Ash and Sophie Miles are some of the music world’s good eggs. Since 2006, the husband and wife team have been operating Mistletone, an independent label and touring company based in Melbourne. Their approach is as straightforward as it is honest; work with music they love and treat people right. It helps that the music they love, and have released, is some of the best independent music of the last 11 years.
Starting out with the release of House Arrest by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, followed by Ariel’s first Australian tour, Mistletone has grown into a respected indie touring company and label. Mistletone tours have included The Clean, Beach House, The Julie Ruin, Michael Hurley, Parquet Courts, Perfume Genius, Sharon Van Etten, Wooden Shjips and a heap more.
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Their record label includes releases by Beach House, Cash Savage & the Last Drinks, El Guincho, HTRK, Toro y Moi and many more.
Leading up to Mistletone’s 11th birthday celebrations and Summer Tones party on Dec 17 in Melbourne that features performances by !!! (chk chk chk), Cash Savage and the Last Drinks, Tropical Fuck Storm, and Spike Fuck, Sophie shares some of the label’s lost/forgotten gems.
Kes
KES, the acronymous Karl Edwin Scullin, was a big part of Mistletone’s early days. Kes had released an amazing album The Jellys In The Pot on Unstable Ape Records in 2005, and approached us to release his next album The Grey Goose Wing (2006) which remains one of my favourite all time Mistletone releases. A brilliant “lost” outsider folk album by a great Melbourne artist who retreated into mystery when he abruptly retired from music in 2013 (yes, we are trying to coax him back).
An Unnamed, Ill-Fated Tour
Everyone likes to talk about their successes but I would like to remember a fairly disastrous tour by an artist I shan’t name. Ash and I loved this artist’s records from several years ago and wondered why they hadn’t toured. We reached out and started a conversation which was erratic at best as said artist was now, quote, “groovy off the grid”. The only way we could contact them was to leave messages with a bar called Gypsy’s where their drummer occasionally worked as a bartender. On the day they were scheduled to fly to Australia we got a message saying they hadn’t boarded the plane as “the vibes were wrong”. The next day I was wandering Sydney airport searching for them, with a large quantity of marijuana on my person (as stipulated on arrival), and had to make a hasty exit when a sniffer dog started barking at me. When I finally found them, the singer solemnly accepted the green catering and handed me a card featuring dolphins and rainbows. The actual performance was a shambles, one hour of drones and mumbles which remains our only show to have attracted complaints in writing. After the show, the singer shed all his clothing and went running naked down Brunswick Street at 4am. He later explained someone had spiked his joint…
Black Dice at The Forum
Speaking of marijuana… this was an incredible, weed-fuelled miracle of brutal noise at Melbourne Festival in that golden year when the Hannah Fox and Tom Supple booked adventurous lineups at the Forum Theatre. They also played a brilliant show at Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory with LA’s Lucky Dragons, who had abandoned their participatory vibes for a suitably unremitting cloud storm of electronic drones, and an early show by Holy Balm.
Vivian Girls
Not to be confused with the post punk late 90s Melbourne band of the same name, Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls (Cassie Ramone, Ali Koehler and “Kickball” Katy Goodman) were a chronically underrated garage-girl group, decried at the time as a hype band and dismissed for being “out of tune”; they were actually a brilliantly unsuccessful band who were just slightly ahead of their time. By the time Best Coast and the rest of ’em came along they’d split up, but their Australian shows were some of the funnest times ever.
Vivian Girls filmed for Shoot the Player by Michaella Solar-March, just days after the iconic Hopetoun Hotel was closed and their gig was relocated to a warehouse in Surry Hills. This footage was filmed on the roundabout outside the warehouse.
Evangelicals
One of our earliest signings, a trio from Norman, Oklahoma. We discovered them on Myspace and thought they would be huge! They weren’t! But we loved them anyway and released two of their albums.
Castle Tones, 2009
2009 was a big year, Ash and I had quit our day jobs and were throwing ourselves into a frenzy of Mistletone activity. One of our least spectacular but quietly awesome Tones shows was Castle Tones, sold out at a way over capacity Edinburgh Castle in Brunswick, before Brunswick became super trendy. Featuring very early performances by Dick Diver and Twerps. Zach from Totally Mild claims that I smuggled beers to him at this show when he was under age (for the record, I deny this).
When Summer Tones Became Tiny Tones
We had planned a Summer Tones show at The Corner with Rowland S Howard (who played our 2009 Summer Tones at The Espy) but had to cancel when Rowland became gravely ill, and passed away not long afterwards. Looking at Rick Milovanovic’s poster, it was such an excellent lineup, it’s a shame we downsized it to Tiny Tones (Alex Fregon artwork below), which was a more manageable and still memorable show.
Mistletonia CD
Our only Xmas compilation to date, released in 2007. “The enigmatic nature of this Australian label’s holiday collection gets points for being unpredictable in a most predictable genre” (CMJ). “A sundry new collection of yuletide songs instigated by the ever-surprising Mistletone Records” (Three Thousand). Featuring cover art by Nathan Gray and tracks by Mark Barrage, Ned Collette, Kes Band, Pikelet, Francis Plagne, Jack Ladder, Ross McLennan and Grand Salvo featuring Oliver Mann, plus international guests John Maus and High Places, and with track titles such as “Santa’s Fucked”, “Gentle Elf” and “Let the Tree Be”, it’s a lost classic stocking stuffer.
Mistletone celebrates 11 years with a Summer Tones party in Melbourne this Sunday December 17, outdoors in the Malthouse Theatre courtyard featuring !!! (chk chk chk), Cash Savage and the Last Drinks, Tropical Fuck Storm, Spike Fuck and DJs POCOCK and Post Percy. Tickets are available here.
