Permanent: Hunger or Nausea | Modern Tapes; Dec. 9
Mimi Luse was a teenage Deadhead. Many a weekend in her native Connecticut would find her camping at festivals—she didn’t play music, but she was a fan, to put it mildly. It was the early 2000s, and she was heavily into the jam band and classic rock tape-trading scene. She read every book on sixties counterculture the library had and began sewing her own clothes on her sewing machine, all corduroy patchwork and embroidery.
“I was a hippie!” says Luse, now 38, sitting next to the secondhand machines she started using much more recently to stitch samples onto bass and drums. “I was really trying to create my own culture.”
Arriving home from her job as the events manager at the Nasher Museum of Art, Luse was wearing a bright lime-green sweater and a dark skirt, and their sharp contrast was somehow like the one between her polished, easy manner and the tarnished, intense music that she makes.
But many scarlet begonias fell between the Dead and D.A.F., the pioneering German new-wave band that stands tall (clad in black patent leather) among the influences that turned Luse from the post-punk of her first band, Cochonne, to the industrial techno of her solo project, Permanent—which, after sprouting late, is blooming quickly.
Luse discovered punk near the end of high school, at an art camp in Boston where she encountered the scorn of New York kids who liked Minor Threat. It was a musical Big Bang that sped up at McGill University, where she went to study English and art history with the intention of becoming an arts writer. She plunged into Montreal’s vibrant scene as the culture editor of The McGill Daily, a storied student newspaper. She was going to DIY spaces and warehouse shows, getting into genres like electroclash, no-wave, and noise.
Still, making music “seemed like a thing only cool people did, and I didn’t feel that cool,” she says. “I was a writer, a cultural commentator. I saw myself more as an observer.”
After college, she spent a few years in New York, working for an art auction house while writing for magazines like Art in America and Frieze. Then she took a year to apply to graduate schools while living with her French grandmother in Paris and working at a mattress store. In 2011, she got into Duke for an art history PhD. Her focus was a moment in early 20thlu-century France when art historians and journalists rejected modernism, a key principle that, in the scope of her music now, emphasizes the interplay of art, culture, and lived experience.
But then, she was becoming a chronicler of chroniclers, and music was fading into the background.
The years between 2015, when Luse was leaning into her dissertation, and 2019, when she defended it, were a blur. She moved to Paris, then Durham, then Paris, then Durham, then Amsterdam, then Paris, then Durham.
Somewhere in the middle, in Paris, something woke up.
“That’s when I really started living again, I think, being embodied, going to clubs and meeting musicians and artists,” she says.
She had taken a Girls Rock class on bass before leaving Durham, which was “mind-blowing,” and felt inspired by all the women she knew who were starting bands, like Fitness Womxn and Silent Lunch. She auditioned to play in a Parisian post-punk band, …….