Ash Grunwald is the Sunday headliner of the City of Kingston’s Mordi Festival, which goes down in Mordialloc over the first weekend of March.
Grunwald’s been living in Bali for the last few years and spent several years based in Byron Bay. He got his start in Melbourne, however, and the place still feels like home.
“I’ll always come back to Melbourne. I don’t think I would’ve had the career so far if I was anywhere else,” he says.
“I was given my education through music from listening to community radio – 3RRR, PBS – in Melbourne and through some of the greats Chris Wilson and Collard Greens and Gravy and many of the Melbourne blues acts.”
It’s been three and a half years since Grunwald’s NOW LP came out, but a new album is on its way later in the year. The album was five years in the making and is lucky to being seeing the light of day at all.
“This new album was recorded in LA,” he says. “I was actually flown over by a producer who wanted to introduce me to the international blues scene. I wrote some songs for the sessions and I was over there recording for ten days and recorded with a lot of living legends in the blues scene as a band. I got to meet some of my heroes and have them perform and sing on this record. It was an amazing experience with a lot of ups and downs.
“The album was completed in 2015 but went missing. It wasn’t retrieved until my new manager came on board and tracked it down. From there I added some tracks and finished the album for the better part of last year.”
Grunwald has updated his songwriting style and production preferences from one album to the next throughout his 15-year career. He started out as a primitive blues guitarist then tried out an experimental blues sound before teaming up with hip hop and electronic music producers. More recently, he made the forceful rock record Gargantua and NOW incorporated a synthy psychedelic tinge.
“I have very consciously made my different releases be part of a journey. I’ve always had a lot of direction of where I was going. It was my dream to fuse the electronic hip hop elements with the blues. I started consciously coming from the raw Delta minimal blues sound and slowly moved to Tom Waits for a while then into the hip hop elements. Once I’d done that and fused the electronic elements, I felt like I had achieved what I’d set out to.
“I went rocky with Gargantua, which is with Scotty and Andy from The Living End and the NOW album was a bombastic psychedelic experiment with very conscious lyrics and I wanted to have a Moog synth player who was doing more evil bass lines as opposed to a typical bass player.”
He started out very much steeped in the blues tradition, covering songs by Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson. Although he’s since stretched out, the blues maintains a strong presence.
“I love blues music. Probably before commencing each album that I’ve done, my initial plans had always been to do a stripped-back, minimal Delta blues album. But then my restless imagination sends me off in other directions.
“I love blues music and the soulfulness of it and the only reason why I don’t just do blues is because I’m trying to bring something new to the genre, so that’s what keeps me restless.”
Grunwald is a seasoned festival veteran, on local grounds and afar, and is thoroughly excited to see what show he can produce at Mordi Fest.
“Due to a lot of the personal changes that I’ve had over the past couple of years my music is just so exciting to me to play. I love playing on stage so much, it’s basically because I’ve been working so hard at improving and practising that every time I go to do a guitar solo I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just so keen to find out.”
Ash Grunwald performs at Mordi Fest alongside the likes of Mia Dyson, Bec Sandridge, 19-Twenty and Vaudeville Smash. It all goes down on Saturday March 2 and Sunday March 3. Head to the City of Kingston website for more information.
