Mile Me Deaf

Mile Me Deaf (c) Beate Ponsold
Mile Me Deaf (c) Beate Ponsold

BIOGRAPHY

Stylistically you could most likely settle Mile Me Deaf somewhere between quality indie pop with a rock flip side and charming casual lo-fi attempts with some slight folk excursions and modest use of noise eruptions – a mix that definitely has its appeal and lets the band head Wolfgang Möstl express his creative and free-spirited individualism in a really unique and exciting way.

Mile Me Deaf’s new album is a swan song for the human race. In his previous albums, mastermind Wolfgang Möstl has hinted at his penchant for dystopic fictions that he links to the fragile status-quo of the current state of affairs. With ALIEN AGE, however, he has abondoned the fuzz-and-thrash sound of his previous albums. Sampled beats and loops set the stage for his new album, reducing the 90s indie rock sound of past records to homeopathic doses. This time, dub, vaporwave, jazz and ambient come in the foreground.
The entire album was single-handedly produced by Möstl, who used a vintage Akai sampler to lay down the base tracks in classic old school hip-hop fashion. Möstl created an album full of idiosyncratic and unconventional Mile Me Deaf pop songs drawing from a variety of sources: from thrift store bin records, to recordings of friends’ bands, to audio curiosities from all over the world. For the first time on a MMD song, Möstl has handed over the microphone to Sex Jams band mate Katarina Trenk, who sings lead vocals on the hypnotic dance track “Shibuya+”.
ALIEN AGE offers a tongue-in-cheek infatuation with extraterrestrial visitations, human extinction, and all manners of bizarreness from the depths of the internet. It’s an exercise in encapsulating the “weird vibe” of the modern age. Between the lines, the album can be interpreted as a posthumanism record. It’s the inconsistencies of the world that leave Möstl to doubt the role of man as the spearhead of the social hierarchy—he throws into question —the traditional thought that the (western) man’s reasoning trumps all else.
The idea for the cover arose out of a collaboration with Burnbjorn, who was also responsible for the previous album design, and plays upon the ‘stereogram’ principle, whereupon closer inspection the images take on a 3-D effect. A tangled pattern visible at first glance suddenly achieves another dimension when viewed in a certain way.


VIDEO


RELATED ARTICLES

Austrian Music Highlights #5

Austrian Music Highlights Logo

It comes as no surprise that the highlights section is still empty when it comes to live events. Big showcase festivals like Jazzahead, c/o pop, The Great Escape, Operadagen Rotterdam and Primavera have been either … read more »

Numavi Records – A Label Portrait

Melt-Downer-c-CheeChaak

“Numavi Records” was founded in the early 2000s in the Styrian town of Weiz and has developed into a significant part of the Austrian and international music scene in the last two decades. While in … read more »

Austrian Acts at Waves Vienna 2018

Waves Vienna © Patrick Muennich

From September 27-29, Waves Vienna will turn Vienna’s ninth district into a hotspot for international and local music fans. About 100 acts from all around the globe will perform on ten stages, located at the … read more »