Originally from Milwaukee, Ritchie now splits his time between Hobart and Canberra as well as touring the world for concerts and festivals.

He’s been told – many times – that moving from New York to Hobart was an unusual decision. “That’s what David Walsh said when I first met him,” he says, referring to the Tasmanian art collector, businessman and professional gambler whose Museum of Old and New Art – better known as Mona – has changed the cultural landscape of his hometown.

“He said ‘may I ask you a question? The deficit usually runs in the opposite direction. People move from Tasmania to New York, not from New York to Tasmania. Why did you do that?’ And then I idiotically said ‘because I like it’. And I think that that made an impression.”

Ritchie has been involved with Mona Foma since the beginning, with the first festival taking place in 2009 – before the museum that shared its name even opened.

“I had a 10-year plan. But that was as far as it extended – 10 years. I thought if we could just do this experimental festival for 10 years, we might create a new audience or create a new way of looking at things,” he says. Instead, “we accomplished most of it in five.”

This year’s festival is as eclectic and ambitious as ever, featuring the cult favourites and recently reformed TISM performing at Cataract Gorge, Queens of the Stone Age, and Isaac et Nora, 14 and 11-year-old siblings who front a family band.

The festival has grown, sprawled out into new venues and is in a state of constant evolution, Ritchie says, but key elements have remained consistent “like disregard for genre, willingness to place seemingly unrelated music next to each other to try to illustrate various points [and] not thinking about whether something is like populist or refined”.

With Mona Foma, as well as the music program that runs throughout the year at Mona, Ritchie can provide platforms and opportunities in an industry that he worries is becoming more nervous and cautious.

“It’s important to nourish the roots of music,” he reflects. Over the summer we’re currently in, the lawns outside the museum will play host to over 500 bands. “Pretty much anybody who’s doing original music and comes to our attention gets a go,” he tells me.

With the festival, he explains, “we are not expected to make profit … David’s interest is the creativity and also to do cool things”. It’s a situation at odds with the music scene more broadly.

“Right now, we’re in an environment of economic instability in Australia,” he says. “It’s a time of distress.” As a result, many people are “retracting their vision” and “getting more conservative,” meaning there is less room for experimentation or new or hard-to-categorise acts to get their foot in their door.

“The big tours are retro tours,” Ritchie points out. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but at the same time, you have to find that balance ... we still have so much great entertainment in this country,” he says. “We need new music. Otherwise, there won’t be old music in the future.”

He’s still conscious that his band’s big break was a “Cinderella story” of sorts. They’d gone for an audition at a nightclub and been turned down and kicked out. Dejected, they walked a little way and decided to busk outside a concert hall where crowds were waiting to listen to the Pretenders. The band came out after soundcheck, heard them playing, and invited them to open the show.

“It’s almost like a fable because it does have a moral to the story, which is don’t give up, you know? Because we could have just gone home.” He turns his attention back to the Gippsland tenderloin he has carefully served us.

Ritchie doesn’t miss a thing – I can see him filing away every detail of the conversation, the building, the food making a steady stream towards our table. Every time a dish arrives, he utters a genuine “wow!” and then takes his time to savour it. Despite the almost constant travel he’s been doing for over 40 years, the places haven’t started blurring into one either. As he looks around the restaurant, he tells me that he’s pretty sure this used to be a Bang and Olufsen store – a detail he later confirms with a member of wait staff.

It seems he is someone who constantly seeks new experiences, whether in the food he eats, the music he listens to, or the instruments he plays.

No distraction will make him forget what we were discussing or what question we were partway through unknotting. A conversation about how he came to play the shakuhachi – a notoriously tricky Japanese flute – is cut off when a dish of yellowfin tuna is presented. “Wow!” he exclaims when he sees its presentation, and, after listening attentively to the description of ingredients and serving us both, he seamlessly returns to the exact point of conversation we were having before the food arrived.

He had just moved to New York when he read that there would be a flute conference featuring the shakuhachi. Once, he attempted to play one at a music store.“I couldn’t even get a sound,” he says. So, when he saw the article, he saw it as a second chance.

In addition to the bass, “I dabble in a lot of different instruments,” both in the context of the Femmes and as a solo artist. He’s played with symphony orchestras and chamber orchestras and along with “some of the guys from Midnight Oil” he performs in surf rock band The Break.

“It’s very unusual for me to be defeated by a musical instrument. So I went there to try it out again.” This time, not only did he get a sound out of it, but he also caught the attention of a teacher. “After I started playing it, I just became pretty much addicted to it.”

Playing the shakuhachi is not just about adding another sound to his repertoire. “The deeper you get into it, the more you realise that you are not actually a master – you know that you have to keep striving and you’ll never get there,” he says. “It’s good for someone like me to have that kind of admonishment in his life.”

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“I see music as a balancing act. If you just did one thing, you’d probably end up burning out – but because I’m doing so many different things, it’s really refreshing to go in these different directions,” he reflects.

“Doing Mona Foma keeps me in touch with the music that’s happening all over the world. Touring with the Femmes brings me into contact with audiences all over the world ... Japanese music gets me in touch with a kind of philosophy and kind of introversion that you don’t find in rock music.”

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