Mouseatouille, the Melbourne-based band of nine members, have always sought comfort in numbers. There is a reassurance in the orchestra, the knowledge that a friend has your back, that someone is always playing along with you. Starting as a two person high school band in 2016 composed of singer/songwriter Harry Green and drummer Spencer Noonan, the band soon grew to include anyone who could be convinced to pick up an instrument and play. Their 2019 double album Out of the Hospital and Into the Morgue features more than 25 performers, musicians and non musicians alike, playing everything from the woodwind, brass and strings to banjo, tubular bells and hand clapping.
Slimming down to nine members following the release of Out of the Hospital and Into the Morgue, the band has opened for established Australian artists such as Floodlights, RVG and Katie Dey, and played venues ranging from small techno clubs to Melbourne's Forum. Mouseatouille’s following extends overseas, where they collaborated on a single with Post Office Winter (from Chicago’s Hallogallo collective) in 2022. In 2024, Mouseatouille supported Chicago based fifth wave emo legends Your Arms Are My Cocoon at their sold out Sydney and Melbourne dates and supported Black Country, New Road on an Australia / New Zealand Tour, playing sold out shows at some of the country’s best venues.
Mouseatouille's latest album DJ Set, out via Dot Dash Recordings, works to retain this high school spirit. Recorded haphazardly over the course of five years, using whatever equipment was available at the time and employing a 'learn-as-you-go' approach to composition and arrangement. Through endless rehearsals and recording sessions in friend’s garages, share-house kitchens or parent’s lounge rooms, Mouseatouille synthesise the care and precision of orchestral arrangement with the spontaneity and carelessness of getting together with your friends to make music simply because it's fun.
A pop sensibility runs through all of these modest recordings; they are as much cautious studies in pop music as they are wide-eyed attempts at being the orchestra. The songs often build to grand crescendos or collapse under their own weight and tumble into complete dissonance. This oscillation between meticulously arranged pop and screeching cacophony pervades Mouseatouille’s sound.