If you know anything about LA based artist, Millie Brown, you’d be familiar with her collaboration with Lady Gaga for her Monsterball Tour. Here her performance was set against Gaga’s dub industrial track “Swine”. In a steep yet smooth contrast to that, Brown’s MIX ‘vomits’ less ‘art for art’s sake’ and more hazy, melancholic 70s sensations. Effortlessly transporting us between each cosmos from one song to the next; much like her work seamlessly explores the synergy and separation of mind, body, and spirit. “Hailu Mergia” makes us consider the strange and tumultuous times of 1978 when people would stay in the club from evening till daybreak to avoid the curfew of the Derg regime. With manic synthesizer lines and the sounds of a church revival, “Sun Ra” follows with an injection of whimsical joy easing us into the smooth soul and endless boogie feels of James Brown. Here Millie gets us moving, something she is more than familiar with as she uses her body as a tool to create the fragmented debris of her process. Exploring the body as a means for spiritual practice, Brown pushes her physical and mental bounds in order to reach a state of enlightenment from which her creative expression and a sense of healing prevails. Afterall, who doesn’t feel a shift in their mood after a serious dose of 60s psychedelia and gypsy pop given to us almost undeservedly from Gabor Szabo with their track, “Stormy 1969”? Riding this high, Brown slips away and leaves us gently with the last song of the MIX. “Deep Blue Day” is a beautifully unexpected chance for some sentimental introspection. A dreamy instrumental reflection of the rawness of human emotion. Much like the record pictured; picked up from her favourite book and record store in Beachwood, it’s a little old but much loved. 

Much like Millie herself, the next hour of listening will be diverse as she delivers what she does best. An analysis of the harmony and dissolution of our collective human consciousness.