Damon McMahon, center of Amen Dennis, doesn’t really listen to music. He doesn’t record at home in Brooklyn, and on tour his van rumbles down the street of the next town, carrying himself and his bandmates in silence. When I ask him to open it—which sounds like a possible aversion to music—he smiles sheepishly.
He considers what I’m asking for a moment. “There’s so much music in the world,” he says, adding that over the years, the part of his brain that processes music has become much more analytical. “It’s gotten more and more intense,” he says, “to the point where there’s no passive enjoyment for me anymore. It’s like I’m scanning so intensely when I listen to music that It might just become clutter. And it might just sound like noise unless it’s something I really like. Then, right after, he complicates his response. “But that being said There’s always good new music,” he adds. “And I’ll, like, discover from time to time.” Regardless, he “can’t stand loud music.”
Later McMahon — wiry and low key, with cropped, bleach blonde hair — tells me he’s not even really into performing music. It’s a trick that has nothing to do with stage fright, as he’s quick to note. “My machine isn’t good enough for that,” he replies. “My machine, it’s very good at channeling the body, the music and the writing. When I’m writing or recording, it’s like electricity going through me.
“But I’m not going to kiss Elvis or Prince,” he continues. “I can perform. I think I do a good job. I could certainly get into it. But these are people who are fair. fluid. They are born only for the soul of Chanel. I’m very grounded.” He pauses, then adds: “I mean, I’m very hard on myself. But if I’m trying to be very objective about it, I’m better for it. [writing]”
Conversations with McMahon are like this, blunt and oblique at the same time. The longer we talk — first on Zoom, with McMahon calling from his home in Brooklyn, and later on the phone — the more McMahon strikes me as the kind of person whose mind is real-time. He prepares to process the thoughts, while the letters are being formed on his tongue. That’s not to say he doesn’t think about things before he says them – he clearly does – yet by voicing the words, he doesn’t seem to arrive at a roundabout answer but rather takes itself in this direction, ultimately arriving at an unexpected. sense of clarity. This same unorthodox mood, it turns out, animates a body of musical work that is often as confusing as it is brilliant.
On May 10, McMahon will release his seventh album as Eman Dennis, Death Jokes. Fans of his last album, 2018’s Plaintiff and Shining Progress freedom, one may be surprised at how left-field it seems in comparison, which is saying something. McMahon’s distinctive vocals—delivered in that tremulous, angular vibrato warble—are still there, but this time they sound from a distant sonic universe. to call Death Jokes An electronic album wouldn’t be quite right, but on this the self-proclaimed Luddite tinkers with Ableton tutorials, messes with a Roland TR-909, and a copy machine, screams from his newborn daughter, and controversial jokes. Takes samples of Figures from across history including Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. Banger “Rugby Child” wouldn’t be out of step with a mumble, while other songs, like “Predator,” could soundtrack a sound bath. colloquially, Death Jokes Explores what it means to create demanding art—derived from McMahon’s humor-informed “open-hearted hostility”—in an age of indifference, and in the realm of an uneasy transcendence. It looks like he’s done nothing, yet it seems nothing more.
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