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 MARK MITCHELL, The PhD-studying, music-sampling, house-moving figure behind CLUE TO KALO, takes time out to buy a coffee and talk to LINDSEY CUTHBERTSON.
Mark Mitchell is walking as he talks, escaping his house of un-emptied boxes from his recent move. He’s on his way to grab a coffee and to talk about Clue To Kalo’s new album, Lily Perdida. His previous album, 2005’s critically acclaimed One Way, It’s Every Way, showed Mitchell at his best as an electronic artist. Lily Perdida is a step up in Mitchell’s skills as an artist.
Now focusing predominantly on Clue To Kalo after he put his PhD in English Cultural Studies at a South Australian University on the backburner for the time being, Mitchell has applied his growth as a musical artist and his literary background to one-up himself with an album of deep-thinking scope. While admittedly not proficient on any musical instruments, (Mitchell believes he’s “pretty average” on guitar) he has shown that in this day and age of computer-generated music anything is possible. What he is proficient at though, is the literary approach taken to each album.
“Lily Perdida is a name I wanted to give the album to indicate that it was working as a portrait of a particular character,” says Mitchell. “Perdida actually translates as lost and I thought that if I had that word in there, which isn’t really a last name, it would show people that this character is essentially a literary device.”
No, this isn’t a gimmick. Throughout our interview, Mitchell delivers intellectual reasons for the themes behind the new album, choosing to focus more on the lyrical aspects far more than the musical. It’s rightly so; the melodies on Lily Perdida stand on their own. User To A Carrier is a lovely electronic-folk tune, as is The Beach Boys-esque hummer The Infinite Orphan. It showcases Mitchell’s melodic ear as well as his skills as a storyteller.
“When it came to doing this record, I had the basic idea to take some of the themes I was seeing in folk music and society and apply it to one fictional character,” continues Mitchell. “When it came time to sit down and write this record, a lot of what I was writing about in my PhD were still there, so I reapplied and recontextualised them and put them into this record.
“Even though this album is positioning itself as a portrait of Lily, it is an impossibility to do it as an accurate portrait. If you try to document something, as soon as you’ve actually arrived on that documentation, that object is no longer the same as how you described it. So I wondered how I could take this idea and put it into the record, and we did that by not doing the record from her perspective, but by writing it from the perspectives of those around her.”
Concept albums seem to be the norm these days, but with Mitchell’s background in English, it seems inevitable. What sets Clue To Kalo apart from the others is the depth, the cohesiveness and above all else, the tunes. Lily Perdida just might be Mitchell’s magnum opus.
Catch CLUE TO KALO at Lofly Hangar in Red Hill on Friday Oct 10. LILY PERDIDA is out now via Popfrenzy. www.myspace.com/cluetokalo
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