What is Mozzarella?
Richard In Your Mind
had mozzarella happen to them,
unexpectedly.
Soon they realised
they had
become it.
As it passes from one host to the next
all become it.
It will drip out your ears.
It’s a kind of cheese.
– RYIM 2012
This is a poem by Richard Cartwright, lead singer of Sydney/Blue Mountains sampledelic pop band Richard In Your Mind, written to accompany the release of last year’s EP titled Mozzarella. The album cover for this EP is an Israeli tourist beckoning to a cow on the banks of the Ganges river while a man who made Joni Mitchell cry plays saxophone in his speedos. Their tags on labelstate.com are psych, weird, psych weird, and weird. Starting to see a pattern?
It takes a special kind of band to pull off the sheer degree of freak out psychedelia that Richard In Your Mind exhibit – the kind of band that for the most part make soft, sweet indie tunes but break their albums up with hypnotic sitar breakdowns, insane tone bending synth vibrato and DJ Shadow inspired tracks about missing trains. Likewise, it takes a special kind of music fan to listen to a Richard In Your Mind album. You have to be open to adventure, experiment and new sonic experiences, because you never know what the next track on their album is going to bring you.
The band formed way back in 2006 and since then have spent the majority of their time on awesome Sydney label Rice is Nice. They’ve also been popping up here and there on Triple J award lists and the gig radar at local festivals and small pubs. Their first LP The Future Prehistoric is a very Flaming Lips affair: its textures are brash and there’s a very alternative sense of production underlying the album. It drips with studio effects, drumbeats interrupted and delayed to infinity, a ton of warbling bird samples, artificial vinyl speedups and slowdowns and some delicious blipity bloopity electronic beats fading in and out of the acoustic percussion.
2010’s My Volcano (featuring the familiar single Candelabra) is an equally strange affair, adding an eastern drone influence to their sound and further entrenching their more straightforward songs into the realm of Strawberry Fields-era Beatles. Likewise, 2011’s Sun saw the band refine their sound and craft a set of songs that work wonderfully in a live setting and focusing less on studio effects and more on their songwriting. 2012 saw the Mozzarella EP released just in time for the Summer, so here’s hoping we’ve got some more Richard In Your Mind deliciousness to come this sunny season, just in time for the holidays.
On that note – deliciousness is an overused word when describing music, but there is actually something tasty about Richard In Your Mind’s music. Maybe it’s those synth filters or that patent guitar wah that makes it sound melted and goopy, or maybe it’s the crisp fizz of that sitar drone that makes my mouth water… Is that just me*?
* Editorial: No, my mouth just watered reading the word “fizz”.
FIND OUT MORE ON
