more alluring. I would’ve understood how to go about it, probably before I actually realised how deep my love of music was. With the template for success laid out so precisely – gigs to be got, managers to be found, reviews to be had and the ultimate dream of ‘making it’ tangibly within reach – Perth would find itself producing far less original art. Because as it stands, it doesn’t really matter if you’re crap or silly or unbearably offensive, you wouldn’t get much further doing something different anyway. This helps to preserve a magical purity because it’s executed with love – with necessity. And what’s more, when these artists keep going and practising and advancing – which they must – somehow their crassness coagulates into something brilliantly individual and accomplished, and you can see it performed in an arena that makes the audience feel truly blessed. I saw Rabbit Island and Peter Bibby and Cam Avery play in backyards. I saw cease play in a tattoo parlour in Maylands. Me and Joe Ryan were plastered against the wall by their sound, gawking up at Andrew, the guitarist, precariously standing on his enormous amp wearing high heels and full fishnet bodystocking, slowly trying to drive his guitar through the top of his cabinet like some pagan-burlesque reimagining of King Arthur. After hours they slowed to a halt, and the crowd cheered from the stairs and bathroom door and kitchen and I remembered where we were: in a tiny share-house in Maylands, in the flaming cauldron of hell or the halls of Valhalla. Mink Mussel Creek played there a few times and once, in a flash of drunken inspiration, someone turned the only light in the room off mid-performance. I saw the fourteen guitarists of Electric Toad destroy a warehouse art gallery wearing ’90s WA football jerseys. Tame Impala and Pond played in Tanya’s garage and every time I cried and danced and felt like the breath of God was being embarrassingly saucy all over my skin. We played our very first show in that garage and I can still see Jay demolishing the tiny drum kit – kick, snare, ride, tom – as sparks floated from the forty-gallon drum and lit the faces of the people looking in from the dark. None of us had ever seen anyone play like it in real life, let alone in a garage, sitting on milk crates. As far as genres go, our music ‘scene’ in Perth was an anomaly. A mad mosaic of groups and artists only held together by gallant separation from conventional Perth society. Nick Odell, the drummer of CEASE and Sonny Roofs, still has a poster for a gig at Amplifier Bar that I remember as a kind of microcosmic Woodstock – a tactile realisation of all the beauty and communion we cherished. The line-up included us (Mink Mussel Creek), CEASE (aforementioned stoner/doom/drone lords), Sex Panther (punk-party queens), Oki Oki (Nintendo synth pop) and Chris Cobilis (experimental laptop noise music). I think most members of the bands ended up on stage at more than one time, wrapped in Cobilis’ wires or yelling into a madly effected microphone in front of CEASE. I certainly did. Nowhere else would such a ridiculously mismatched line-up consider themselves a tight community. We all partied together, played together and are still friends. I think this spirit is lacking in a lot of the more culturally enlightened parts of the world. Maybe in these vibrant communities the countercultural idea is so entrenched it becomes capitalist orthodoxy and loses its edge. It is subjected to the rationality it once challenged. In the cultural capitals – Paris, Berlin, New York – creativity and original thinking are accepted and valued parts of mainstream life. In Perth they are not. Paris has over four hundred streets named after artists and writers, and this honour is not restricted to the most unobtrusive or patriotic. Rue Albert Camus, Rue Marcel Duchamp and the recently proposed Place Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, show the state glorifying revolutionaries, absurdists, libertines and a gay, heroin-using, Haitian–American graffiti artist. Today we can stroll along the verdant Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui, named after the man who led the uprising of the Paris Commune. A revolutionary, a prisoner, an anarchist. In modern terms: a terrorist. There, art is a basic fact of everyday life, while in Perth it is an anomaly hidden in garages and living rooms – deep beneath a conservative fishbowl of productivity. So, all things considered, ‘cultural capitals’ should be havens for art and music, and Perth should not. The romance just seeps into the pores, ja? I always thought this before I left Western Australia, but have since found it to be otherwise. I asked a young photographer and artist in Amsterdam about the music scene there and her reply was wholly negative. A lot of Parisians seem to feel the same way. I look back on my time in Perth and think about the huge number of brilliant musicians and artists who I saw and knew, often not in official venues but in backyards or sheds or the abandoned entertainment centre (yes, CEASE). Perhaps with the freedom – almost expectation – to create, revel and throw it all around the streets, it all just gets a bit boring. Like much good art, it doesn’t really ‘mean’ anything, so writing an essay about it is an odd activity. The experience of a city or community varies so much that it can never be defined while it is still occurring. When it’s actually happening, a ‘scene’ is not really a ‘scene’ – it’s completely intangible and only coagulates into a definitive and convenient ball when history puts it in a cage, when someone from the outside looks in and decides there’s something shared between a bunch of vaguely artistic fools. I guess that’s what I’m doing now, which is pretty ridiculous seeing as nothing is finished and the Perth artistic community is so ethereal that it couldn’t and shouldn’t be labelled at all.

From Griffith Review Edition 47: Looking West © Copyright Griffith University & the author.