Lia Mice

Hello. You’re listening to the audio.com podcast where we interview artists and musicians about their work in sound. I’m Ilia Rogatchevski and my guest today is the composer, producer and instrument builder Lia Mice. Mice was born in Australia and spent her formative years playing in various bands, before branching out with her solo project and relocating to London. In the UK, she undertook a Masters of Music degree in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths and later a PhD in Large Musical Instrument Design at Queen Mary University. Mice has created several instruments that draw from years of experimentation with technology. These include Reel Time (an upcycled reel-to-reel machine converted into a digital sampler), a chandelier modified to make drone music, a One-Handed Violin, in collaboration with the OHMI Trust, Chaos Bells (a large percussion instrument employing microcomputers) and the Catastrophone, which explores how digital instruments can be made from sustainable materials. Mice is a recipient of numerous residencies and has exhibited and performed internationally. She is also a DJ and her high-energy sets explore the weirder sides of electro, tech-noir, acid and experimental pop. Mice has guested on NTS and Rinse FM, and co-hosts a monthly show called EastBlenders with A'Bear on Threads Radio. In 2021, Mice was awarded the Oram Award in recognition of her multidisciplinary work that covers electronic music production, large-scale digital instruments, interactive sculpture, A/V performance, composition for film, and academic writing. To date, Mice has released four studio albums, each one developing and augmenting established pop, dance and electronic structures. Her latest record, Sweat Like Caramel was released by Objects Ltd in 2022. Mice is an advocate for accessible musical instrument design and is herself monocular sighted. Since moving to London in 2015 she has founded and curated Electrolights AV an experimental platform highlighting audio-visual artists and performers, and Lost Valley - a late night dance party highlighting experimental techno artists and DJs. Our interview took place in December 2023 at my home studio in London and began with Lia reminiscing about her earliest sonic memories. - My childhood was kind of all sound and no vision, because I'm blind in one eye, but I was forced to wear an eyepatch on my sighted eye from when I was two weeks old, so everything was sound, and as it went on and, you know, I grew older, I came to understand that this was a misdiagnosis, but nobody else did, and so I basically lived looking out of a blind eye for ten years, so I really trained my ears, and for that reason, I have a really strong connection to sound. I remember reading somewhere that you were doing an eye test, and you memorized the letters on the board in order to cheat it. Yeah, I actually used a song in my head to memorize it, because I only had a split second to memorize it. I was so certain that this wasn't working as a medical intervention, but nobody else was, and nobody was listening to me when I said that, so I was in a situation where I was told, just keep wearing the eyepatch, and it'll make your eye better, and the only way for other people to kind of stop doing that was if I actually faked the vision by memorizing the eye chart. So what I did, because I was very young, it wasn't like the eye chart that goes A, C, F, Z, it was like all these E's, and the E's go forwards, backwards, up, or down, so all I had to do was match forwards, backwards, up, or down to a different pitch, and make a song of those four notes, and I could memorize, say, 30 of them, because they'd take my eyepatch off of my good eye, and then cover my good eye, and make me read it with my bad eye, so I had about that long to kind of make up a song in my head, and I did it. Why do you think nobody was listening to you at that time? Was it a form of ableism, or did they feel like, we know better than you, we can make you better, we can make you sighted? All of that, yeah, there is a form of ableism that is just thinking disability needs to be corrected, and it doesn't need to be corrected, and in this case, it certainly didn't need to be corrected. They knew I could see out of one eye perfectly, and they just really hung on to this idea that they could correct the eye that I couldn't see out of, and they didn't want to stop trying, and so it came from a place of wanting to help me, but that in itself is ableism, striving for, quote unquote, a perfect body, a normal body. When did you start making music then? When I was about eight, I really liked playing with this organ that we had, and it had the foot pedals, and it had three tiers of different manuals, and it had this drum beat selection, and I would just kind of jam out and make up things on that, because I did learn the piano from when I was about five, but the thing with not being able to see the sheet music was I had to sneak away with it, look at it with my good eye, try to memorize it, and then take it back into music class, because I couldn't see it, so I didn't really progress well on the piano, but I did enjoy just making up songs with this organ, and then it wasn't until I was probably late teens that I started bands with friends, and that was when I was really starting to write songs. I've got a list of all the bands that you were in. Oh, okay, let's go. I'm curious about this. Okay, so you grew up in Australia, right? I think the first two bands were Australian, so there was the Tremors. Yes. Which is a sort of punk rock group, released one album around 2004. Yeah. And then Gazoonga Attack. Yeah. Which is an all-female group, more of a punk, sort of an anarcho-punk vibe. Around the same time, around 2005, you released an album, I think, and you played bass in both. Yeah, I played bass. In the Tremors I sang and played organ. And then you moved to New York, and you were in a group called Adult Themes, which is an alt-rock kind of group. Around 2010. Yeah. And then you did a solo project called Happy New Year, which sort of bleeds into your solo identity as Lia Mice, and I was going to ask, when did you get interested in electronic music? Why did you gravitate away from alternative rock and that sort of thing? So, when I was making punk music in Australia, I did want to involve more electronics in it, like drum machines and things, but that scene was very rock, and yeah, there just didn't seem to be much appetite for adding those electronic instruments. So, when I really wanted to start a solo project, which, yeah, I did start calling it Happy New Year, but then it was really difficult to have a project called Happy New Year, because people couldn't find it on the internet. So, that's when I just said, okay, I'll put it out as Lia Mice. That was a little bit out of aesthetically wanting it to sound electronic, and a little bit out of necessity of thinking I want to do this all myself, but I'm not a drummer. It was probably the first time I actively aimed to make electronic music. Was it all made in GarageBand? Is that right? The first album was made in GarageBand. I like that idea of accessibility. I think somewhere you said that you should just use whatever you've got under your fingertips at that moment in time, otherwise you'll always be dreaming of the best gear and never get around to making anything. That was exactly the approach to that first solo album. It was also very exploratory, because I didn't know what it was going to sound like, and I didn't know when to finish it. I just thought, I'll keep working on these tracks, and when I have the feeling that they'll be finished, so I was making and remixing and messing with them while I was learning how to produce. So, it was a very strange process for making an album, but I think I may have pushed GarageBand to as far as it can be used for. When did you start building your own instruments? So, I did a Masters of Music at Goldsmith, which I did between 2015 and 2017. And in that Masters, I did a module that was about interactive systems, and it was the first time that I considered making my own interactive systems. I'd always been into them, but I never thought I would be able to do that. And then once I built one, which was, I wouldn't say it was an instrument, it was more of an interactive composition using Max MSP. It was called Soul Delay, and it was a map of the world. It was about this idea that was from a William Gibson novel. It was this idea that when you travel, your soul is kind of lagging behind you in the places you've been. Like a shadow or something? Yeah, like it kind of takes a while to catch up to where you are now. So, I thought about it as like, could that explain jet lag? And so, it was an interactive system built in Max, where you could kind of choose the different cities to be traveling between, and then the music itself would morph from like where it was from and where it was going to, and in a sonic representation of soul delay. Anyway, I really enjoyed making that, and it made me really think, okay, I could make instruments. I've always been fascinated by instruments, and I started, you know, to follow instrument makers. That was when I realized, you know what, why don't I just try to make instruments? So, I then enrolled in a PhD at the Augmented Instruments Lab at Queen Mary University, and my first actual instrument was the ChandeLIA. I was looking at the video of that, of people testing it out in the lab, and maybe you can describe a little bit about what it does and how it works, but essentially, it's a chandelier that you found on Deptford Market, and you sort of augmented it. I think there's a piezo microphone involved, and also a microcomputer. Do you want to elaborate on how it works? Yeah, it's not a piezo, though it does kind of work like a piezo. It's an accelerometer, and so what that does is recognise the angle that the chandelier is being tilted at, and then the data that is kind of saying what angle it is, is going into the microcomputer that is running a Karplus-Strong algorithm, which is a physical modelling algorithm that is designed to emulate an electric guitar string. So, essentially, when you move the chandelier with your hands, the lights flicker and it microtonally changes this electric guitar drone that it sounds. It almost sounds like the electricity running through the chandelier. That chandelier instrument feels to me like the kernel of an idea that you see evolve in other instruments that you've built since, which are the prism bell, the Chaos Bells, and your new instrument called the Catastrophone. So, can you explain a little bit about that evolution and how those instruments differ from each other? What were you trying to achieve when building them? Yeah, so my overall PhD research focused on large instruments, so instruments larger than the performer's body. I was wondering why are digital instruments getting smaller and smaller? Of course, they're designed to fit on the tabletop of a bedroom producer and to be portable, but it made me wonder why don't we even have the option for very large digital instruments, and then what are we missing out on because of that? So, I started to build large instruments, and the first one was the Prism Bell, and in many ways, that was a prototype towards the chaos bell because I knew that I wanted there to be more kind of implementation for chaos bells, but I wasn't there yet. However, I had a great show that I wanted to play at Islington Assembly Hall, so I got to the point that I got to and just called it Prism Bell and went and played a show with it, and I played several shows, actually. I took it to… Supernormal, I think. Oh, yeah, I took it to Supernormal, and there was maybe one other place I took it to. So, that instrument was larger than the performer. The performer was Janine A'Bear, and it was like a cage around Janine that she would climb into and hit with mallets, these rods that jut out in different directions, and each one had a piezo on it, and it was tuned to a different cup of strong pitch, and so it was very noisy. It created this sound as if you're hitting an electric guitar with all this distortion, if you're hitting that with a mallet, and I really liked that instrument because it was kind of gnarly, and the sound was so unruly that it matched with the giant gestures where you're smashing it, and yeah, I just thought, you know, there isn't something like this out there. And then to progress further into my research, the Chaos Bells added a level of interaction where you could hit them with mallets, but you could also tilt the bells so that in that way, when you're tilting them, they begin to drone, kind of like the ChandeLIA, actually. When you're tilting it, it begins to drone, so it had 20 different pendulums that you tilt, each is pitched to a different tone, and so you could play multiple together and drone them, or you could hit them and play them percussively, and they would play a more staccato note when you hit them. And so that instrument was really designed both to play live on stage, but also to run some research on how the size of a digital instrument influences music composition and performance. Because these are digital instruments, you can potentially make them sound like anything you want. So what informs how they sound? What sort of process do you go through to choose the pitches and tones that end up being manifested by the instrument when it's played? With those instruments, the ChandeLIA and the Prism Bell and Chaos Bells, the reason for choosing physical modelling was so that it wouldn't be like MIDI. So MIDI itself, it only can go from like, at the moment, right, we're still in MIDI 1.0. It can only go from 0 to 127, on and off. So you only have like 128 different steps, and so if you wanted to make something really reactive, you could spend a really long time changing the code so that each of those 128 steps sounds different, but that would be really computationally expensive. So really, when you're using MIDI, you really are kind of constrained to the on and the off and the one sound or different thresholds where it changes sound. Whereas when you're using physical modelling, it's emulating the real physics of a string, and so hitting it lightly, it runs through the algorithm in a way that if you hit a string lightly and then if you hit it more heavily, there's a larger kind of change to the timbre. It completely reacts differently when you're hitting it lightly or heavily. So something that I really wanted to build into those instruments was that nuance. However, to do that, I was confined to a physical modelling sound, and you know, I was using microcomputers and there's a limit to their computation. I mean, there's a limit to every computer's computation, but for instance, Chaos Bells requires four Bela Minis, and so it's almost like I'm playing four instruments at once. There's four complete circuits, and that's just because it can't run on one. It can barely run on four. So that is the trade-off of having something with that much nuance, and the other thing is it requires you to code it in a way that it's already maxed out by that decision. So I'm stuck with that sound. I'd have to pull it apart and put it back together again to use other microcomputers if I want to change it from a guitar algorithm to say, I don't know, a flute or whatever else, you know, a drum, you know. So I was working with that sound because I thought that sound sounded cool to me. Like, I like electric guitars, I like noise, and I found ways to make that sound a bit different in each instrument. With Chaos Bells, I added extra partials to make it sound more bell-like, but with Catastrophone, which you mentioned, that's my latest instrument, I am actually working with MIDI, and that allows me to connect the instrument to a computer or to another synth and to change the sounds on the fly as part of the performance, and that allows me to use it on stage with my wacky electronic music that has all different synth sounds all the time. And so for me, the Catastrophone, while it has the trade-off where it's not as nuanced or expressive as Chaos Bells, it allows me to play it in my electronic music and it fits the aesthetic more. Because you have a very strong pop sensibility, even though there's a lot of experimentation and unusual sounds, when I saw you play at the Albany in Deptford, it felt like a very joyful atmosphere, people were dancing, it was very fun. Not to say that experimental music or sound art gigs can't be fun, but there does tend to be that tendency of you come, you sit down, you listen, and you're respectful of whatever's going on, but this is a kind of a meeting of the two worlds. Yeah, I love the song format of pop music and I love the catchiness of pop music. I love a good beat, so I'm definitely inspired by those aesthetics when I'm working on my solo project, but things I get bored of are generic sounds or generic processes, so what I'm doing is I'm using quite experimental processes and experimental sounds, but within that really structured pop format of verse, chorus, or sometimes a bit more dance music inspired. But it does come out as heavily in the pop world, but with an experimental part of it. You have a lot of collaborators, people who you invite to perform your large instruments, you mentioned Jeanine A'Bear, and there's also a musician called Andrew Booker, and when I saw you in Deptford, you were playing with Liz Melina Godoy Nieto. How do you choose who to play with and what does each different player bring to the performance? I invite people who I know will have fun and want to join me on stage, because getting on stage to play someone else's set, I think I'm asking a big favour of them, and I just want them to actually get something out of it themselves, so to actually have fun, and so yeah, that's the first criteria when I'm going to ask someone, I just want to make sure they're genuinely going to have a good time and really want to be there. Jeanine A'Bear is a trained gong performer, as well as being a multi-instrumentalist and a trained piano player, so she has this kind of innate sensibility of synthesizers, but also percussive performance, so she was really great when it came to improvising with the Prism Bell. I think there becomes a limit where if I ask the same person too much, they might just not necessarily keep wanting to play with me, so I stopped asking Jeanine to play, not for any reason, she's my DJ partner for EastBlenders and we hang out all the time, it was just that I kind of thought, you know what, she's doing a lot with her own solo project, performing out, playing live shows, so I'll start asking some different people. Andrew Booker is a trained drummer and he plays different percussive instruments too, he's always learning new percussive instruments, he's a session player and he was part of my study for Chaos Bells as part of my PhD, so I had seen him come along to the study sessions and explore Chaos Bells and I recognised that he was getting a lot out of that instrument, so that's why I invited him to be in the Chaos Bells video, but also to explore Catastrophone when I recently played at Cafe Oto and that was amazing because he's so well trained, he's got such tacit knowledge of percussive instruments and performing with mallets and with sticks. It was the first time he was playing this instrument, he had a bit of a try on soundcheck, but he said: "Hey, let's stop now. It's working, but I don't want to, you know, try it all out in the soundcheck, I want to be trying it out as the improvisation on stage." It was wonderful to play with him because he is a skilled improviser, which takes so many years to develop the skills of improvisation, so you're listening and you're performing at the same time and you're exploring and you're kind of mentally getting in sync with the other performers and he's really great at that. And then Liz Godoy is a really crafty producer, she self-produces her music, she's been on stage for decades, is a really great performer and is a really great synth player and so when she plays a Catastrophone, she's kind of playing a percussive synth, so she plays it more like a synth player and is hooking these kind of melodies and jamming with my pop songs in that way, so it's really interesting to see what different performers bring to the same instrument and what we're doing is I'm playing my album. So lately I've been playing Sweat Like Caramel live, I've got a push and I'm playing like different stems and looping different bits and remixing it live and singing and so what I've asked these performers to do is like jam along with that and then I allow them some space to kind of go off on their own tangents, I might bring it back to just drums so that they're soloing and yeah we have that kind of ebb and flow of the set, so there's a lot of room for a different performer to have a different outcome of that set and for me that makes the set really really interesting because I have played on my own and I do sometimes still play solo, but I'm only jamming with myself and the technology at that point, like adding another human in makes it so much more fun for me. Maybe we should quickly describe what the Catastrophone looks like as well, it's sort of like a grid of collages, I can't remember exactly how many, maybe about 12 sort of square collages of cats and each of those is a trigger for the MIDI, right? Yeah, so when I was designing the Catastrophone, I wanted to explore how to make a large digital instrument from sustainable materials, so I went down this path of studio exploration where I was playing with different sustainable materials and I started playing with recycled paper and I wasn't really getting anywhere because paper in itself is very flimsy, I was trying all kinds of origami and folding architecture kind of techniques and by the end I just needed to have some results because I did this thing that I always do which is book in a show and then make the instrument that I'm going to play at that show, so the show was coming up and I still didn't have anything, so the night before I was looking around my studio and I found all these collages that I'd made in lockdown where I had collaged all these images from encyclopedias and one of the encyclopedias was a cat encyclopedia. I just started holding them up to the frame that I had and kind of blending that idea with the folded architecture and the origami and I was like, oh it's a collage instrument. So I realised okay, I need to collage all of it and it kind of gave it this visual aesthetic that is kind of chaotic but it's also kind of representative of the way that I produce music which is collage, like I'm sampling and I'm cutting up things and I'm reversing them and I'm putting them in the wrong context and so I collaged all of these kind of tiles and they have cats on them and then I took it out to the Albany and I asked the audience to name it. Instrument building is very important to your creative practice and you mentioned sampling, not the last album that's come out but the one before that is called The Sampler as a Time Machine and I believe that one's based around an instrument called Reel Time, or at least it features the Reel Time instrument which is a tapeless reel-to-reel machine that is, again, uses microcomputers and a looper, a digital looper. You gave a talk at the Tate Modern and you mentioned being influenced by this idea that the brain is a sampler, that we don't see or process information in a continuous stream as we're used to thinking, it's fragmented bits of information and I'm really intrigued by that idea and would you be able to kind of expand on it and talk a little bit more about what influenced that record? At the time that I was making that album I was reading a lot about memory, time travel, neuroscience like consciousness. I just kind of was reading about anything that could kind of be a bit of a metaphor for time travel and I was thinking about the sampler as being a way to sonically time travel. So when you're making music with a sampler you're putting these kind of fragments in and then you're pressing play but if you think about it, what you're playing is all of these little fragments and all of those fragments have come from other places and so you're kind of time travelling to where that microphone was at the time and we take it as a whole, like we experience it as a song beginning to end as if it's a whole thing but it's actually this kind of web of non-linear experiences. What's kind of interesting is that we experience the present moment as a continuous experience in the same way that we would experience a song being played from a sampler as one whole but what I came to learn when I was reading about all of this was that we actually experience snippets of the present moment kind of like frames of a film, how there's 24 frames in one second and then there's a moment where our brain has to process it and then we experience that reality but the problem is with that latency, we're still in the present moment that is kind of ahead of what was perceived so what we're really experiencing is this present where we're almost predicting what we're going to perceive and that's how we trick ourselves into thinking that it's all one experience rather than multiple snapshots and then of course the way that our senses work and the way that our perceptions work and interact with memory is that we're always reacting and rehashing and triggering all of these other experiences and that's kind of what the sampler is doing. Let's talk about your latest album which is called Sweat Like Caramel, came out in 2022 and that's inspired by your experience of lockdown and a tape machine that you bought second hand as sort of maybe an unorthodox or slightly different form of composition than what you're used to do you want to talk about how that album came into being? In lockdown I started to experience double vision and that was something that was caused by my childhood interaction with my eyes and things it was kind of like coming back to haunt me and it fatigued me and I had migraines for a really long time and I couldn't make music for probably all of 2020 but I think it was right at the end of 2020 I bought a second hand tape machine and it also came with about 300 reels of tape that had things on them. I went into the studio in early 2021 but I was really fatigued so my usual experimental like yeah let's just do something cool like bounce off those ideas I just didn't have the energy to do it the way that I normally would do it so I said to myself if I just put on a tape and play it I'm making music like and I really aim just to have fun in the studio so my aim wasn't the final product my aim was just to enjoy my day in the studio not pressure myself and maybe press play on a tape and see what was on these tapes because I just didn't know what was on them so I just kind of would play a tape and sit back and if I heard something interesting I might chop it up or I might sample it into my computer and I started to challenge myself to think of all the different ways I could play with this physical tape to produce music and I started to roll dice and cut it up according to the length of that or I might just randomly cut pieces and some of them would end up backwards or in the wrong order and I might make rhythms out of some cut up and put in blank bits of tape. I came up with all different kind of ideas and that became the basis of that album but they got to a point in that process where I realised if I only play with tape it's going to sound very dated because in the pre-DAW time of music production that's all we had to play with or like you know primitive samplers as well but it all started sounding like a bit like early 90s so I thought okay I'm going to think of other ways to interact with the tape but in a modern digital way so I started picking out bits that I'd made in these tracks and maybe bouncing them to MIDI and then bouncing that to a synth so I was still using melodies I'd come up with from chopping up tape but it was now being put through a synth or a drum machine and then I was thinking of ways that I could either sample the voice off the tape or interact like with that voice as a duet with myself or synthesise voice so it wasn't just my voice on the album and that's kind of how I came up with Sweat Like Caramel. You mentioned rolling dice and that brings to mind Chance Operations, Yi Ching and John Cage and things like that is that something that like a conscious decision to go in that direction or is it a coincidence? The reason for bringing chance into my music production is so that I don't have to think of the solution all of the time so if I have multiple ways to go I'll just leave it up to Chance so that I'm not getting into decision fatigue so for instance if I'm going to the studio and I have 12 drafts and I'm trying to finish them all for an album I'll go to random.org and I'll just put 1 to 12 and then it'll give me a number and then I'm like okay I'm going to work on the 6th track and I know what I want to do on that track next but it stops me from having to be like which track am I going to work on today? Yeah so the less bogged down I can get with the unnecessary decisions the more mental energy I can save for the actual decisions I need when I'm producing music because producing music is decisions, it's non-stop decisions and when you're fatigued you just hit a wall faster so I was trying to find ways to have less energy but still make music and have fun. I'd like to also talk about another one of your instruments that you created it's called the One-Handed Violin which is designed for people with differently abled bodies and somewhere you mentioned about music lessons being focused on the whole class learning one instrument like the violin or the keyboard and that project sort of came out of that thinking can you talk a little bit about it? Yeah so in the UK in primary schools there's something called whole class ensemble training and it's an idea coming from positivity like every student should have the chance to learn some music how are we going to do that with a whole class of 10 year olds? Oh we'll get them all to have one instrument each, the same instrument and we're going to teach the whole class that instrument but the problem is that within that whole class will be different students with different dexterity different physical abilities and approaching teaching music in that way it's just not accessible for every student so the One-Handed Violin was a concept that I worked on with the OHMI Trust which stands for One-Handed Musical Instrument and their goal is to make a version of every traditional instrument that can be performed with just the use of one arm and hand, because there are a lot of people who do not have dexterity in one arm or don't have one arm and this makes performing in orchestras and performing music more accessible but one instrument that still hasn't been converted to a One-Handed version is the violin. I did a six month project placement with the OHMI Trust to develop a One-Handed Violin and the outcome was a concept that I'd love to work on more at some point but it hasn't fully been realised into something that could say hit the market but it did get to the point where you could bow an electric violin and hum a note at the same time and in that way the humming of the note pitch selects what the electric violin will be re-pitched to so the output is a re-pitched violin. The One-Handed Violin instrument was featured in a Guardian article in 2019 in that article you talk about coming up against barriers within the music tech industry where it's a very male-dominated space and I was wondering what sort of pushback or challenges have you come across within that space and how have things changed if at all since that time? I've always been really welcomed in the space of music technology since becoming an instrument designer and that went hand-in-hand with saying that I was a doctoral student and then getting a PhD so that is pretty qualifying when you couple it with that but previously when I was a performing musician and I was looking to get into the world of music production in studios and things like that yeah I definitely got pushback that was like oh you don't really know anything about this you know you get the idea that people think you're suddenly today I had this great idea I'd like to get into music you know and that can hold you back because people aren't opening doors for you but you just have to keep going and not everybody is like that. You won the Oram Award in the year 2021. I think that's a symptom of that world changing women and non-binary people people from diverse backgrounds being recognised and elevated their voices being taken seriously, I suppose. Well, the Oram Awards is part of the change it's not just a symptom of the change. It's actually pushing forward to create the change recognising the contributions of women and gender expansive artists in their lifetime at the moment that they're making those contributions is challenging the world to take us seriously and to make space for us in the highest echelons of our careers and with more and more and more initiatives through every area of society that is making change and it's a really great place to be in right now making positive change.