How did you guys first meet?

Damon McMahon: I was working on the Freedom album with Chris Coady [producer] in LA and we were mixing, which isn’t an easy thing to do. Chris did an amazing job on Freedom but I just felt like it needed a different voice to the one that recorded it. So I went to Chris, “Hypothetically, if I were to go someone else, who is a really good mixer?” Chris has a very Baltimore matter-of-fact way about him, and he said, “Craig Silvey is the best mixer in the world.” I was like, interesting… Chris has very strong opinions and I’d never heard him speak about anyone in that way, so I was like, damn. I reached out to you and you said, “Come on over.”
Craig Silvey: It’s funny because Chris and I have only ever spoken a couple of times through socials or whatever and spoke about doing something together… which never happened until Freedom, basically.

DM: Interesting. So I ended up going to London…
CS: Eating a lot of Indian food.

DM: [laughs] A lot of Indian food.
CS: It’s interesting because leaning into this record [Death Jokes] would’ve been more difficult if we hadn’t had that experience on Freedom, because Freedom wasn’t even a typical mixing session.

DM: Tell me what you mean by that.
CS: It felt like what you and Chris had created was an open palette with no arrows pointing towards anything necessarily. There were people playing things but no guarantee of what actually had to be used.

DM: It’s funny, in comparison to old Amen Dunes, it was way more organised than anything else. [laughs] In the old days I’d just have a bunch of takes in real-time to figure out what worked.
CS: Mostly I remember enjoying the process of learning how each of our brains work and then syncing. I think we both had points of thinking, “That’s a really strange way of doing things,” but then being like, “Oh, maybe there’s a way to make this work.”

DM: [laughs] I think that’s more you thinking that. I never thought you were strange, but I definitely came across as strange.
CS: It was just that some of your ideas would be very left-field and would take me by surprise, but I was up for the journey. Certainly with Freedom, that journey usually ended up with fruitful results. So when we came to this record it was like, “OK, there might be some curveballs here but if you hold tight it’s going to be good.”

DM: Totally. I’m going to flatter you here, Craig. I’d say in the music production world in general, most people aren’t confident and comfortable enough in themselves to take risks, change things, try ideas that seem ‘wrong’. Of course there may have been a few days at the beginning when you were really feeling me out and was uncertain, but I’m a very unorthodox musician. The people who play with me, only some can hang, most can’t. But the really good people, they like the challenge. I have very sensitive ears too, and I’ve never been… Chris Coady was the first time I’d ever been in a studio where I was impressed with someone, because he got things to sound so beautiful. But I’d never been in a mix session where I was impressed with anything anyone did. Then, slowly as we started to know each other, you’d do things and I’d be like, “Oh, damn.” One thing you did that was cool was, sometimes people will slam stuff with effects or hard sonic opinions – “This is gonna hit!” But you’d actually use more effects than anyone but you wouldn’t notice them – they’d be so subtly integrated. That album was a beautiful adventure because it was a new relationship and we’d watch the songs grow and move.
CS: Creating the arcs was so much fun, it was a real pleasure.

Moschino Biker Jeans $1,680

Read Next