Mona Mule isn’t what comes to mind when I think of Sydney music. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t sound like any place at all. Rather, Mona’s debut EAT-My Hell travels laterally – contemporary and old meeting organic and digital; something that lies between goth, darkwave, baroque, experimental and theatrical. Independent Artist of the Week, Mona joined Rhea and Pat on 704 W High Street to discuss her debut release.
EAT-My Hell is a personal project that started before Mona’s collaborative hip-hop release SWANN, alongside Riki Wells and Sayel Elwan – a irony-to-reality debut made in response to Joeyy’s Sydney appearance. Despite the lightheartedness of the release, Mona’s production talents were made evident, something later adapted to the drastically different aesthetic of Mona Mule “[SWANN] was very educational in getting beats down and making them sound hard instead of making them sound beautiful”).
EAT-My Hell, in contrast, feels more intentional. Debuting at The Lord Gladstone under an event titled ‘When Roses Bleed to Cry’, alongside a lineup of friends and album collaborators – Maschinenkrieger, Sofia Carey, Jack Slade – EAT-My Hell was the occasion for haphazard creative performance, some DJs making their own performance debut.
“I think it’s really great to find connections here [in Sydney] and I think everyone wants to see growth so people immediately gravitate towards you doing anything. As soon as you say you want to do something, people are like, ‘Yes, let’s jump on board!’”
The night briefly delved into standup and performance art. Performed live, EAT-My Hell featured violin-smashing and single snare hits by a comically deadpan backing band, a fitting accompaniment for the more theatrical elements of the release.
The two collaborators missing from the night were long-time friend Celia Hearts – Adam, also member of Melbourne band Mouseatouille – and Biblemami, recently now based in New York, however ‘Through-THEWire’ was a track written a bit earlier and tailored to the feature.
“It was when Maeve [biblemami] was still in Sydney and we had just met. I was so immediately drawn to her and we connected and wanted to make music together and I had that song ready to go. I showed her the album and had her in mind for that track and she loved it and dropped the most amazing vocal lines ever.”
The album release came alongside various iterations of art ranging from illustrated portraits, photography and painted 3D models, each scattered with various motifs – pawprints, skull and crossbones crosses and red locks of hair. The album – both visually and in sound– is a result of a long collaging of different ideas.
“The name [EAT-My Hell] comes from an exhibition that I really loved from the artist Pipilotti Rist. The exhibition was called ‘Sip My Ocean’ …it felt like you were walking through a space she had lived in but there were these projections everywhere. I just felt that what she was saying wasn’t very concrete but in the way she said ‘sip my ocean’… it was this wash of personal experience and it, delving into someone’s mind without being super explicit…EAT-My Hell is my own spin on that.”
Words by Rhea Thomas