Biography
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Years Active
2016 – present (8 years)
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Members
- Rishi Dhir
MIEN are a neo-psychedelic "supergroup" featuring Alex Maas (The Black Angels), John Mark Lapham (The Earlies, The Late Cord, The Revival Hour), Rishi Dhir (Elephant Stone, The Datsons) and Tom Cowan (Tom Furse, The Horrors, Spider and The Flies, Innerspace Orchestra). MIEN's self-titled debut album was released in 2018.
The seeds were sown for this collaboration as long ago as 2004, when Rishi Dhir found himself in a chance encounter with Black Angels’ frontman Alex Maas whilst performing sitar with his former band on a bill at SXSW in Austin with The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Not long afterwards, he would also stumble across the Anglo-American band The Earlies, who he would similarly collaborate and share a stage with. This led to essentially the genesis of MIEN, via a shared love for one song – the ‘classic sitar banger’ by The Association, ‘Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin’. Upon finding that both he and The Earlies’ electronics guru and producer John Mark Lapham had a particular desire to cover the track, they began a slow process of putting together the version they’d always dreamt of. Whilst this would never come to fruition – the sparks that flew between them lit up a collaborative path clearly worth following.
Some years later, another piece of the puzzle came into place, when Dhir was now playing bass with The Black Angels in 2012, and found the band sharing several bills with The Horrors, whose ‘Skying’ album had been on heavy rotation for him during this period. Thus he made the acquaintance of Tom Furse, and yet another pact was made to work together in the future.
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