Garden City Movement on Risk, Reward, and Reading the Crowd

Img Cred; Romy Kopit

It’s easy to lose the plot when your setlist starts feeling like a résumé. That’s not a problem for Garden City Movement and Mita Gami. Their new EP, Untouchable, out now on Crosstown Rebels, feels dialed in from the start. It’s direct, confident, and tightly focused on energy and presence. They’re not trying to impress anyone. They’re trying to move a room.

The EP pairs Mita Gami’s raw, percussive instincts with Garden City Movement’s melodic and rhythmic depth. It’s their first collaboration together, and their first release as a group on Crosstown. “Untouchable” opens with immediacy, pulling together funk-laced grooves and vocals in a way that feels designed for that first sweat-soaked hour of a peak-time set. “Happiness Is Too Finesse” leans further into acoustic textures, while “Club Terracotta” closes with a restrained, more open mix that shows how much intention went into the flow of this record.

In this interview, they break down how they think about performing for a mixed audience versus a room full of musicians, what it takes to time a stripped-down song well, and how they handle the pressure to play technically complex material live. It’s not about gimmicks. It’s about giving the crowd something to move toward.

Have you ever caught yourself overthinking your setlist—focusing on impressing other musicians instead of connecting with the audience?

It’s very rare for us to think about what other musicians might think of our set. It can cross your mind if you suddenly find yourself playing at a jazz festival, but we know what we want from ourselves and from our performance.

Over time, the one thing we’ve really refined is the experience for the audience. For us, it’s far more important that people enjoy, feel, and dance than whether another musician critiques a solo in one song or another.

How do you decide when to take risks with experimental material versus keeping the performance more direct and familiar?

It really depends on the context. If we’re playing at a festival, the balance will usually lean toward the more familiar side of our music. Festivals often bring a mixed crowd, so we aim to connect quickly and keep the energy flowing. When it’s our own show, there’s much more room to explore.

The audience that comes specifically to see us already knows we have many sides, and they want to experience all of them. In those settings, we feel free to dive deeper into our more experimental material, knowing the crowd is ready to follow us wherever we go.

Is there a difference between playing for a room of musicians and playing for a broader audience with mixed backgrounds?

If you’re inexperienced, you might get nervous and start thinking people are judging you.

For us, it doesn’t really matter. The show is the show, whether the room is full of musicians or not. Most of the time, we don’t even know what people in the crowd do for a living.

You have one opportunity to get on stage and perform the best version of what you’ve created. If you’ve been given that stage, it means your music has already made a journey. And if people came to see you, you’ve already achieved something. So just play your best, with as much charisma as you can.

Do you think there’s value in “immediate” songs—pieces that land quickly and unify the room?

For us, it’s a split answer. As a band that plays only our own material, we never wrote songs with a specific purpose like that in mind. We simply created music we loved. If the question is about our hybrid or DJ-oriented side, then yes, there are tracks that are instantly recognizable and can unify the room when needed.

Those moments are important, but you can’t overuse that card. In a set, you only get a handful of chances to play it, and you need to use them wisely—otherwise it loses its impact and becomes cheesy.

What’s a moment where you scrapped a technically complex song because the crowd needed something else entirely?

Probably at one of the early festivals we played, like Glastonbury or Primavera.

We started with a set that was relatively chilled, but when you find yourself in front of a crowd that’s running at full speed, you want to match that energy. So we improvised and switched to a more energetic version—both in the way we played the music and in our physical presence as performers.

Do you think performers sometimes overvalue complexity and undervalue emotional accessibility?

Maybe in certain scenes, but in those cases that’s usually exactly what the audience comes to see.

There are definitely musicians who believe sophistication outweighs emotion, and maybe they’re right and it works for them. For us, the ideal approach is finding the right balance between the two—that’s what works best for our music and our connection with the audience.

Have you ever had a moment where a straightforward performance hit harder than your most intricate arrangement?

It’s a well-known thing, especially in a show that’s packed on a production level, that switching to a stripped-down, simple version with minimal instrumentation can bring intimacy and honesty to the performance, and the audience connects to that immediately.

Using a moment like that has to be precise. As we mentioned earlier, if you want to make the most out of a simple arrangement, you need to know exactly when to play it in your set and build toward it.