‘Like Going Through An Old Photo Album’: Melbourne’s Mouseatouille Foster Communal Creativity For New Album, ‘DJ Set’

Almost everything about Mouseatouille comes off as charmingly haphazard, from the Melbourne band’s cute name to its sprawling nine-piece lineup. And singer/guitarist Harry Green admits that their third album, DJ Set, might have never seen completion if not for the promise of releasing it on vinyl though local label Dot Dash. 

After all, it spans five years and many makeshift recording locations, yielding a heartfelt document of shared friendship and creativity.

“We can happily tinker and iterate and record music together forever,” admits Green over Zoom from home in Northcote, “and not really worry about there ever being a final product. 

“[But] once we got to the three- or four-year mark, it was like, ‘God, are we really just going to put this up on Bandcamp again?’ We love doing that obviously, but to work on something for five years and then have everyone move on after a week is a bit scary.”

Mouseatouille had been down that road before with their 2019 double album Out Of The Hospital And Into The Morgue, which is still up on Bandcamp for a name-your-price download. 

At that point, the band had an unstable roster revolving around the creative nucleus of Green and drummer Spencer Noonan, who started it as a home-recording project while they were still in high school. 

Then and now, the pair channel their deep love of DIY beacons like Daniel Johnston, K Records and the Elephant 6 collective to make fuzzy, lo-fi indie rock dotted with strings, horns and the occasional toy piano.

The High School Years

Green and Noonan met in their final year at Swinburne Senior Secondary College in Hawthorn, where they took the same VCE music course. Though Green was in a band called First Kiss that saw him write all the songs but never sing, his introduction to the humble glory of the 1990s home-recording scene gave him renewed confidence.

“I had gotten really into lo-fi music,” he says, “and it really opened my mind to the potential that maybe I could get away with singing in front of an audience.”

As for Noonan, he owned both a four-track and a reel-to-reel recorder, which was rare for a teenager in 2016. Suddenly the two were inseparable as creative partners, fiddling with mic placement and other techniques after school.

“He taught me stuff that was kind of wrong,” recounts Green with good humour. “But at the time it was all we knew. He just had his ideas about how to do that, and it was incredibly interesting to me. So we bonded over that.”

Green originally had a solo project in mind, with Noonan as a drummer-for-hire. But Noonan pushed for a proper partnership, and after a fateful night at Bar 303 in Northcote when Green debuted his solo songs and was bombing until Noonan jumped in on drums, Green agreed. 

When asked what their band was called, Noonan immediately answered “Mouseatouille”, a reference when a friend had gone into Green’s Facebook account and changed his name to that as a joke. That first night, they got booked for a house party as well as a gig at The Bendigo Hotel.

Kebabs And Beyond

That first proper pub gig didn’t go as planned. Ten minutes before Mouseatouille’s set, Green and Noonan were told to leave the premises for being underage. So in the plucky spirit of DIY, they walked down the street with their gear until they noticed a kebab shop with a power outlet.

“We asked if we could set up out the front. They said if everyone buys a kebab, we can,” remembers Green with a laugh. “I kept having to say between every song, ‘Can everyone buy a kebab please?’”

After the pair’s early recordings saw them play and track most of the instruments themselves, Green looked to communal Elephant 6 bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and began recruiting as many players as possible for live shows. 

At an early gig at The Yarra Hotel, they had three guitarists all playing the same parts, plus synth and tambourine. (There’s a lo-fi recording of that on Bandcamp.)

“Once we had all these people, I was trying to think of a use for them,” he says. “That opened the door to more interesting arrangements.”

After self-releasing their 2017 debut album, Fill The Bathtubs, Turn Off The Lights And Brace For The New Millennium on cassette, Mouseatouille leaned into the idea of a musical community on Out Of The Hospital And Into The Morgue, recruiting more than two dozen players to juggle various instruments.

He compares it to a scrapbooking exercise that extended even to friends of friends. But the band couldn’t play many gigs then because the lineup was still so in flux. 

After that album came out, Green and Noonan convened a firmer lineup to be able to play the songs as they are on the recordings. Green’s partner Chloe Dimitrjevitch was now playing synths, and his sister Sofia Green was on clarinet – plus other friends on violin, trumpet, trombone and more.

The Question Of Logistics 

If you’re wondering where a nine-piece band is able to rehearse, Mouseatouille practise weekly at a DIY space in Preston. They’ve recorded there too, as well as at Green and Dimitrjevitch’s former rental in Carlton North, which had a bedroom big enough to fit all nine members (and their instruments). 

DJ Set also features recordings from Noonan’s parents’ living room, and violinist Erinna Lloyd’s parents’ entire house. 

So how do you go about corralling and shaping five years’ worth of piecemeal recordings? The first step was keeping this as a single album, which would not only fit onto one slab of wax but encourage the band to leave behind songs that weren’t working.

“Also, we benefit from being able to sit with things for a long time and see if we still like them,” says Green. “The stuff that ended up on the album was the stuff that lasted. Some of it was done reasonably recently, but still a year or so ago. 

“It was the stuff that we felt was still worth pursuing and putting on into the world.”

Some songs almost didn’t make it; Green was ready to scrap the dreamy Song For Growth, but members of the likeminded Chicago band Post Office Winter helped him rescue and “fix” it. 

That band’s Charlie Johnston also worked on the arrangements of the closing My DJ Set, and members of Post Office Winter also contribute to Dogshow and Letters. 

The two bands first collaborated on a 2022 single, and Mouseatouille have since supported Chicago’s Your Arms Are My Cocoon live, reinforcing the idea of both a local and global network of DIY bands.

Like Bringing A Camera On Holiday

Between the gorgeous ramshackle pop of Mike & Melissa, the noise-saturated glory of My Love and the cheeky improvised jam and uncharacteristic guitar heroics of …And They Played Forever, it’s hard not to view DJ Set as a direct outgrowth and reflection of the band members’ creative partnership. Several of the songs are even about friends, partners and going through your 20s together.

“It’s for the same reason that you’d bring a film camera with you if you were going on holiday,” explains Green. “By the time the album was mixed, some of the people in the band – including me – hadn’t heard some of the stuff for a long time. It was like going through an old photo album.”

While he notes that the same is true for most albums, most don’t take quite so long to complete. “The unique thing is that it’s over the course of five years,” he agrees. “So there’s a big span of time that we can reflect on. It’s the kind of people we are: we’re all very nostalgic and obsessed with youth. Those are the themes we talk about all the time.”

As for how to end the album after that prolonged gestation process, Green decided to take a cue from The Sopranos and go out with a hard cut to black. The closing My DJ Set cuts off in mid-thought, prompting many friends to message Green telling him that the album hadn’t been properly uploaded.

“We had been talking about ending the album that way for a couple of reasons,” he explains. “It’s kind of novel, and in writing the lyrics, I felt that what I wanted to convey was best explained by having the album end that way. 

“It just felt like the most appropriate way to summarise talking about finiteness, and maybe even death, without actually spelling it out.”

But that’s not to say Green makes every creative decision for the band. By the end of recording the album, Mouseatouille were writing songs more communally than ever. Opener Tom’s Lament was conceived as a band, and pianist/trumpeter Fergus Menner wrote lead single Harry And The Jets before they all arranged it together. 

“It’s very collaborative now,” says Green with clear pride. “By the end of creating the album, at least, it was. That was the thing I’d been chasing… this idea of a community of musicians. It felt like I was forcing that before, and now it feels like an actual community.”

Mouseatouille’s DJ Set is out now. The band will launch the album with an East Coast tour in October, before playing the Meredith Music Festival in December.