Amen Dunes

How did you come to find the folk voice and style on 2018's Freedom?

I lived in total cultural isolation. I was a part of no scene. I was reading about music and going to one record store in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as going to raves with a good friend and watching Rap City on BET. But I also had a country/folk influence, as my grandmother was a country singer. And through a writing/research project with my high school that got me out traveling at a young age, I absorbed a lot about the history of blues.

What was the project?

I somehow convinced my school to give me credit to leave for a whole semester and do a trip through the [Mississippi] Delta and document all these landmarks of American roots music. I went from the Carolinas and Tennessee all the way down to Mississippi, Alabama, New Orleans, and back up.

You have frequent collaborators, including [drummer] Parker Kindred, the Roman musician Panoram [Raffaele Martirani], and producer Chris Coady [Tape Op #113]. But in the past, you just worked songs out on your own with a guitar, right? How was Death Jokes different?

Love and Freedom are the only albums I did with a band – just my two bandmates, Parker and Jordi Wheeler. At that point it was a different animal, almost like a jazz trio. Those records were done with carefully crafted songs, as well as rehearsing together for a fucking year. We are talking like Captain Beefheart level of rehearsing! Then we were recording at Electric Lady Studios, with Chris Coady producing. But the three albums before Love, and now Death Jokes, were done just by myself. I have some very talented musicians on Death Jokes – including jazz bassist Sam Wilkes, producer Christoffer Berg, and Kwake Bass [Giles Kwakeulati King-Ashong]. But I grew frustrated and tired when taking the Death Jokes material into large studios and, surprisingly, being told I had to follow certain rules. Producers, engineers, and musicians… I probably tried to work with 20 people who didn't work out over the course of two or three years. I would go to very well-known NYC studios, and they would basically scoff at this stuff. Some of these were very respected people in the production world. I do think it's apropos to tell Tape Op readers in 2024 that you do still have to fight for your own creativity, and leverage home recording, because of people being beholden to a DAW grid and this mentality of everyone needing to be like Ariana Grande or Grammy-nominated music.

I hope you didn’t bruise any egos!

No, it was the other way around! My feelings were hurt. I had people insult me in sessions multiple times. I'm serious… I worry about our world for creativity and experimentation.

So, in true Tape Op fashion, you went at it on your own?

I needed to make this record. I knew it sounded good to me. Certain drifts and tempo mapping would just always sound worse when someone else tried to mix. It was the pandemic, and I wasn’t in the best state, health-wise, but I started watching YouTube videos about Ableton [Live] and drum programming. I got a few choice pieces of gear, and I started just having fun. I have to know how to turn it on. And I have to know levels, approximately. But I would just see what sounded good. I'll tell you this; I fucking fell in love with Ableton Live. By the end of the year of working on this, I would turn on my Ableton, and I would get a warm feeling in my body, like a friend was coming up. It was like my partner, because I approached it naively. It allowed me to play with audio again. I had this concept that I wanted guitar to sound like machined Auto-Tune playing a Strokes song. I recorded the guitar, but I'd recorded each string of every chord on different tracks, with a different plug-in or equalization. Then I'd cut and paste different voicings of the chord throughout the session. It's constantly shimmering and moving because it's not played traditionally. I think it freaked a lot of producers out that I had so many plug-ins going and that I was using them in unintended ways.

Did you have any compatriot, or someone checking you outside of your own room?

I only have one trusted person, and that's my bandmate Panoram. He's an artist, and he’ll also tell it to me straight.

You’ve expressed an affinity for remixes in the past. Since this music is more in the lane that can lend itself to that, should we expect some?

With remixing, I find that the original spirit can be lost pretty easily. But I think I am obsessed with mixing because I'm just obsessed with audio. I have synesthesia, essentially. Mixing is a dark art. It obviously takes years and years to craft and hone.

Where else did something unconventional end up making the cut?

The song "Rugby Child" is off the charts with different time tempos. It was not only because the drum machine was drifting, but also it’s not on any DAW grid. So, even if you get it to land, there's no mutual corresponding time signature. That lead to a situation that I would describe as like splicing tape, but in the computer. I would hire guys who came to my house for fucking six hour days… just nudging. But it neutered the music. In the tenth hour of work on it, I ended up getting the right vibe myself, expanding and contracting kick drums overflowing into hi-hats. I just discovered which drum had to speak to other instruments for the right syncopation.

Talk to me a bit about "Exodus." Were there a lot of different people that came together on that track?

There are the people I already mentioned playing lots of places on the album, but that's the only track where I kept a number of the performances. There are two basses. There are live drums for 30 seconds at the end. There are little snippets of harp and mangled cello. There’s this amazing musician in Brooklyn, Robbie Lee, who plays medieval instruments, and he played on it. Money Mark from the Beastie Boys plays a little Casio keyboard on it! That was an amazing experience. He came to EastWest [Studios] when we were in L.A. He is so very gracious and talented. While he was playing, he was bouncing up and down off the couch. It was cool to watch him!

With interstitial moments that are in between some songs, were you building that material ahead of time or doing it along with the songwriting?

Ha! I wish I was that organized. [laughter] I aspire to do that. To me – to make an album with these repetitive motifs – it is genius, right? Like J Dilla in the world of hip-hop. Let’s just say I got inspired by someone who had the perfect intro track… and I was like, "Fuck, I need this." Eventually, it came together. All the comedian clips came in, all the spoken word, all the thematic stuff, and then all the drum machines. I was like, "What if I just threw it into the album and weaved it in and out?" It came out okay, in the end. 

Has there ever been a time where something has happened experientially, and you're so inspired but you didn’t have the tools to capture it in time?

Yes, in the old days before cellphones. Definitely. The way I write is I get a little lightning strike; like a melody comes to mind. I'll run to an instrument, and I'll grab an iPhone. I used to carry tape recorders with me. Sadly, I think there are a couple of moments in my life where I had a great melody come in and I had nothing to record it with. But it wasn't meant to be, you know? It’s like little spirits that visit us and then fly away. I hope there was nothing too special that just died on the vine.

I personally believe that great gear can inspire these moments to linger longer. Is there anything that you want to shout out?

I’m just getting into this world. I have a [Neumann] U 67, which I got for a good price – it’s just unreal. One more thing I’ll say about Ableton and the drum programming is that I discovered I really enjoyed a combination of the drum machine hardware and the sample libraries. Even the stock sounds that are just in Ableton. I was always mixing and matching.