INTERVIEW: Bedroom Folk minimalist Mudgoose on Origins, Cassette Recording, the "Scene" and the lack of good Country.

 

INTERVIEW: Bedroom Folk minimalist Mudgoose on Origins, Cassette Recording, the "Scene" and the lack of good Country.  

 

 

i don’t know how much of an introduction the music of Mudgoose needs if you’ve been an avid reader of this site. his music is sweet, yet melancholy, lugubrious, yet beautiful. a true DIY songsmith, you get the feeling you can know him as a friend just by listening to his output; and that he’s singing to you, personally. If you're a fan of all the prerequisite good indie bands everyone’s supposed to like (Sebadoh, Pavement, Elliot Smith, The Raincoats et al) he’s one to watch.

i had the pleasure of speaking to mr Mudgoose the day before the release his latest effort, the full length Here Come The Planes EP, released on cassette and digital by ChainPunkBaddie (that’s quality whanganui workmanship, that is.) i’m told the tapes will find their way to high profile wellington record stores, so make it your duty to support the artist today. without further ado…

first off, will you tell our readers who you are?

I’m Fletcher Ng, AKA Mudgoose. I mostly write lo-fi noise pop and alt rock, with whatever equipment I can afford. I’ve been making most of my music on tape for a while but recently started putting more effort into digital recording. 

can you tell us what a mudgoose actually is? 90% of my time writing reviews is spent trying to get google to stop spell-checking your name.

I’ve got absolutely no clue. I kinda just threw words together until I liked how they sounded when I came up with the name. I used to tell people that I took a shit on a goose once and thought “hey, that’s a muddy ass goose” but eventually decided that that was pretty dumb and lame so there’s no real origin story anymore.

your first mudgoose records were released 3 years ago, written when you were only 17. what music were you making pre-mudgoose, and what made you stick with the project for this long?

Pre-Mudgoose I was in a noise rock band called Glass Daughter. If you ask me, we were the greatest band of all time, but only people who saw us play can confirm that. Mudgoose now is essentially just the pseudonym I use for all the music I make, but now I’ve decided to only release stuff I think is good and not just whatever I mumble into my dictaphone. 

the cassette format has been popular with indie musicians since it’s invention, but is often derided for it’s low sound quality and, these days, the relative difficulty involved in actually playing the damn things. as someone who’s been putting out homemade tapes since the genesis of the mudgoose project can you explain your dedication and love for the humble C60 cassette? 

For me, it just boils down to the fact that I think cassettes are cool. I like the clicky-ness of the buttons on tape decks, and I like the wow and flutter and tape hiss that a shitty tape machine produces.

the wellington scene as i see it is currently defined by the network of bedroom recording artists, who believe in low fidelity and maintain even lower profiles. what’s your relationship like with these other bedroom-noise-lofi-pop artists?

I think it’s really just due to the nature of being a student or young person in Wellington. You can’t really afford to go to a studio, so you buy yourself an interface and go from there. If you ask me, we need less bedroom noise pop artists and more country in this city. No one plays country anymore.

 

are there any small, local bands that you’d like to educate our readers about?

 

My boy Roman makes great experimental music under the name O Time Thy Pyramids. Any band that Baxter Gray is in is usually pretty damn good. and, if you ever get the chance to see Sighthound play, definitely go to that show. Oh, and shoutout my flatmate Lou.

 

would you say your music is more aimed towards freaks, or geeks?

I’d like to say freaks, but as I’ve gotten older and become more introspective I’ve learned that I’m definitely more of a geek. Great show, shouldn’t have been canned.

lastly, when can people next see you live, and where can people find your music?

I’ll be playing with the rest of my band at Otis Fest at San Fran on Sunday the 14th of April. No clue what time we’ll be on yet, San Fran still hasn’t told us (Thanks, Skivenation). You can find my music on all streaming services, but there’s more back catalog dictaphone stuff on Bandcamp as well as my main releases.

 

 

 

there you have it folks, Mudgoose, in profile. go listen to the album, attend his shows and shower him in praise or i'll beat you with my special critic's club i keep on my person at all times. i may be small, but i am crafty, and wise, and i want to hit people with a club anyway. it'd just be nice to have an excuse for once.