Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things you should know about math-noise rock duo Mi’ens and their new album, Future Child
The Vancouver act is the second Canadian band to sign to Kill Rock Stars
Mi’ens’ Future Child is a concept album that represents the imaginings of a Future World.
KIM GLENNIE (guitar/loops/Moog) and Evan Heggen (drums) form the mathy noise rock duo Mi’ens. Having just released a new album, Future Child, they’re the second Canadian act to ever sign to Kill Rock Stars, a progressive indie label out of the U.S.
Both Glennie and Heggen are classically trained, on piano and guitar respectively. Glennie started Mi’ens in 2012 as a way to explore new approaches to song-writing, looking to create a sound palette that was colourful, bright and cacophonous, and hyperactive and playful without sacrificing technique. With a knack for polyrhythmic blastbeats, Heggen proved to be the perfect fit for the project’s rhythmically complex, circular, and systematic components.
Here’s what you need to know about the experimental-with-a-side-of-sparklepop band and their latest release.
Mi’ens’ influences include math and noise rock, bands like Battles, Don Caballero, Shellac, Sonic Youth, Tera Melos, Fugazi, Marnie Stern, and Hella, as well as acts like Stereolab and Broadcast. Heggen likes the drumming of Ed Greene, Clyde Stubblefield, and Jeff Pocaro, while Glennie is obliquely influenced by no wave, neo-futurism, the soundscapes of 1970s sci-fi films, avant-rock, and minimalism.
Mi’ens describes its style as “female-fronted guitar shredding, live loops, layered textural guitar and effects, the warm, analog drone of the Moog, coupled with well-placed vocalizations, all atop breakneck beats”. Press has described it as “virtuosic and chaotic soundscapes”, “reminiscent of Hella or Don Cab”, and “trippy as fuck”.
Future Child is a concept album that represents the imaginings of a Future World, a world that can be better than the dystopia we seem to find ourselves in now. “Future Child is a departure and extension of our previous work, both tonally and lyrically,” Glennie tells Stir. “I wanted to play with themes of myth, dreamscapes, inequality, dystopia, connection, and catharsis. I also wanted to explore sonic expansions with propulsive angularities, complex and experimental instrumentations, loops and feedback, the hum and whirr of the Moog, frenetic percussion, and intertwined guitar lines, that oscillate between articulated and visceral.”
Mi’ens is short for Mittens, one of Glennie’s nicknames, with the lightning bolt apostrophe representing a glottal stop, kind of a visceral throwback to a pre-verbal communication style (mɪʔnz). Other meanings of the band name are mien (demeanour, mood) and the French meaning of la mienne (mine), representing the first time that Glennie has written all of her own melodic material rather than cowriting in a band, a nod to its origins as a solo project.
Kill Rock Stars is a queer-positive, feminist, anti-racist, and artist-friendly label that arose out of DIY punk culture in 1991 and was founded by Slim Moon.
Mi’ens’ Future Child is out now on Kill Rock Stars and on coloured vinyl in local record stores Red Cat, Audiopile, Dandelion and Neptoon.
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