"Krone" interview

Milky Chance: “The Lido has great catering”

Inventors of folktronica and cozy electronic chill-out sounds: Milky Chance with Clemens Rehbein (l.) and Philipp Dausch.

(Bild: Anthony Molina)

The German folktronica duo Milky Chance was the first major international band on the opening day of this year's Lido Sound at Linz's Urfahrmarkt. The Kassel duo Clemens Rehbein and Philipp Dausch were impressed by the backstage area in the "Krone" talk and philosophized about friendship, sustainability and the exhausting self-marketing in the music business.

"Krone": Clemens, Philipp - what experiences did you have before your appearance at Lido Sounds?
Philipp Dausch: There's really good catering - lots of it and good, that's the best combination and makes a lot of difference at a festival. I walked down the Donaulände beforehand and got a great physio afterwards. Everything here is wonderful.

Milky Chance are known as a "green band". Sustainability is very important to you. Doyou also pay attention to which festivals you play?
 ClemensRehbein: I would say so. There are a lot of parameters that we take into account. In principle, there is this XY axis on which fee and coolness are noted. The best is, of course, "fee high, very cool". (laughs) Of course, that doesn't apply to everyone, but you do have a certain compass for festivals and we discuss this internally in the team. If it's cool for everyone, then it works.

Is the issue of sustainability becoming increasingly important at festivals?
 Dausch: It's the same for us as it is for everyone else. The worse the world gets, the more you have to worry about making improvements. 
Rehbein: For us as a band, the music is of course the most important thing. Things are bad all over the world and that requires certain changes.

The question is: do you change something because you have to, or because you have the intrinsic motivation to do things differently?
Dausch: That also goes hand in hand. We have an intrinsic motivation, but the pressure is still there. If the planet was doing well, we wouldn't have so much pressure to change and wouldn't have to worry so much. Then perhaps we would have less intrinsic motivation. We all want to learn from mistakes and do things better.

Coldplay are currently trying to make their music accessible to blind and deaf people. The drive for inclusion is increasing all around.
Rehbein: Of course, but you need certain budgets for certain things, which big festivals have and can use for this. We share the aspirations and plans, but we are not the decision-makers when it comes to this. 
Dausch: When you're in the very top league like Coldplay, it's nice to set such a good example.

But you're no longer the smallest up-and-coming band, you've already been to Coachella and other big festivals and played huge concerts ...
Rehbein: Yes, but if we raise our voices and demand things, the organizers knock us off the billing. We're not headliners, we can fuck off. (laughs) We're somewhere in the middle of the pack and don't have much to say.

At the Donauinselfest in Vienna, the band Itchy recently brought a spokeswoman from the Last Generation on stage. After a certain amount of time, her microphone was cut off, the band was allowed to finish their set and was then expelled from the backstage area. How do you see that?
Rehbein: That's highly political. When the atmosphere in general gets more and more heated, it finds its way into the art world and then something like that happens. In principle, I think Itchy's action is correct and right. All kids should always do that - stand up for the values they have in precarious times like these.

You've been touring together very successfully for more than ten years. Do you get tired of touring after a while? 
Dausch: Things change, but I generally enjoy touring more. I'm very present when I'm on the road. The older I get, the more I'm in the here and now. No change is easy and you have to make an effort. Being on the road is physically exhausting, but I still really enjoy it in terms of content.

How do you keep the friendship and collegiality fresh after so many years and experiences?
Rehbein: You still need the good old communal shower for that. (laughs) 
Dausch: That's a big question. You need to have a good basic trust in each other and be there for each other. You have to be open to change and to each other's ideas. You simply have to want to work together, otherwise it wouldn't work. Then you could start a solo project right away.

You haven't done that yet. Has that ever been a consideration?
 Dausch: No, we haven't felt that way yet and our career was never intended to be like that.
Rehbein: But it would be totally okay and also interesting to see what the others do on their own. I don't stand in the way of that at all. If you have a healthy, friendly love for each other, then you're happy that the other person is also doing great things. Hopefully that's nice - or it can suck. (laughs)

Would you tell each other that directly?
 Dausch: That's the question, of course, but it would be advisable. We are basically positive people and try to explain things to each other.
Rehbein: If you basically have a problem with the other person doing something, then you have a problem with yourself. That goes straight into the jealousy drawer and is not an issue for us.
Dausch: If I did something else, that would be cool of course, but then the band shouldn't suffer. You can go somewhere else, but you have to communicate that and talk to each other. 
Rehbein: The band should always have a certain priority, but it would of course be justified if someone didn't want to be in the band at the moment - but you have to talk clearly about that too. It's just like in a relationship. It sucks if you suddenly turn your attention elsewhere, but if that's the case, then you have to react to it.

Has it always been easy for you to communicate so well and openly with each other?
 Dausch: We've definitely got better at it and have learned a lot. We used to communicate very little with each other, which was good. Now we can talk to each other very openly, which is amazing. Back then, the basis was so stable that we didn't have to share everything, but the more things happened, the more we had to talk to clarify things or make decisions.

In your case, a pure friendship became a friendship with a job. These are conditions that are rather rare ...
Rehbein: That's true, I would have to think about that more carefully. A job can also turn into a friendship. I don't know which constellation is rarer or better. For us, the music was always there and was decisive for everything else.

Was there a particular point when you knew that you were at a crossroads between career and hobby?
 Dausch: We just made music and things developed from that. But we always had a great desire to do it, we did some things well and some things we totally messed up, and as a result we were confronted with all the areas that such a job entails.
Rehbein: We weren't waiting for a fish to bite, we wanted to go out to sea ourselves. There was a general spirit of optimism and we wanted to make music. Then one or two opportunities arose and we jumped at them, but it wasn't born out of a business mindset.

When a band becomes a business, it usually becomes a bit difficult to remain casually creative.
 Dausch: You're still casually creative, but you're also inevitably a bit anchored in the business. It's more a question of what you do with your creativity when business takes over. Milky Chance is now a big project, a lot of people are involved. Of course, it's not that easy.

The more you publish and the bigger you get, the more external expectations come with it. Can you free yourselves from them?
Rehbein: Good question. But it's not the case that you can completely isolate yourself from these expectations. That's a misconception.
Dausch: It always depends on what makes the end consumer tick. Do they only want cauliflower all the time, or asparagus sometimes? I believe that the expectations tend to come from within the music industry. That something is successful and the record companies then try to ride this trend. If something works, you want to repeat it, it's pure entertainment. TikTok also works with extremes - between horror and humor. It's compressed and thrown out at the same time, but it doesn't work that way. If you find something funny, you might try to do the same thing because people celebrate it - but if you do that, it's obviously not as funny as the original. It confuses me how people try to reproduce things here.

The whole music business has become very visual. Nothing works without videos, social media, snippets, reels, stories. Isthis destroying the music itself?
 Dausch: This has now become a classic common complaint among musicians. Many are questioning whether they are still artists or just producing viral shit. That's annoying and the business is undergoing major changes. It remains exciting to see where the journey will take us.