“We’ve been friends with Natalie Taylor for a while now,” songwriter and guitarist Michael Kruger explains. “She does some great work for Decibels and Balcony TV. We had recently recorded a demo track and Nat suggested we submit it to Decibels and see where that took us. Thankfully, the guys at Decibels liked it, we got asked in to do an audition and then it all started from there.”
The role of record labels in today’s ever-changing industry is hard to define and when that label is a government program, things become even more blurred. Kruger discusses the opportunities this young band has enjoyed as a result of this project. “Considering how uncomfortable we all feel with the self-promotion side of music, it was so incredible for us to have a group of enthusiastic, dedicated people helping promote us as a band,” he says. “And really, above all else, this label deal has given us the rare opportunity to make an EP and learn about the process of doing so.
We feel like we’re still developing our music and we were aware that we probably weren’t going to come out of the studio with an EP that was going to redefine music. But through the making of this EP we know that we’re a hell of a lot closer to finding a sound that we like.” The EP Kruger is referring to is their self-titles release that was refined and recorded with the help of Jim Maroudas (Kimbra, Eskimo Joe, The Living End) and Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell from I’lls.
Mansion, Alaska, came together as result of Kruger needing to dodge the exhaustive trail of copyright approval for a soundtrack he needed. “We actually started almost by accident,” he says. “I needed a soundtrack to a film I was making and not really wanting to deal with copyright issues. I asked a few of the guys if they wanted to record some tracks with me. We soon realised that we loved making music together so much that we should do something about it. Luckily, two of our mates from high school played drum and bass and we quickly found ourselves with a band. Earlier this year we decided we wanted to expand our live sound and another friend of ours jumped on keys for us.”
Although the band came together almost by accident the name has a more romantic story. “It all came from something I heard on the radio one day,” he says. “Apparently there was a governor in Alaska who tried to sell his mansion during the Depression in America but it just wouldn’t sell. At the time, I was also studying post-modern literature and had just heard about the concept gnomon. Gnomon is a mathematical concept that has been appropriated by literary geeks and is used to define characters by their absences, such as a man who is defined by his inability to love. I thought this concept related really well to the story of the mansion. It’s a house defined by an inability to be sold, its inability to do the one thing it was created to do – to be lived in.”
With an obvious affinity for musing on the philosophies of life and the subtext of existence, Kruger still finds it hard to establish how his influences permeate his music. “Sometimes we’ll bring a specific idea from a song or band we like as a reference point for a song that we’re creating,” he explains. “But by the time it gets through us incorporating that idea into our sound it will have morphed into something entirely different. Usually I’ll come with an idea, usually a finished or half-finished song and take it to the rest of the band.”
The EP launch looks set to be Mansion, Alaska’s last gig for the year as a couple of members head off on a road of self-discovery – or just a piss-up, who knows. “Dom (Willmott) and I are actually going overseas with another mate for three months starting in November,” he says. “So we’ll have our EP launch and something of a going away gig before then. Hopefully, when we get back we’ll get straight into writing new material, set our sights on another EP and gig extensively.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
