Melbourne-based Maple Glider will perform at the much-loved boutique music festival Meadow on the last weekend of March.
A vulnerable, visceral, and altogether enthralling experience, Maple Glider’s debut album is as radiant as it is raw.
Released back in June last year, To Enjoy is the Only Thing is a stunning 35 minutes of beautifully tranquillizing music, hitting all the marks as an emotionally potent, lyrically powerful, and musically ethereal record of self-reflection and discovery, capturing Melbourne-based Tori Zietsch’s coming-of-age through songs of reckoning, yearning, isolation, celebration, and growth.
Emerging as a ray of breathtaking musical introspection with the album, Maple Glider still feels like something new and special; something worthy of recognition and praise, despite its release almost nine months ago – something we can credit to covid and lockdowns wreaking havoc with independent artist’s abilities to tour their new releases.
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Now, the stunningly expressive work of Zietsch will wash over the lush farmland hamlet of Bambra at the much-loved boutique music festival Meadow, marking the festival’s eighth edition, following the success of 2021’s successful event in April.
“I am really excited to be around a heap of great people that are excited to see good music because the lineup is awesome and I get to do it with all of the people in my beautiful band,” Zietsch says of the upcoming festival performance.
“It’s just a really good excuse to play, perform, but also hang out and see some beautiful music. I’m excited to just enjoy all of the layers of the experience.”
The cherished Victorian surf coast festival will transform the picturesque Otway Hinterlands into a three-day, two-night, one-stage, multi-sensory safari from March 25-27, featuring performances from celebrated artists like Methyl Ethel, Tropical Fuck Storm, MOD CON, Fantastic Man, Gabriella Cohen, Youth Group, Camp Cope, Mo’Ju, and Karate Boogaloo, among many others.
Promising to be an unforgettable auditory experience, it’s Zietsch’s heart-on-sleeve expression and sheer vulnerability that will be an unmissable festival performance, with Maple Glider performing as a band for just the second time this year.
“We’re playing with a full band, there’s five of us which is awesome. It’s so much fun. We’ve just had our first band set of the year last weekend which was great so we’re excited to keep that momentum going.”
With a slew of festival slots and solo shows lineup up for March, these shows will act as an unofficial album tour for Zietsch, performing all the tracks from her acclaimed, intimate, hypnotic folk release.
“It’s so nice to be able to just play those songs. We talked about maybe integrating some of the new, songs as well soon which would be cool but we’re just really wanting to perform the album at the moment, just because we haven’t really toured it much yet.
“But it can be intense at times. I found that after not performing for a while and then coming back to performing again, all the songs still feel pretty raw, there’s a lot of feeling there.
“It’s a nice feeling though to enter into a space that you have been in the past within a song and then come back out of it. There are a lot of songs on the album I wrote some time ago and there are definitely things that I resonate with within them, but there’s also a little bit of a perspective shift since then because time has passed. So it’s a good way to sort of cleanse yourself and help with the moving on process.”
Since the release of her debut single ‘As Tradition’ as Maple Glider in September of 2020, the talented singer-songwriter immediately became an artist to watch, deservingly so, with her debut album cementing her as a force to be reckoned with.
Written whilst Zietsch lived in Brighton in the UK, To Enjoy is the Only Thing immediately resonated with listeners from across the globe due to the striking set of vignettes from Zietsch’s life; growing up in a restrictive religious household, falling in and out of love, cross-country and international travel, longing, alienation and more. Moments both unremarkable and life-altering, but always deeply felt, brought to vivid life by the beauty of Zietsch’s artistry and wry sense of dark humour.
“I’ve been doing music pretty solidly since I was like a teenager. So, I was always gigging a lot and then I released an EP with another project and it was then that I needed to take a little break. That’s when I went travelling and went to the UK and then I ended up writing all this new music and that was the start of Maple Glider, unknowingly,” she says.
Leaving Melbourne for the seaside town of Brighton, she began to work on solo material, drawing from bouts of homesickness, basking in the lengthy European summer hours and writing non-stop.
“I was quite uncertain for some time about pursuing a career in music. But after I wrote all those songs, I just had this real drive and energy to record them and perform again. I’d sort of already weirdly put myself back into Melbourne, mentally and emotionally at some point, and just wanted to get back into it,” Zietsch says.
She returned to Melbourne in late 2019 with a SoundCloud account full of demo uploads, enlisting Tom Iansek (Big Scary, #1 Dads, The Paper Kites, Hockey Dad) to produce and record the songs that would eventually form, To Enjoy is the Only Thing.
“It was a nice process because I had finished writing the heap of songs and then like just reached out to Tom and we ended up sort of just recording a few songs and then decided during the recording process to record the album. And that’s when I started working with Pieater and they were amazing help with releasing the music. Everything sort of just flowed on from there.”
Releasing the album in June of 2021, the collection of songs quickly caught the undivided attention from the Victorian music industry, with Maple Glider project nominated for three Music Victoria awards: Best solo artist, best folk act and best breakthrough act, the latter in which she was crowned the victor by the public.
“I feel really lucky to have met so many beautiful people and to be lucky to play with beautiful people in my band. There are so many musicians here that I just really love and adore and am a big fan of, so it’s nice being able to like connect with new people as well since being back in Melbourne and find this whole kind of new space to share music in.”
With Lana-Del-Rey style vocals, gently-plucked acoustic guitar and deftly weighted piano chords, Maple Glider has already proved herself a powerhouse with an album that deserves to be listened to from start to finish, and new music on the way that’s sure to inspire.
Be sure to experience first-hand the dream-like trance of an incomparable majesty and beauty that a Maple Glider gig conjures at the 2022 iteration of Meadow this month.
Meadow is happening from Friday, March 25 until Sunday, March 27 2022 in Bambra, Victoria. Get your tickets here.
