Q&A: Mild Orange Reaches for What’s All Around in ‘Looking For Space’
MUSIC ENCAPSULATES MORE THAN JUST FEELINGS — for Mild Orange. It can be about personhood; it can become the sonic embodiment of the world around you. The New Zealand four-piece has returned with an mystical, larger-than-life LP, Looking For Space. Each member of Mild Orange — Josh Mehrtens, Josh Reid, Tom Kelk, and Jack Ferguson — has grown greatly as musicians and as people since their eponymous sophomore release. Compared to their past tunes, which were mellow, intimate, and nostalgic, their newest LP is a guitar-driven out-of-body experience.
Recorded in six different locations all over New Zealand, Looking For Space is an evident refinement of the band’s sound and production. Songs like “What’s Your Fire?” and “The Time of Our Lives” (both extended versions of their initial releases as singles) layer intricate guitar riffs and background melodies on top of each other, so high that the songs themselves feel mountainous. Edgier tracks like “Colourise” and “Aurora” have the power to transport you into a completely different headspace.
As festival season begins and the days start to get warmer, Looking For Space is fit for a headliner spot. The feeling of a live show in the outdoors, people gathered together and the tethered connection between artist and audience, is something we all miss, and is exactly what Mild Orange is bringing back with this new project.
After transforming beach houses into studios, long nights of recording, and even an unfortunate fit of pneumonia caught by Mehrtens, the band gained the perspective they needed for this piece. Keep reading to hear Luna’s conversation with Mehrtens, a.k.a. “Mehrt,” and his tale of how Looking For Space came to be.
LUNA: I’ve seen Mild Orange described as “energetic, summer psychedelic rock.” Is that something you align yourselves with or would you describe Mild Orange differently?
MILD ORANGE: I like to call it “melting melodies.” We’ve kind of been saying that since the start. That encapsulates this open-endedness because we have so many different sounds, but it all sounds very “Mild Orange” all along the way. We like to go a bit up and down, change tempo, and we don't really constrict ourselves to one definite genre sound at a time. Consistent through all of it is that we want it to be groovy, and for everyone — no matter where they are — to find something that they'll enjoy or relate to.
LUNA: Your sound is very fitting in the New Zealand indie rock scene. Did your environment shape your sound or did you have different influences?
MILD ORANGE: The city we formed in was New Zealand’s most sort-of famous music city; there are so many bands that formed out of Dunedin. I think that definitely shaped us in the early days, because we were just around so many other bands. Even before we started, we were going to see gigs and seeing how people were doing it. But I also think that in New Zealand we're very aware of our isolation, and that we take inspiration from elsewhere, too. Because we, from day one, have always thought we wanted to be an international band.
MILD ORANGE: I feel like our music fits in a bit differently to a lot of what's being made in New Zealand as well. We’ve been influenced by the environment a lot of the time because when we're writing and recording together, we'll be in these really isolated places and it's pretty much just us making what feels good to us. The influences around us are more like nature and each other hanging out.
LUNA: You guys recorded this album in six different places. Can you list all the places you went to?
MILD ORANGE: Yeah. First off was Bannockburn, which was at Barry's family home that we converted into a studio. I did a lot of recording in my family’s home in Arrowtown, which is like 40 minutes away from there. Then we were on the west coast of New Zealand in Carterton (Carter’s Beach). A hundred people live out in this little beach area — it was super isolated. We lived literally on the beach for like a month. There were horses roaming outside the house on these massive paddocks and fields and stuff; it was very cool. I went back to Arrowtown after that again, and then Oakura in Taranaki because Jay and I moved to New Plymouth, and then also Auckland, which is where we did the recording studio around his studios.
LUNA: That’s a lot of jumping around! How was that?
MILD ORANGE: It’s good! I love it. I love traveling. I love moving around. I get kind of stir crazy if I'm in the same spot for too long. The band lives in different places currently, so it makes sense for us to meet up in all these different places.
LUNA: I feel like traveling influences the album a lot as well.
MILD ORANGE: Big time, yeah. When I was mixing it, I’d listen to it while I was going from A to B, so I could tune out. I’d be mixing, whatever, and then I’d put my headphones in and then go for a skate or a walk into town or go for a drive — go from A to B — and I’d experience it while the world around me is moving. That was influencing the mixes, how I wanted certain parts to pop out, and the production.
LUNA: Did you have an idea for the sound of the album going in, or did it just happen?
MILD ORANGE: A bit of both. It was after we recorded in many different spaces that we started to come together and we were like, “Okay, this is actually all concise.” But in those moments before then, we hadn’t really been like, “We’re making an album and this is what it’s going to be like.” It did start making sense as we kept recording and going along the process. I know some elements we wanted to really keep upping were the quality and the texture of the sound. We wanted to be in a bigger studio, improve recording techniques, and also improve the way we’re playing. We got way tighter as we were doing it all.
LUNA: I think the new album feels big. Very large, if that makes sense?
MILD ORANGE: That was our intention — we wanted it to sound bigger … We knew that when we would be releasing this album that the world would be opening up again. And, you know, the live music scene had taken a hit; people wouldn’t be able to go to shows for a while. When the album would come out, it would be during the return of live music. When we would play it, it would be these big songs that we want everyone to be able to explode to because they haven’t been able to see live music.
LUNA: Do you have any stories from the recording process?
MILD ORANGE: I have an interesting one [about “Music”] … that’s my favorite track on the album. I had been quite sick, and I wrote “This Kind of Day” and “Music” while I was recovering. With “Music,” I wrote that in the garden on acoustic, just quite unassumed at the time. It was about [looking] after your health, [saying], “Don’t lose the thing that you love the most,” because I found that [when I was sick], I wasn’t able to do music. I showed the song to the band, and we jammed it once and the guys wrote their parts literally after playing one go. We were like, “Okay, let’s have this up our sleeve … we might, maybe record it.”
Then we were on one of our last nights in the recording studio. We’d done all the things that we needed to do. We were like, “Okay, cool, let’s just have a jam.” We’d been drinking quite a lot too. [At this point,] we were all a bit steamed — which isn’t what we normally do — but this night, we were pretty stoked. We go to play “Music,” and the other guys would only play through it once. Barry’s playing out of tune, Jay could hardly even play his guitar. He didn’t even make it to the end of the song. But Jack and I managed to somehow get to the end of the song like real janky and raw.
I was listening back to it, and I was like, “Hey, there’s actually something here.” The music is raw and cool — you can’t recreate this energy. I got them to rerecord it, and also Frankensteined a bunch of the original bits. It’s just a fascinating process, how it all came together. It sounded so bad at the start, but now it’s my favorite.
LUNA: You also have a visual lyric book to go along with the album. Is that something you knew you wanted to have from the start?
MILD ORANGE: The way I interpreted it was making this thing to show as much about the album, the process, [what went] into it, and the vibe of that while reading the lyrics. I put that together within four or five hours one night and just slicked it all in one go.
LUNA: Tell me about the title Looking For Space. How did you decide on that?
MILD ORANGE: The album didn’t get its title until probably 80% of the way through making the music. It was kind of timely, because we were ready to enter our next chapters, like now we’re gonna move overseas and begin to tour and [do other] stuff again. Looking For Space has a lot of meanings. For me, it’s about understanding yourself through the world around you, how you affect it, and how it affects you. You’re just trying to understand it all, and I came to the conclusion that I don’t understand it all, but it’s part of the beauty.
There’s also the literal meaning where you're looking for space, but it’s kind of funny to think that you’re looking even though it’s everywhere. But some spaces draw you more than others, even though “spaces” are literally everywhere.
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