FALLS FESTIVAL GUIDE

IT takes standing in front of a festival crowd for Milky Chance singer and guitarist Clemens Rehbein to fully gauge the ocean of appreciation that exists for his music.

Rehbein and school friend and bandmate Philipp Dauschhis found themselves catapulted to superstardom in 2013 only a year after graduating from high school in Germany when they released their debut single, Stolen Dance.

The song took over airwaves around the world, topped the charts of several countries and peaked at No.2 in Australia.

“To us it was the door opening for everything,” Rehbein said. Stolen Dance has now had more than half a billion listens on YouTube alone.

“It’s crazy looking at this number and it makes you excited, but it’s also hard to get. In the end it’s a f...ing number on a YouTube platform.

“It’s more like, you know, coming to Australia for example, like for us, being Germans, it’s the end of the world.

“It’s just like so, so far away and then you come there for the first time and there’s so many people responding to your music, playing at festivals and stuff like that, and that’s reality, you know.

“It’s because of this number, but yeah, that’s the moment when you start realising.”

Rehbein said he was “very thankful” for his success, but in 2013, was not ready for the turn his life took and “all the things that happened to me in the past six years”.

“It seems like you need the knowledge that you’ve got now from making all these experiences, before making all these experiences.

“It doesn’t make sense, but sometimes I feel like it all could happen a little later.”

Rehbein said the band, now a fourpiece, has come a long way, having learnt a lot from their experiences and becoming more competent and confident musicians and songwriters.

Milky Chance released its third album, Mind The Moon, last week.

The band’s Falls Festival shows this week will be the first of their album launch tour kicking off in Australia.

Rehbein said the album was “diverse and colourful”.

“With this album, we get way more closer to the core of our DNA that we have as a band, like our identity as musicians and artists,” he said.

“I think we got pretty close to it and showing it and pronouncing it in the right way.”

“The sound on [the second] album was way more layered and there was a lot of ideas, and I think with the third album, we kind of tried to limit ourselves again, but having all the knowledge and the experience that we made over the past years as musicians.”

The first single from the new album, Daydreaming, was a collaboration with Australian master multiinstrumentalist and psychedelic rock singer-songwriter Tash Sultana. Rehbein said he discovered Sultana on YouTube about 2014 after she posted “one of her living room sessions”.

“I was pretty amazed by her multiinstrumental skills, but also like being a great singer, like crazy vocal skills, so I was pretty amazed by that,” he said.

The band met Sultana in 2015 and got to know her playing festivals around the world and started talking about working together.

“We started working on the new album and we had a demo, sent it over to her and she liked it and we were all petty pumped and yeah, then we finished it at her place in Melbourne.”

Catch Milky Chance on the Valley Stage at Falls Festival Marion Bay at 9.10pm on New Year’s Eve.