Amen Dunes, Striving for Imperfection

Michael Schmelling

Damon McMahon, the nucleus of Amen Dunes, doesn’t really listen to music. He doesn’t throw on records at home in Brooklyn, and on tour his van rattles on down the road to the next city, carrying himself and his bandmates, in silence. When I ask him to unpack this—what sounds like a potential aversion to, well, music—he smiles slyly.

He considers what I’m asking for a moment. “There’s too much music in the world,” he says, adding that over the years, the part of his brain that processes music has become too analytical. “It's gotten more and more intense,” he says, “to the point where there's no passive enjoyment for me anymore. It’s almost like I'm scanning so intensely when I listen to music that it can just become clutter-y. And it just can sound like noise unless it's something I really like.” Then, immediately afterward, he complicates his own response. “But that being said, there's always good new music,” he adds. “And I periodically will, like, explore.” Regardless, he “can't stand loud music.”

Later on McMahon—wiry and low-key, with clipped, bleach-blond hair—tells me that he’s not really into performing music, either. It’s a proclivity that has nothing to do with stage fright, as he’s quick to note. “My machine isn't good enough for it,” he replies. “My machine, this body, is very good at channeling music and writing. When I'm writing or recording, it's literally like electricity is passing through me.”

“But I'm not fucking Elvis or Prince,” he continues. “I can perform. I think I do a good job. I could get into it, of course. But there are these people who are just fluid. They're born to just channel spirit. I’m very terrestrial.” He pauses, then adds:. “I mean, I'm being pretty fucking hard on myself. But if I'm trying to be very objective about it, I’m better suited to [writing].”

Conversations with McMahon tend to be this way, at once candid and oblique. The longer we keep talking—first over Zoom, with McMahon calling from his home in Brooklyn, and later over the phone—the more McMahon strikes me as the type of person whose mind is wired to process ideas in real time, at the moment the syllables are forming on his tongue. That’s not to say he doesn’t think about things before he says them—he clearly does—yet through sounding the words out, he seems to not so much arrive at a roundabout answer but rather lurches himself in that direction, eventually approaching an unexpected sense of clarity. This same unconventional disposition, it turns out, animates a body of musical work that’s often as confounding as it is brilliant.

On May 10, McMahon will release his seventh album as Amen Dunes, Death Jokes. Fans of his last album, 2018’s plaintive and shimmering breakthrough Freedom, may be taken aback by how left-of-center it sounds by comparison, which is saying something. McMahon’s distinctive vocals—delivered in that quivering, angular vibrato warble—are still viscerally there, but this time they sound beamed-in from a distant sonic universe. To call Death Jokes an electronic album wouldn’t be entirely accurate, but on this one the self-proclaimed Luddite tinkers with Ableton tutorials, messes around with a Roland TR-909, and samples a copy machine, his newborn daughter’s wails, and the words of contentious comedic figures throughout history, including Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. The banger “Rugby Child” wouldn’t be out of step at a rave, while other songs, like “Predator,” could soundtrack a sound bath. Lyrically speaking, Death Jokes probes what it means to create demanding art—informed by McMahon’s love of humor derived from “open-hearted antagonism”—in an era of insincerity, and circles an uneasy transcendence. It sounds like nothing he’s ever done, yet nothing has ever sounded more like him.

McMahon describes Death Jokes “a display of a person being imperfect publicly and enjoying it.” He’s okay if people don’t like the new Amen Dunes album so long as they react to it. “Love it or fucking hate it, I hope people can be like, ‘This doesn't sound like other things,’” he says. McMahon willingly chose “unorthodox” methods for this particular album, which resulted in him getting “a lot of rejections from producers and engineers” who didn’t jibe with that approach. Naturally, that “stoked the fire” for him even more. “I definitely have perfectionism issues,” McMahon says. “But that kind of rejection motivates me. I love it.”

“I've been blessed with a very strong drive, and a lot of people, my whole life, telling me I wasn't good enough, to be quite honest,” he adds. “And I didn't have any encouragement ever in my life, in any area, from my family [or] professionally, for many years. So I'm like a cockroach, you know? Like, I survived nuclear holocaust.”

Amen Dunes has existed more or less a solo endeavor since McMahon started the project in 2006, but throughout the last decade he’s gradually opened up his circle to allow a few collaborators in. McMahon has a penchant for artists who approach music-making in askew ways, even if they appear diametrically opposed to him. In 2020, around when Death Jokes began to take shape, for instance, McMahon reached out to Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn, of the English post-punk band Sleaford Mods: Did they want to jump on a song of his?

The tune that McMahon sent via Dropbox to Sleaford Mods “couldn’t have been further away from what we do," Williamson says. At the time, Williamson wasn’t familiar with McMahon’s music, either. But he found himself pulled in by McMahon’s gumption regardless. “Whatever it was, he was feeling it; he's not messing about,” he says. “And that appeals to myself and Andrew.”

Williamson says he enjoyed working with McMahon on what became the single “Feel Nothing,” but he admittedly didn’t feel moved by Amen Dunes when he initially listened to the music. “We've got a saying in England: ‘He’s one of those Marmite musicians,’” Williamson says. “Marmite is a savory spread that you put on your toast over here, and people either hate it or they love it. So [Damon is] one of those people. It’s a very singular aesthetic that he's got.” But McMahon’s sound burrowed under Williamson’s skin in time. “You start to see why he does it,” Williamson says. “And to me, that is the sign of a very credible musician. You don't see him come in—and then it just creeps up on you, slaps you around the face. That's how his vocal style got me in the end. I didn't take to it automatically—but I don't think you should.”

It may not shock you to learn that McMahon’s first serious foray into music, in his teenage years, got off to an inauspicious start. As a fifteen-year-old he took several years of acoustic guitar lessons, and quickly learned that he “didn't like the whole musical part of it,” he laughs. Specifically, he despised having to learn charts and read music. “That bored the shit out of me,” he says. But when his guitar teacher offered him an alternate route—music-making as “little patterns,” as McMahon puts it—that altered his thinking, especially when this same teacher introduced him to acoustic music out of Texas, Mississippi blues, and Jamaican tunes. “It blew my mind that I could like, make sounds,” McMahon says. He soon started writing songs.

Born in Philadelphia and raised in the suburbs of New York City, McMahon came up in a “culturally inclined household,” with parents who were into country music, classical, and especially Bob Dylan. Though his folks were hardly “artsy fartsy” people, there were musicians further up the family line; McMahon’s paternal grandmother sang in a church trio in Wheeling, West Virginia, busting out gospel and country songs in the chapel and on the radio. McMahon grew up going to synagogue—his mother’s side of the family is Jewish—and remembers feeling mesmerized by the songs he heard there.

While his family believed in art’s importance, they never encouraged him to be an artist. (Until McMahon was 35, he says, his father told him: “Cut your hair, get a job.”) Still, he senses that it’s in his blood to sing music calling back to these entwined lineages. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized this Semitic tradition—there's something about that scale, that kind of music—that is like country music, too,” he says. “If you hear a cantor in the synagogue, it sounds like Appalachian music in some way.”

McMahon first began singing back when he was learning guitar, though he’d “have to be very drunk or something” at first to do it. He ended up surprising himself with what emerged from within. “I was like, ‘Oh shit. This is intense,’” he remembers. Aside from Bob Dylan, McMahon says that Ice Cube and the Houston rap trio Geto Boys have been the most foundational forces in his vocal practice—through them, he gleaned how to imbue depth into songs beyond the lyrics themselves. “They put feeling into a word on top of its meaning,” he says. “Certain people use the word as a shape to convey a feeling, so they’ll sort of manipulate the shape of a word to be angry, or shape and manipulate a word to be happy, or to be coy.” This guiding principle is all over Death Jokes, which McMahon later tells me is in essence a “mimicry of the self-titled Geto Boys record.”

Beyond folk and rap music, McMahon was into late ‘90s and early-aughts era UK electronic music as a teenager, and a friend of his started taking him to raves around Manhattan. Those events didn’t especially stay with him as much as the sounds themselves did, though. “Private listening in my bedroom was more memorable than going to raves,” he says. “I've never liked going to live shows. It's all been between my ears in my bedroom, really.” He says he’s always been an outsider and never a member of any musical or cultural community, even when he eventually joined the band Inouk with his brother in 2004—which found a footing in the post-Strokes New York City rock scene. It did not last long. “I had not developed as a musician,” McMahon remembers. “And the [band members] were very critical of me. They were like: ‘you can't play, you suck at guitar, your voice is kind of fucked up.’”

After Inouk broke up, McMahon rented a cabin upstate and set out to do something radical. “I was like, ‘You know what? I'm gonna do all the shit that they told me I wasn't good at, that I didn't think I was allowed to do,’” he remembers. There he recorded his first album as Amen Dunes, the “fucking free, chaotic” D.I.A. He considers that experience an inflection point in his career, the precise moment he expressed his “true, authentic self for the first time,” he says, as opposed to “always trying to be a good boy, creatively.” Generating something uninhibitedly, even with the specter of failure close by, felt like an exhilarating prospect. “I was like, ‘All right—what does it look like to make music if you quote-unquote suck?’”

When the label Locust decided to release D.I.A three years later, McMahon suddenly had to tour and promote the album. “And I was like, ‘I can't do this all alone. I'm not good enough,’” he says. McMahon found his first bandmate in Sara Shaw, a member of a group called The Occasion. McMahon was a fan; they made what sounded to him like “dark, punk folk…evil, beautiful troll music.” He and Shaw toured for a while as Amen Dunes, until Shaw started working in the film world and quit music, he says. He moved to China, then back to the U.S., and kept recording expansive music that oscillated between punk, folk, psychedelia, rock, and experimental genres, sometimes all at once.

McMahon says that if you listen to the Amen Dunes albums in chronological order, you can track “someone's journey of processing their shit” in a linear way. But his discography also charts a series of inventive revelations: With each release his music sounded more daring, the songs increasingly steelier and softer. It’s a meticulous process; McMahon arrives by taking the long way around, says Raffaele Martirani, a collaborator of McMahon’s who records as Panoram. “His way of recording is like, trying out many, many, many things before he’s satisfied with something,” Martirani says.

After operating on his own for a while, McMahon started bringing others into his orbit again. In the years leading up to the tremblingly beautiful album Love, released in 2014, McMahon enlisted drummer Parker Kindred and multi-instrumentalist Jordi Wheeler: To him, the two are the “most elemental, mystical timekeepers I've ever encountered” who resonate “with one another in a dark cauldron, a dark primordial soup or something.” The same year Love came out, McMahon bought a record by Panoram at the behest of record store heads in London. He and the Rome-based Martirani became pen pals, writing back and forth about their abstract ways of understanding music. “I grew up making electronic music from the start,” Martirani says. “[Damon] has always been an electronic music lover, but not a maker. But I think what got us connected was his interest in certain sounds and arrangements and concepts and ideas about electronic music. It was more like two animals coming from different ecosystems.”

Eventually, McMahon broached the idea of having Martirani collaborate with him on 2018’s Freedom. It’s a hard record to forget, one that almost overwhelms with its capacity to reach in, rummage around your brain, and dig up sense memories you didn’t realize you’d been clutching. The album became a critical hit, topping many best-of lists that year from upstart blogs and traditional tastemakers alike.

McMahon still seems a bit thrown by the attention, in that he sees his “position more of service with the music” than him at the center. “They're saying, ‘good job,’ but I'm like, ‘I don't really feel like I did anything,’” McMahon says. “I definitely was in the car, but I don't think I was in the driver's seat. And so when people are like, ‘thanks for driving me to Boston,’ I'm kind of like, ‘I don't know if I drove you to Boston.’”

“For a long time before anybody cared about Amen Dunes, it was music made for me,” he adds. “And it still is. But there's just a bigger audience observing it.”

Later that year, comments that McMahon made in a 2014 interview with No Fear of Pop, about why he didn’t collaborate with women, had resurfaced and circled online. Later, in a statement, McMahon responded: “I did not feel comfortable having a woman in the band, at that time, and my reason is as follows: Two different adult women sexually abused me throughout my adolescence, from about 9 until I was 18. When I finally reached an age where I gained enough courage to begin to acknowledge what happened to me, Amen Dunes became a form of my own therapy. It was the one safe space I had to explore the feelings and the trauma from childhood, and to start to try and reclaim my identity and sexuality as a man.”

The way McMahon talks about the 2018 incident suggests that the wound hasn’t fully closed yet. “I was pretty angry that I had to disclose all that stuff, just to save my life,” he says. “But honestly, what really upset me the most was that people were so eager to defuse their own discomfort publicly like that…these people are clearly unhappy with themselves in some way, and the state of the world, understandably, but there's better ways of going about trying to address that. But also, it just came from this place of their own agitation...”

“Look, I don't want to get into too many details, but there's certainly people who should be attacked,” he continues. “There's wonderful instances of that. But that gets kind of ratcheted up to a point where people are shooting from the hip. That's what really bothered me. It’s just like, I can't believe someone would be so violent without challenging me directly or something, or asking me more….” he then trails off. “That’s not exactly what I want to say. But I will say it made me very angry. And to this day talking about it really bothers me,” he continues. “I've learned my lesson to try and be a little more clear…I understand that someone could take that out of context.”

I ask him to clarify: Was he more upset that the people that took issue with him didn’t ask him about it directly first?

“Hmm. No, that’s not exactly it,” he pauses. “I want to think about exactly what I mean.” He’s quiet for a while. “I don't want to, like, riff on what I think a healthy solution could be to that problem, because I don't want to say something without thinking about it.” Eventually, he arrives at this conclusion: He feels that “highlighting that speculatively, and taking that person down, is [not] the best way of addressing a very serious problem in society.”

The world has largely continued turning since the COVID years, yet those early days continue weighing heavily on McMahon. “I went through my own gauntlet. I mean, psychologically and spiritually, it was catastrophic,” he says. “And I'm very sensitive to all that stuff, so I was just watching it going down and was quite horrified.” When the pandemic hit, “the nails holding on to the side of the building were really falling off,” he says about himself. “I personally was forced to really face how much I was attached to my body in itself, who I am. My feelings, my fear of losing it, all that shit, was amplified for me.” While trying to make sense of how he was “toying with our tenuous grasp on life,” he notes, the concept of “death jokes” began to materialize.

He didn’t initially set out to include the words of deceased comedians, or the voice of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, in an album called Death Jokes. But as the songs began to take shape, McMahon found symbolism in their words. The infamous sentencing of Lenny Bruce, partially immortalized on the album’s last song, “Poor Cops,” telegraphed something profound to him. That is, how “intention in a public setting as being lethal, especially as an artist, and the unfortunate constrictions that that places on art as a whole,” he says. That’s ultimately what the album came to mean to him: “It's dangerous to fucking joke around.” Still, McMahon strongly believes that sort of dialogue is necessary, as “a fucking medicine for this kind of social distancing.”

Around the same time, McMahon and his wife also started a family—he now has two young children—and moved back to the east coast in 2021 after a stint in Los Angeles. With kids, McMahon says, “There’s no time for thinking by yourself too much. And I found that I was actually better than I used to be, with those restrictions.” In those precious slivers of time, he started imbuing the songs with his revelations about “the spirit breaking free” from everything he’d attached himself to. Those breakthroughs sent him in new directions, spurring him to revisit the same live setup he’s had for 18 years and dredging up the percussive thrums of his days traipsing around Manhattan underground raves.

Even close friends and collaborators of McMahon, like Martirani, didn’t know how that would work in practice. “I was not sure how [McMahon] was going to manage to merge this new thing with the electronic sounds and his songwriting,” says Martiriani, who worked with McMahon on Death Jokes. “So it's very interesting to see the way he was able to blend the two worlds together. He was not just looking for colors to add to his palette, but he was pretty radical about almost making the two worlds, like, crash.”

A chance recommendation from his piano shop in Los Angeles led him to take lessons with JonNichimyoun Taylor, who goes by Jonichi, to understand the basics of the instrument. Over the phone, Jonichi says he considers himself more of a piano trainer rather than a teacher: “I train you in all the disciplines, and the act of how to play,” he says. “We don’t play the piano with the fingers, we use it all from the shoulder to the forearm, actually using the weight of the arm to initiate the tone.” These studies in pressure, articulation, and sight reading are what he imparted onto McMahon. He had his work cut out for him. “I didn't have to do anything,” Jonichi says. “You just light a spark under him and he just turned into a brushfire.”

I ask Jonichi—who’s described as a psychic medium in the album’s press materials but bristles a bit when I go there—if he thinks McMahon’s approach to music is intuitive. “I would say [it’s] more instinct,” Jonichi says. “Without judgment, almost without being consciously aware of what he does. He does it automatically. This is what talent’s about. I would say born to do,, to a certain extent, and just need the necessary means to open it, to let it flow through you.”

In the 1970s, Jonichi studied with the late Nadia Boulanger, who taught Philip Glass and Quincy Jones, among other luminaries. McMahon says during the making of Death Jokes Boulanger became his mentor “by proxy,” as he resonated deeply with her teachings about creating art. “She was very adamant about sincere art-making and risk-taking,” he says. “I ended up finding one of her lectures online, and I’m like ‘Holy shit, this is exactly what I'm trying to say.” Her words (in French) are sampled on the album’s centerpiece “Round the World,” a nine-minute-long epic of consolation, submission, and disembodied acceptance.

As such, McMahon sought to embrace “exultation, liberation, removal from this mortal coil” with these songs—not so much in a New Age-y sense, but more so as a salve. “For a long time, all the Amen Dunes stuff was really a balm for myself,” he says. “And then on this album, it was a little different. I think this album was more exploring, and feeling alive from challenging myself by making music. It wasn't so much like, ‘I have to make these songs.’”

He stops himself. “Actually, you know? That’s bullshit. I'm just forgetting. Because it's been so many years that I’ve done this album, I'm actually forgetting the years of writing these songs. What am I talking about? Yeah, they were absolutely methods for me to process what was disturbing me.”

Beyond grappling with those disturbances, the songs resound at once like a repository for shards of memories—the wistful line from “Rugby Child” about a “pile of 50 ones” invokes his early touring days, when he used to get paid with wet dollar bills from the bar—and as a vessel for transmuting acceptance, like on the stirring “Exodus.” The latter doesn’t make its presence known at first; it’s a song that reveals itself over time. “You say life is hard / Well at least you think it is / But it’s a joke / Some day we lose it / So use it,” he croons. In anyone else’s hands, these lyrics would probably ooze with carpe diem-esque cheese. It not only doesn’t come off that way at all, but McMahon also manages to transcend these mere words into a galvanizing groove.

If listeners feel rattled listening to Death Jokes, McMahon believes he’s done his job. “Hopefully other people will maybe consider that they feel shaken up too; we might need a wake up call,” he says. “That's what I'm singing for, honestly. Because otherwise, frankly, I just make these fucking songs in my basement. At this point—to be honest with you—if there wasn't that purpose behind this album, I swear to God, I would stop doing it all together.”

Originally Appeared on GQ