Mildlife, Photograph: Ruby Boland
Mildlife make music that’s notoriously difficult to categorise.
The Melbourne band, comprising bass player Tom Shanahan, synth player Kevin McDowell, drummer Jim Rindfleish and guitarist Adam Halliwell, have won the ARIA Award for Best Jazz Album three times. At the Music Victoria Awards, they’ve been nominated for Best Soul, Funk, R’n’B and Gospel Album and Best Electronic Act.
But none of these labels feels accurate.
Mildlife are a band in the old-fashioned sense: a group of allies whose music represents the personalities and ideas of all four contributors. Across three albums, including this year’s Chorus, their songs display a jazz-influenced inclination to explore grooves, chord sequences and melodic lines to the point of spiritual revelation. Everything they do bears the mark of soulful investment.
Chorus, like Mlidlife’s earlier LPs, 2017’s Phase and 2020’s Automatic, shows a fondness for retrofuturist gear, such as vocoder and modular synthesis, while a new EP of Chorus remixes proves Mildlife’s songs can easily be turned into Balearic DJ tools. But for all the band’s versatility, Midlife’s music also feels uncomplicated, friendly, a psychedelic swirl in which to lose yourself.
After the release of Chorus, Check Check spoke to Jim Rindfleish and Adam Halliwell about the band’s democratic creative policy, their gear obsessions and their aspirations for the future of Mildlife.
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Check Check: You released Automatic in 2020 in the midst of Covid chaos. Did it feel like a long time between albums?
Adam Halliwell: From the outside world, it’s probably quite long, but our process is very slow because everyone is equal parts songwriter, performer, whatever. It’s a very democratic process, so it just takes a long time. So, for us, it doesn’t feel that long between releases. I don’t know about you, Jim?
Jim Rindfleish: I would agree. Like, I waited forever for this new season of True Detective, even though it sucks. But I’ve been waiting forever for that and I’m sure in their mind the production went quick. In fact, it probably went too quick, which explains why it’s so crap.
Do you ever get impatient working in that way – making space for all four members to contribute, to agree?
Adam: That’s how we’ve written music in this group, but yeah, sure, it gets frustrating. But it’s worth it. Think about it like if there were four people slapping paint on a thing trying to make a picture of someone on top of a roof smiling at the sun, and how much that would end up just changing and changing and changing.
Someone would have a vision and then that vision gets twisted into something else and then you have to make sense of that vision, which is a collective vision, and then maybe someone goes along and just puts black paint over the whole thing and then you have to start again.
You’re just constantly readjusting your mind into what we’re actually doing. It’s a very psychedelic process and it ends up being quite psychedelic music.
You must have built up a lot of trust to be able to go through so many iterations and not try to overrule each other.
Jim: That trust thing is at the absolute bottom of the process. I think the more music we’ve made and the more that we’ve seen the process work if we just all take our egos out of it, the more trust you accrue as a group.
For instance, Adam might have a really strong vision for a particular part that I don’t see as clearly as he can in his mind. So, initially, I might’ve been really quite staunch about not going down that road because I don’t understand it. Whereas nowadays I like to think that I would entertain this side-quest and just see where it leads us, just based on that musical trust.
At the end of the day, we all like how each other plays, we all like each other’s taste, and so it doesn’t make sense to be close-minded about where someone’s idea might take the group.
Has touring overseas become a core part of your routine now? And is it essential for sustaining the band financially?
Jim: In terms of sustaining us, we always talk about how great it would be if we lived in a country that had more than a handful of cities that you could play in, because plenty of US bands and Europe bands, even bands in Asia, sustain themselves in the country they live in.
There’s only so many times you can play Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane before the crowd’s seen it all and the shows are too close together.
Have you played in Asia?
Jim: Yeah. We played Indonesia and Thailand and that’s actually what made me think of it, because Adam’s pretty close with the boys from Ali and they were telling us about how some bands [tour in Indonesia].
Adam: Yeah. They do sustain quite well over there by just touring their country. But also, their population’s a lot bigger in Indonesia than it is in Australia, so they can just do that.
Are you hoping to make Asian tours more of a regular thing for Mildlife?
Adam: Yeah, we definitely hope so.
Jim: We’re doing everything we can to make it to Japan. I’d just love to play Japan or South Korea or go back to Thailand, or Singapore, Malaysia. That sector of the world, we’re ready to make that part of the regular rotation as quickly as possible because it was so much fun, the shows that we played there, and the crowds were awesome.
Photograph: Aldiansyah Waluyo
Are you all gear nerds to some extent?
Jim: Some more than others, but I think we all generally are. Adam?
Adam: Yeah. I go through phases and it depends on what I’m listening to at the time. Like, the last thing for me was being obsessed with Jon Hassell and then I just got obsessed with Eventide’s products because of that. That was the gateway into that sound for me.
Jim: The stuff we’re working on at the moment isn’t much more than a condenser mic and a nice plate reverb. So, [the gear obsession] all depends on the music. We’re too poor as well. But I say that and I literally bought a drumkit yesterday and it’s fucking dope. It’s got six toms, fucking mad. Now I’m trying to play six toms.
Do you ever have conversations, before writing or recording something, about what you’re trying to achieve or what the purpose of it is?
Jim: Not in the sense of, “We want to do an album that is a prog rock odyssey that goes for two discs,” or whatever. We’re often musing about what’s important to us as a band or what sort of music we want to be making. I think what we usually land on is just some variation on whatever feels most honest and not of a trend.
We’re not trying to siphon off someone else’s dream. We’re trying to dream something up together that, if it is influenced by something, it’s influenced by something that’s more or less public domain at this point and not just something that’s in the air currently.
Is the goal to keep growing the Mildlife audience?
Jim: Yeah. We all want to be able to do this fully committed where we’re not also doing a bunch of other work as well. I mean, Mildlife is a full-time job for us all, but it’s a full-time job on top of other jobs that we’re all always doing.
Adam: Yeah, for sure. If you can make it sustainable and just keep doing the music you want to make, then sure, that’d be great.
Jim: We love the band – it’s our whole life. It’s everyone in the band’s whole life, main objective, main quest. We love it and we’re so devoted to it and spend every waking second thinking about it and doing stuff with it. I think all of us want to do all that work kind of guilt free.
