We recently connected with Alexander Mcmahon and have shared our conversation below.

Alexander, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

With every musical collaboration I have taken on I have always considered it in terms of a collage. Every skill, experience, success, failure, loss, gain becomes something to be worked through and recontextualized. A constant state of growth and decay, but usually consisting of some artifact (a recording, performances, etc…) that lives on. All of these experiences start to blur into one another like a gigantic watercolor painting that grows another layer with each project taken on.

I bring to the table the entirety of the process and am ready to react and leave parts of myself therein.

Lately the most meaningful project I have been working on has been reaquanting myself with writing songs again. The majority of the ‘work’ I do in music is almost predominantly my ability to make soundscapes and/or make interesting sounds with my instruments. I do a fair amount of recording work and performing in bands where my role is fairly defined.

So to reacquant myself with writing actual lyrics or animating poems or quick visions is such a refreshing change. One that allows me to really experiment with intention and heavier doses of unintention and context loss…which allows an idea you thought you grasped to feel brand new again

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into guitar when I was really young. The music instructor in my elementary school played a pink paisley telecaster and lead a group sing-along to ‘wild thing’ and I feel like I started a pursuit that has 30+ years momentum. I became obsessed with guitar music, as if I had never really even known what a guitar was prior to seeing someone play it for a room of children. It was like an unseen dimension became crystalline in lacquer and chrome

I got my first recording device (tascam mf-p01) in high-school and that would definitely mark the next ‘shift’ which ultimately was a focus on how things sound. Not exactly what the actual notes/information is but the actual tone of instruments. I was really into the Alan Lomax recordings as well as a lot of early electric blues, both of which had a certain patina that felt like lost feelings. Something that sounds a certain way and carries with it an emotional weight that vibrated in a warm glow and I was a moth.

Many years later now I am still very interested in how things sound. Luckily I have updated technologies to use, though the mf-p01 still gets plenty of use. My goal with recording is to let every song be a test to synthesize synesthesia…soundscapes that extend the lyrical and imaganitive foder into a place where songs live as microcosms. The actual tone of instruments becomes an archetype. I get so lost in this, I feel like it’s a way to try and manifest something that cannot live in just 3 dimensions alone. It’s infinitism

I am relatively new to capital ‘P’ producing, but I greatly enjoy working with singers, songwriters and poets who want their art to elevate and be elevated in a process I feel is largely responsive. I hear a sound or read a line and try to react immediately and follow that idea until it cannot be followed anymore…either for failure or changing streams.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Perfectionism can really take you away from being present. I used to really struggle with letting a few minor mistakes in a performance completely derail me. I was doing something that I actually enjoy but was completely miserable an so self aware that I was absolutely living only in my own head.

It took me a lot of time making mistakes to realize how little any of them ever really mattered at all. Not even for the sake of ‘fake it till you make it’ musings, but moreso for the fact that the derailments usually felt like the most alive parts of performance.

Suddenly the impermanence and decay of it all gave a sense of being here now. It’s all decay, it all goes away, there is always the ability to let it go. This ideology really met me first in performing in bands but I feel it resonates so deeply in writing and recording music. Especially when dealing with the potential mechanical ‘perfection’ of computers and recording software it is crucial to maintain an entertaining amount of human error

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

For so long I thought the only way that someone could say they are an artist was to go to art school. Photographers when to photo school, collagers went to collage school and p0ets went to poem school. Since I had only gone to school school and more or less treaded water and never really did anything I couldn’t say that I was an artist…this is the mind of a younger me that worried too much about what total strangers would think about me…even though I was a complete stranger to them too.

Poor trait of the selfc0nscious artist.

Now I realize how lost in labels and a scholastic hierarchy I was. An ideology had spored into my brain without me knowing it. We can do anything we want, we can be whatever we want and we can get interested in whatever we want.

My artist awakening was when I started noticing that the photos I took evoked feelings that I could make resonate with the music I wrote and/or recorded. My poetry and little scribbles while drinking coffee at a large windowed cafe suddenly had sights and sounds that made eveything melt into one. As artists we can make little worlds to get lost in, our individual senses make way for oneness.

My goal with art is to never stop growing and seeking ways to give my ideas other voices and overtones.

Contact Info:

• Other: Bandcamp https://alexmcm.bandcamp.com/