Muta: Beamimg.

Muta play the Gabba Hotel on Friday (over 18s) and Saturday (arvo, all ages)

“I've had the flu for a while. I'm at home, sick and miserable,” Grant Kaplan of Sydney punk exponents Muta explains.

“Physically not mentally though,” he jokes. That aside he goes on to tell me about their new EP they've just released.

“It's called Friends, Lies & Alibis. It's our second EP. We recorded it at 301 Studios in Sydney. All the tracks are live tracks, but I mean obviously we've put guitar overdubs and the vocal overdubs as well. They were all recorded live, a four track EP with some old songs and some new songs, I guess.”

In 2001 Muta successfully took out the honour of national winners in the 2001 Jim Beam Rock Xposed unsigned band competition. I asked him what it was like winning and what did Muta achieve from it?

“What the Jim Beam thing did was to give us a lot of exposure and it got us into quite a lot of magazines... just our picture and our name I guess in general publications like Ralph or whatever but that was just about it. That's pretty much all that that has done for us. We won a guitar for it but we sold that, we used the money to pay for some recording, but yeah that's pretty much the beginning and end of the Jim Beam saga.”

How about the Planet X Summer Games thing Muta were involved in?

“Yeah that was in association with that. That was good we got our faces on television and our songs played for about three or four episodes of the Planet X, which was exciting I guess. But much like the Jim Beam thing that's all there was of it.”

Muta supported The Atari's, how was that?

“We didn't say a word to them. We played with them but I think our only conversation included a nod through the corridor. It was our first major support and we didn't know what to expect, but that's the way it is. Personally I don't like The Atari's. It was here nor there and we didn't really care.”

Revolver Magazine labelled Muta in a review of a live show, 'punk as fuck!' I ask Grant for his comments on that.

“'It's good I guess, it's better than being labelled as 'as bad as fuck’. That was a particularly good night though.”

You've achieved so much already, what else are Muta out to achieve?

“Basically we just want to play and play to bigger audiences. That's been slowly happening. I'm hopping with the more music that we write we can reach a wider audience than what we normally do. I think we play... punk music, but I think it's becoming more diversified to accommodate a wider audience and I guess they're really our goals. We just want to play and hope to do a bit more touring. I think we're also really really trying independently trying to get ourselves over to the states to do a little tour, maybe in a year or something.”