Lia Mice

“I was on tour and the tour ended and I was supposed to get on this flight back to New York, which is where I was living,” Mice says. “[But due to] Hurricane Sandy, the flight got cancelled for about a week so I just stayed. I had such a good time during the time that the flight was cancelled that I never ended up getting on the new flight.”

I Love You sees Mice move away from the lateral experimentation of 2012’s Happy New Year into a groove-based and melodically focused sound. Likewise, her erstwhile opaque lyrical approach is superseded by a descriptive, personal style. The stylistic shifts are a direct consequence of the move to Lyon, says Mice.

“When you’re somewhere, you just soak it all in; you soak in the sounds, you soak in the lifestyle. All the stories I’m telling in the lyrics, they really happened. I think the sounds – it’s definitely more pop than anything I’ve ever written and that’s because a lot of the music I was getting exposed to here was less discordant and less edgy. Some people want things to sound really quirky or discordant. I think if you like something that’s pop it doesn’t have to be a guilty pleasure, it can just be a pleasure. So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to free myself to do something and if it’s not dark that’s OK.’

“I always want to challenge myself, to keep my mind really open to reacting to new experiences and reacting to new stimulus,” she adds. “I travel a lot and it’s nice to have a few days off just to experience and be immersed in something new.”

Mice originally comes from Brisbane, so she’d already undergone a drastic change of circumstances before abandoning Brooklyn for Lyon. Still, she was based in New York for almost six years, which indicates she’s not a total transient. “It was my home,” she says. “But I was like, ‘Well, I’m already a stranger in a strange place, so what’s the difference about changing that?’ Except that I had to learn French.

“I’m trying to be less impulsive now. I’m trying to make plans and things. I used to not plan like three weeks in advance, and at the moment I definitely have a plan for the next six months. So I’m improving, I think.”

In contrast to Mice’s wandering impulsiveness, before getting stuck into I Love You she conceived a detailed album manifesto. In the document – which was published on her website – Mice stated she would write and perform all the album’s instrumentation alone and try to capture sounds organically rather than generating things digitally. In the end she did slightly deviate from these guidelines.

“I didn’t play everything on the album actually,” she says. “I really wanted to get things as live as possible. My first album I made in GarageBand and I would just play a few bars of something and then loop it. The thing is, my basslines are really repetitive, but I had a bass player play it with a drummer and me playing as well so that it would have some freedom and a bit of human error. Then later I did sample the drums and loop them, but I wanted to start from a non-computer beginning.

“I had been listening to a lot of ’60s records and it’s so amazing how beautiful they sound. It was like a tape rolling and that was that – there wasn’t much editing. Sounds that come from a real organic place have a bigger range. They sort of mush together in a way and then they impact you in a way. Definitely this new album has a better sound – it’s more dynamic.”

Mice was in Australia for the 2014 Bigsound conference and she returns this week for a trio of intimate club shows. While a five-piece band joined her last year, she’s doing the forthcoming shows solo, and also triggering visual accompaniments throughout. This sounds like a handful, but Mice isn’t concerned about her competence.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” she says. “Sometimes I have a band but usually I play solo. I used to be a bit daunted by all of the technology, but I’ve got it under control now. It used to be like the technology was wild and I was trying to train it. Now we have this arrangement. I like collaborating with technology. Sometimes you make a mistake and it ends up really working out.

“I have samples and I loop my guitar live and I loop the synth live, so I’m sort of building up loops and then shutting them down. Some of the loops are pre-made. I’m not, like, standing there drumming. At a certain point I think a solo performer needs to perform. Sometimes if you’re too stuck behind a table you can lose the aspect of it being a performance.”