For Melbourne psychedelic-jazz fusion outfit Mildlife, a return to live music beats sitting around on their hands for last nine months or so, as bassist Tom Shanahan so aptly puts it.
Playing Brisbane and Sydney shows in early March, Mildlife are preparing to make the rounds off the back of the release of their second album, 'Automatic', released last September.With its varying sonic style and sense of discipline – compared to the band's debut album, 2017's 'Phase' – the playing of 'Automatic' is sure to make for some changes in the live setting.
"Both albums, I think, have a certain energy that encourages dance or people to move," Tom says.
"That's something we're conscious of in our sets – how the energy carries through from start to finish, especially for an hour and a half, which is the length of the set at The Tivoli [in Brisbane].
"Both albums are different, stylistically, but the energy there will allow us to weave between the two albums in that time, without too much change in energy or dynamics so that we can carry the energy through, because we want people to move and feel the music with their bodies as well as their heads."
To capture that fluidity with their live performances, there is of course a continued catalyst that allows Mildlife to pull off such succinct delivery.
There, Tom says, is a spine. "I suppose it's our desire to create music that you feel in your head and in your body. If we're going to be trying to create music that allows people to move their body as well as their head within both albums, then you'll have that [element] connecting them.
"We're making music that we are inspired by and drawn to at the time of its creation. So when people talk about great differences between them [the albums], we're not as aware of these differences."
As songwriters as well as performers, Mildlife's perspective of their own material is going to be different to those people who receive it.
"It's not an intentional thing – 'Hey we want this album to be more disciplined, we want this album to be more this or that' – our intention, it's not there before we're making it, it's more about us feeling the vibe and energy of the room and seeing what comes out of that.
"We're a live band," Tom adds, "in the sense that we love playing live and we never write music that we can't translate to a great live show.
"The live performance is always going to impact the way we write music – it's written live. We're all in a room together live, we're jamming live, writing music live; that becomes the seed of any idea, then we work on it live. That live aspect is always going to be huge in how we approach albums and future releases.
"In terms of our shows, if the audience is in a certain spot and they have a certain energy, we're going to feel that energy as well, and it's going to become sort of a feedback loop between us and an audience.
"In that way, I suppose you could say the audience informs how we write music, but it's not really an intentional thing in our mind. We have to have trust in ourselves and write music we enjoy writing, because we have to enjoy playing it, too."
Mildlife play The Tivoli (Brisbane) 6 March and The Eltham Hotel (Sydney) 7 March. They also play the Euroa Music Festival (Euroa, VIC) 27 March.
