Frank's Corner #6: In Conversation With Mieke.
A love for winter, underwater lucid dreaming, and analog horror as comfort.
*CONTENT WARNING*: This discussion contains mentions of sexual violence some may find distressing. Reader discretion is advised.
Mieke is nostalgia-sickness personified.
I first interacted with her music just under a year ago where I subsequently filmed and posted a video prescribing her genre as “voicemail instrumental music.” With only a few singles from her upcoming LP frau eva out at that point in time, I would later uncover her full fledged universe that she has since *graciously* shared with me and will soon share to the rest of the world.
Proving that grainy voiceover audio (from what sounds like a home video of children laughing and playing) and stripped acoustic strings were only the tip of her iceberg, I now realize that my initial description was perhaps premature and undercooked.
The new record is an evident labor that rings of clear cohesion and concept all while harnessing the chaos and ambiguity of computer binary voids, drugs, violence, and analog horror. It’s a mish-mash of the good, bad, and ugly both screamed and whispered by a lone rockstar through her liminal 8-bit reality.
I got to take an early listen to the album and had a great chat with her about it. Hope you take a peek!
How've you been? It's winter down in New Zealand right now, right? What's been going on in the cold months?
I've been okay! Yes it is winter. When I was a teenager, I declared winter my favorite season – maybe it was an edgelord thing, or I connected with those grey and green hues differently at 14. But truthfully I hate never being able to keep my hands warm! I'm definitely ready for the kindness of spring.
Have you been taking space away from actually listening to the album now that it's complete and ready to go? Does re-listening to an album before its release make you excited, or does it make the release more daunting?
I've been taking more space lately. If I listen too often, it feels like static – I have this fear that I'll hear some new element worth hating and have to start again, like a poltergeist in a home rather than something real. Sometimes I listen and feel so proud, other times I want to die.
How was it making this project? When was it conceived, and how long did it take to write? Was it a lengthy process? Gratifying? Torturous? Smooth?
Making frau eva has been painful and life saving. It's been in the making since 2020 – my life has moved through so many phases since then, almost like navigating the stages of grief.
I started the album in a hole I thought I was going to die in; writing music was the chair that kept the slack in the rope around my throat. Now, I think I'm the most okay I've ever been. Releasing the album is like that final stage of grief – accepting what happened and letting go of the idea that I have to be in that hole to create good art. I can be okay and be an artist too.
You refer to yourself and your work as "one's childhood bedroom." Is nostalgia a good thing or a silent killer? Is it always nostalgia that sparks an idea in your work? What else is there to the construction of a Mieke track?
I think nostalgia can be a sickness. I have this memory book where I write down every childhood memory I can remember – places, items, people, scenarios, dreams, nightmares. It's become a burden because I can never get the pages neat enough. If a pen runs out or my handwriting changes, I have to start over. It's irritating but I can't stop – I have this deep fear of forgetting things.
My songwriting process typically starts at 3am in bed. I fumble with chords until I find something that triggers a memory or feeling, and that memory forms the path I follow to finish the song.
Following that idea up, are you positioning yourself as a place that other people inhabit or have once inhabited?
I suppose I am, yeah. I think if I could bend reality in some way, I would become an online consciousness that people could enter and uncover memories/feelings they wouldn't have remembered/captured otherwise. I want my music to sound like a place you've been before, something you once held in your hands or tasted, a sunset from 2004 or a fight you had with your little brother, your childhood bedroom.
Who is Mieke the artist versus Mieke the individual? Who do you want Mieke to be to those who listen to your work?
Simple answer? I don't know! My music and visuals feel like the only way I can truly articulate my inner world. When I try to do it verbally or interpersonally I find I can only really make a fool of myself.
I had this dream a few years ago that I think answers the second half of your question properly.
The first part of the dream was a horrific nightmare that I don't feel comfortable sharing in its entirety, but I had essentially been drugged and taken advantage of by a group of men at a party and it was filmed, this video was being passed around at my school. I spent this entire section of the dream sobbing and hyperventilating. I rushed home to seek the comfort of my partner, and he sexually assaulted me when I cried to him. I'll quote the dream exactly from this point:
"I managed to get off of him and asked him, screaming 'why?'
He coldly replied, 'It's funny bitches think they are worth more than sex.'
This sent me to spiral, and upon my broken mind I was sent back to a yellow and lavender room doing a girl with short hair's makeup. It was a warm and safe place. Yellow lamps, old emo and anime posters around the room.
'What year is it?' I asked, eyeing her frog plushie.
'2014,' she replied casually.
I was 14 and this was an old friend.
'Oh that's your dog pepper?'
Her dog was standing on her dresser.
I walked to her window which overlooked the main street of my city, but it had small incorrect details – stores which weren't there before, shops that had swapped places.
'Oh, I know' she said as if addressing the obvious. The friend continued, 'I'm not a part of the set design team' — an implication she knew I was dreaming, and the set designers didn't quite get the details of my hometown correct.
It felt as if she and the 'team' had created a safe space for me within a second layer of my unconscious mind."
To those who listen to my work, I want to be the friend in my dream, and the set design team, and the room and the posters, the warm glow of her lamp and the yellow walls, the frog plushie and even the dog standing atop her dresser. I want to be a safe space, a warm break from reality.
How does the creative process function as a self-proclaimed liminal space as opposed to that of a person whose physical identity is a major part of their "brand?"
Maybe it isn't too different, I'm not sure really.
Do you find that you actively seek these liminal environments in your time away from creating? Is there always a sense of comfort in spaces like this, or does it solely function as inspiration for your art?
Yes! I love indoor pools. Like seriously have an obsession with them, whether it's deep diving (pun intended) for photos of them on Pinterest, playing liminal space/pool room Roblox games, searching for cool pools in other countries (Google Deepspot in Poland) or literally going to my local indoor pool twice a week and every other day wishing I was there/counting the days down. I also dream about pools a lot. I love them.
My partner and I recently rediscovered the art of goggles. Seeing underwater feels like being in an incredibly vivid lucid dream, I like to lay at the bottom on the floor tiles and pretend there is another world above the water. There is this one section of my hometown swimming pool where, if you crawl along the pool floor with goggles, it strongly resembles walking into heaven.
I think the reason I love liminal spaces is they feel like the perfect crossover between a memory and a dream, some weird space where the two manifest physically, seeking spaces like this in my real life feel like a break in reality. Also, if I may be cringe but free for a moment, when it is super foggy out on a late night or early morning drive home, I love to play a 10 hour "Fallen Down slowed + reverb" Toby Fox remix on YouTube and pretend I am in a video game. 10/10 recommend.
I read on your Bandcamp that commercializing your music is not a concern for you. Especially in light of the recent Spotify exodus with bands like Xiu Xiu and King Gizzard?
Yeah I mean, it's a tough one. There is a deep conflict inside me between wanting to be a kind melody for as many people as possible, and not wanting to be a product, and often I fear one can't be without the other, like wanting a rainbow without rain. I think the phrase "selling your soul" is very literal, my music is my soul in sound, and signing to a label would literally mean selling my songs and soul to them.
In a way, those pieces of myself would no longer be truly mine (and maybe they never have been or should be). But on the other side of things, I truly believe there is nothing in the world for me outside of music, I'm no good at anything else, so what else can I do?
With that, how do you reconcile with pursuing this as a career? Do you consider/desire this as a career, or is it something purely for the sake of creation?
I desire it as a career the same way a finch desires to escape its cage, but fears the hawk it watches from the window, if that makes sense.
The same way the bird flies for the sake of flying.
Where do you seek reference for the visuals you create, not only for this project but for other projects and their physical media (i.e, album covers, videos, etc)?
Pinterest, Tumblr, early 2000s internet, and bus or train rides. I really want to evoke the feeling of being in a different (and more kind) time and place, like being greeted by an old friend.
I also have quite a vivid internal world, as kind of a weird example, as a very little girl my dad used to sing "You Are So Beautiful" by Joe Cocker to me, and in my head when he sang it, it would conjure this image of my dad and I standing in this kind of white liminal space with rainbow colored dots appearing and disappearing, and recently I was like, "Wow I should recreate that space for a video!" and downloaded Blender minutes later.
Your sort of creepypasta brand is so refreshing to see. Are you tapped into the creepypasta lore/do you have a favorite creepypasta/online nook/analog presence?
I love creepypastas and analog horror. I remember having a dream about Slenderman guiding lost children across a river when I was 11, and I woke up and posted about it on Facebook. My favorite creepypasta is "NoEnd House" by Brian Russell, I must have read it when I was maybe 13? I loved it so much I printed the whole thing out on A4 paper (sorry dad) so I could show my brother and friends.
I also loved sonic.exe and red mist (Squidward's suicide). Gemini Home Entertainment takes the cake for my favorite analog horror.
Oh! And Serial Experiments Lain, a psychological horror anime.
How important is it that your music functions as "background" versus something that demands some sort of active listening? Is there an optimal listening scenario for the album?
The short film I made was my 5 minute way of saying "PLEASE USE HEADPHONES I'M BAD AT MIXING FOR SPEAKERS," and also a visual for the real world spaces I had in mind when creating the album.
If I could choose how people listened to my album, for the first half of the album I'd throw a pool party that looks like the Life is Strange vortex party (because I absolutely love the way water/indoor tiled spaces play with sound/create reverb). And then the second half of the album would happen, and suddenly you are alone in a field watching a pink sunset, there are no people around you, powerlines stretch as far as the eye can see. As the album wraps up you are stuck in a snow storm, you can barely see 3 meters in front of you. But it is incredibly beautiful and you aren't at all affected by the cold.
Realistically, I don't mind how people listen to it, as long as it brings some kind of comfort or genuine emotion.
Who are some artists that you are listening to right now/might have inspired some of the sounds on the record/inspired you to pick up production to begin with?
This is such a lame answer, but I typically don't listen to specific artists, I listen to my playlists. But I'd say the artists who show up the most on these playlists are Slowdive, Muse, Radiohead and Sonic Youth.
In terms of what influenced the album, it truly is those indescribable feelings like nostalgia, or a lucid dream, or the uncanny valley effect. The feeling of the bus ride home from school in the winter. The feeling of being a woman. The feeling of unwanted sexual advances. The feeling of being choked by an abusive boyfriend. Something I don't know how to explain, but I know how it sounds. Some artists who I think are incredible at capturing indescribable feelings are Elliott Smith, Grouper, Sparklehorse, Kurt Cobain, Adrianne Lenker and Billie Holiday.
If we are talking about what lit the flame for my production journey, it was BTS! For context, I started writing songs as soon as I could hold a pencil, which, off topic, were weirdly very melancholic songs (there was one about my cat called 'You Are So Cute', but the lyrics were begging my cat not to leave me...I digress). When I was about 15, I declared that I was giving up on music forever because I was so anxious about sharing my work and performing, I tried to do singing lessons at this time but every time I tried to sing for my teacher I would sob. The poor woman would spend every lesson comforting me.
The way specifically Namjoon and Yoongi talked about writing and producing made me think it was the coolest thing ever, seriously, like it was a super power. I remember reading this story about how Yoongi had a panic attack in a bathroom before his first performance, and I remember thinking that maybe I could overcome my fears too. Funnily enough, I also had a panic attack in the bathroom before my first show with my *epic* band Wallflower in 2023. I also think being into K-pop and screamo around that age also influenced the importance of instrumentals to my budding producer brain, I couldn't understand the lyrics, but the emotions that came through were so potent that I didn't need them.
Once the release is here, what's next for Mieke? Can we expect any add-ons or fun visual tidbits in the near future?
I really want to make a game as an extension of this album eventually, so if someone is reading this in 10 years and I haven't done it yet, please send me a message and ask what the fuck went wrong.
Listen to ‘Frau Eva’ on Spotify or Bandcamp out August 29. Follow Mieke on Instagram here.