Altered Zones

By Ian Pearson

MP3: Amen Dunes: "Christopher"

MP3: Amen Dunes: "Bedroom Drum"

In 2009, Amen Dunes' debut LP, DIA, presented itself as a mystery: a red cardboard sleeve with strange, xerox-printed art, the story of a man taking refuge with his guitar in a Catskill Mountain cabin, and twelve dissonant jams from the leafy crawl space, stirring and emotive. In the months to follow, this terribly romantic story and the ambling folk freak-outs it left behind caught the attention of listeners Internet-wide. What I first encountered as some obscure record bin treasure became a prized gem in an ever-growing, modern fuzz-psych canon. Damon McMahon, the man behind the moniker, has since released a few follow-ups, including this year's finest downer, Through Donkey Jaw on Sacred Bones, and Rat on a Grecian Urn, a cassette of unstructured compositions on Fixed Identity. I phoned Damon a few weeks ago, just after the threat and ultimate disappointment of hurricane-turned-tropical-storm Irene, to talk about the origins of Amen Dunes and where he's headed now.

AZ: Amen Dunes is not your first project. How did this one come about?

Damon McMahon: It came about from some recordings I was doing in 2006. I bought a tape machine and miscellaneous music gear and I had a plan to just go away for a month and record some stuff. I ended up with a bunch of songs that I didn't intend on releasing, but then sent them to this label in Chicago called Locust Music, and they said they wanted to put it out. That's when I put a name to the project. I had no intention of playing shows at all at the point. I didn't even play any until 2009, when the album came out. So it was just the name for the recordings I did in 2006.

AZ: Did you have any kind of musical training?

Damon: It was pretty minimal. When I was 15, I took one year of guitar lessons, where they'll try to teach you The Allman Brothers. That was it. I learned the chords, but to this day I have no idea what key anything is in, or which scales. All I know is major/minor chords, seventh chords, and then everything else I kind of... I like it that way. I wouldn't want to know too much. But the thing is, ever since I was 13 or 14, I've just been a fanatic listener, and I think that's been my music training. I've internalized patterns or habits of how people structure songs.

AZ: When did you first get the urge to make your own music?

Damon: About a year after I took lessons, at 16 or 17, I started writing songs. At that point I had no gear, so it was just my guitar-- songwriter stuff. It's weird, because I didn't have an outlet for what I was listening to. I had no band, and was living in the suburbs. I only had one other friend who listened to real music, and I had no equipment. So I just stuck with the simplest thing.

AZ: You had a band, Inouk, with your brother at one point, right? Did you guys play together growing up in Connecticut?

Damon: Yeah, we played a ton. We were very close growing up and he was like my music fan friend, too. We would both write and trade songs, and record demos; we even sent tapes out to labels. At 17, I sent a tape with cut-out photographs and a letter to Drag City. Never heard back from them.

AZ: Was there a scene, or even a local record store that you discovered music from?

Damon: I wish. The only people who listened to records were old dudes and there was only like two of them. When I was 14, I gave my mom a list of the records I wanted for Christmas. She would go there and the old guy would say, "Oh, this is pretty good." That was about it.  My only peer was this 50-year-old dude who lives in a basement somewhere. There wasn't much of a scene except for the hardcore one in a city about an hour away, but I didn't take advantage of that.

AZ: The name, Amen Dunes, sounds very similar to your own, "Damon." Was that intentional?

Damon: [Laughter] That's funny. Some people will say "Ay-men Dunes," and I like that better, but I've never thought about it that way. I like that there's that implication, I guess, but it wasn't intentional. I just like the way the name looked and I like the word "amen." I didn't put too much thought into it. It was the name of my father before he was brutally murdered.

AZ: [Silence]

Damon: ...I'm just joking.

AZ: I was waiting for the end of that story!

Damon: Yeah, that was it. Very unemotional.

AZ: You recently put out a tape on Gary War and Taylor Richardson's label, Fixed Identity, and the sprawling ambient sounds there greatly differ from anything else you've released.

Damon: Totally. I'm kind of more excited about that tape than the record I just put out, because it reflects the music that I listen to today and the music that I make. I love the albums as well, but they're full of songs that I either wrote in the past or have been working on intermittently over the past year or two. They're a little more stiff and kind of exist on their own, because they've been around for a while. Rat on a Grecian Urn, the tape, is recordings I did a year ago-- half last Summer, and half last Winter.

AZ: Right around the same time you recorded Through Donkey Jaw?

Damon: Right before, actually. I finished the tape right before I recorded Through Donkey Jaw. I wish there were more tapes and that more people could hear it, because I had a lot of fun doing those recordings. That's where my head is most of the time.

AZ: Are you planning on doing more releases like it?

Damon: I would love to. I'm actually doing a release like that this Winter on the Belgian label Kraak. Those guys are awesome. We've been planning on this for a long time. So it's more recordings like that. But specifically on Rat on a Grecian Urn, there's a really long piece inspired by composer Julius Eastman, with me recording with piano. So a lot of this is attempting the music I look up to, but I'm not a trained musician, so the way it comes out is the way it comes out. I think it's honest "feel" music.

MP3: Amen Dunes: "Watching Cartoons"

AZ: How do you perceive today's ambient-drone tape scene?

Damon: Well, I was really excited about it when it first started up, and was a pretty active listener, but I think it's hard or rare that people do it really well. And when they do, it's really fucking great. I wouldn't consider myself one of those people who do it really well by any means, because serious sound people and real composers-- people like Andrew Chalk or Greg Davis-- really care about all aspects of the sound. Not just the vibe of it, you know? And I really think it is a craft, too. To be able to control what sounds you're making is really difficult. I don't think I'm at that point yet, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a different approach, in a way.

AZ: Are you approaching your process differently with future releases?

Damon: Yeah, I think so, because I definitely feel like I've got a good chunk of songs out of the way, and while I'll always write songs, my mind is unfortunately so divided. Half of me just loves rock music and melody, and the other side of me is only really excited by shit that's really new-sounding and inventive. I struggle to balance the two. My approach now is to just throw it all together and that totally works, so I definitely want to experiment more in that realm on future releases.

AZ: Geography seems play a big part in how people talk about you. You recorded DIA in the Catskills, Murder Dull Mind in Beijing, and Through Donkey Jaw in NYC. How do you think these places have affected your work?

Damon: That's hard to say. I don't know. Upstate was a very direct influence, because the only thing I could do was record. It's funny talking about it, because that whole scenario sounds so cliché, but the label that put that out, as labels should do, built a story around the release. But really I was just trying to get to a place where I could be alone and be really loud for a month. It just so happened that it was intense being by myself in the woods. But I don't think that in China or New York that it does affect one much. I think that wherever I've been, I've just used music as it's own little geography-- wherever it is, I'm in this kind of bubble, recording and writing songs.

AZ: You're going on tour in about a month. Are there any particular cities you're excited to visit?

Damon: I would love to hit the Midwest and play smaller towns. I really like the idea of playing someplace where people don't have that many shows coming through-- like kids into going to a show, being psyched you came even if they have no idea who you are, listening, and wanting to be a part of it. I really like that sort of energy and you don't get that in New York.

AZ: You get to be that guy who releases them from the suburban monotony you grew up in.

Damon: Totally. I always think that my music is for that kid, because that's so what I was. Maybe that comes through to a certain extant, or I hope so. Nothing is more gratifying than having someone say your record affected them. I love that idea.

AZ: So if music is to transcend the physical geography and take you someplace else, where would you like to take these kids? With your music, I mean.

Damon: [Laughter] I would like to take them to Disney Land... for fucked-up kids. Music for fucked-up or bummed-out kids. Actually, I would like to be non-specific. It would be awesome if they had any kind of emotional response to it, as opposed to just putting something on because it sounds cool. That's a goal of mine. I don't consciously try that, but that's a really desirable outcome... And I'd take them to Disney Land. Take everybody... or to Disney World, actually! Disney Land might just make them even more bummed out.

Grab Through Donkey Jaw LP from Sacred Bones and Rat on a Grecian Urn from Fixed Identity