https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l-drq91zxxJUGlz1Dti-7YdO2ACHVrF7I&si=FG0C_MTNYmKEBQmQ

Amen Dunes has always worked with an outsider’s verve, but as he approached his seventh album in fall 2019, it was clear to Damon McMahon that he needed to become an outsider to his own history. “I was tired of the music I’d become convinced I had to limit myself to.” Instead of embarking on a familiar project, he decided to become a beginner again, immersing himself in the fundamentals of both piano and the electronic music he’d grown up with at raves and clubs but never imagined himself able to make. Few Amen Dunes fans might have perceived the lasting effect such music had on his work, but with Death Jokes, these influences would become clear. This album also marks a change in thematic focus; through samples and lyrics, Damon is much more directly critiquing the way American culture exalts violence, coercion, and groupthink as societal inevitabilities.

To learn the piano, Damon hired the first teacher his local shop recommended, a psychic medium named Jonichi who had studied with Nadia Boulanger, a preeminent French conductor and music teacher who left lasting influences on everyone from Igor Stravinsky to Quincy Jones. Parallel to those tradition-focused lessons, Damon was teaching himself how to use Ableton and program drum machines, a departure for a musician who had long avoided working with “any technology more complex than a screwdriver,” but a homecoming for the kid who’d grown up to a soundtrack of techno and rap music.

One day that winter Damon felt a song coming on and recorded a voice memo as he sang along with the piano. The resulting demo eventually became “Round the World,” the nine minute penultimate track on Death Jokes which soon seemed prophetic. What first sounds like a heartbreak ballad— Made up my mind/ I give up on you— later warps into a ghostly dirge—This world’s on fire/ Nothing seems true. The haunted refrains of round the wo.......
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