Kevin McMahon: Appropriate Responses

The Middle Hudson Valley of New York State has long been a bastion of creativity, counterculture, the arts, and especially music. While Woodstock is the hippie hamlet famous for lending its name to the legendary festival, as well as as a hub for some of the biggest musicians and artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it is in New Paltz – a markedly younger town than Woodstock – where producer and engineer Kevin McMahon runs Marcata, a studio in a beautiful old barn. It is here where he has produced Swans, Real Estate, Titus Andronicus, Widowspeak, and more excellent artists that come to the pastoral isolation of Ulster County to record in peace. I drove up here to get the tour and discuss the perks of having a barn studio. Spoiler alert: There’s a grain silo for reverb.

What are the origins of Marcata?

The studio was started in Harlem by The Walkmen, and then later they had me run it. At that point we were working with a lot of the same bands. I was also doing live sound for them and a bunch of other people. I used to work at the club Brownie's, in New York. I knew about The Walkmen, but I had no idea they had a real studio. I had worked at studios in the city, but I just had a little setup in my basement up here in New Paltz when they asked me to run Marcata. I went and saw the space — it was a big liveroom, a control room, a tape machine, and a console. It was a great space, with a really live room, up at 138th and Broadway. The building had been some kind of Nash car production facility [the Nash Garage Building] way back when. It was a garage, so there was a helix ramp going up the middle. They rebuilt everything around it, so the live room was a very odd shaped and had two levels. There was an upper area, which consisted of brick walls, cement floors, a normal industrial area, and then a deep pit that was an eight-foot drop to another level. 

When you put mics up in the rafters at the old Harlem location was it how you hoped it would be, or was it a tough spot to work with?

If you like a live sound, and I really like a live sound, then it was a dream come true. If you didn't want that, you were kinda fucked. The upper level was close to the ceiling, so I could put bands up there and the close mics really got them — the faraway mics would get just the room. But even cooler than that for reverb — and we did have a plate reverb — were the hallways of this space. There was a long catacomb that wrapped all the way around, with tall ceilings — that was priceless. I used that all the time. Columbia [University] kicked us out of that space, along with everyone else there, while I was also working at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock. It's up on the side of a mountain, and its A room was an airplane hangar-sized live room. There was the mix room I was told Bob Clearmountain [ Tape Op #84 ] did a lot of his work in, which was looking at the smaller B room where [Meat Loaf's] Bat Out of Hell was recorded. They had a cottage, which was their smaller facility on the same property. Sometime in the ‘90s they closed the big complex and moved it all into the smaller cabin. They had hired me to repair the console, and when I was done they said they didn't have money to pay me but I could have time in the studio. It was all barter, and I had about a year in there where it was me and a friend of mine who were the only people using it. I thought I was going to move the Harlem location into that space, but the hammer fell with some legal issues at Bearsville. There was a bunch of equipment from those two spaces that needed somewhere to go very quickly. Then I found the current location of Marcata, which I knew about from being an audio tech and previously having them hire me to work on the console. I knew the barn was here, and I knew there weren't a lot of sessions happening in the space. I moved gear here as a temporary solution, and it ended up being like, "Wow, this place is really awesome." It's a pretty cool spot. I believe there's a bit of history in here. I've been told that one of Vic Chesnutt's early records, About to Choke, was partially done in the space with an awesome guy named Garrett Uhlenbrock. Everybody from this area, whoever was in a band over the last 25 years or so [prior to McMahon's moving in] has worked in here. But I don't really do a lot of local projects, so now it's a different sort of space. The tape machine is the only thing left over from the Harlem era. The other things I've purchased. Being a tech is a great thing, because you can get expensive things for cheap, if you know how to fix them. I bought the MCI 36-channel console for a thousand dollars. With countless other pieces of equipment people are like, "It's big. It sucks current. I don't have space for it. I don't really know how to align the tape machine." That aspect is an exciting part of being a tech.

How did you get into being an audio tech?

I have a dear friend, Burt Price, and we worked together at the first studio where I started recording. He showed me a lot and introduced some of the basics to me, including the detail-oriented work ethic required to do it. He continues to be someone I ask questions, which is another important part of it; having some backup when you really are in over your head. I had also bought an Ampex 440 1-inch, 8-track. That thing used to break, and about the fourth time that I hired a tech, I was like, "I can't afford to be paying somebody $70 or $80 an hour to do this." Furthermore, I was thinking, "That's good money." There was a guy that I'd hired a number of times, Ken McKim [ Tape Op #86 ]. He's down in New York City now, but he was the original tech for Bearsville. He's hands down one of the best techs in the world. He built the Retrospec tube DI. He's apparently self-taught, but knows everything and costs a lot of money per hour. He would always be cheaper than other techs because he'd actually fix the problem and do it fast, with precision and purpose. I was inspired by him to try to be as good as he was, so he really set the role model for what kind of a tech wanted to be. There are many different kinds out there, in terms of fairness, self-motivation, and reliability. I ended up meeting this guy, Jeff Blenkinsopp from EARS [ Expert Audio Repairs & Services, Inc. ]. He used to be Pink Floyd's tech, and he produced Secret Machines' first LP [ Now Here Is Nowhere ] while I was working with them as a live soundman. He also has a company in Long Island City that's called the The Analog Lab. I interned with him for a good year or more and learned an incredible amount. Another brilliant guy is Chris Muth [ Tape Op #45 ], who designs the Dangerous Music gear and has been on the scene for a long while, particularly in his role with designing mastering consoles and fixing cutting lathes. He was very involved with Sterling Sound, along with many other world-class studios in the NYC area. I was really lucky to be able to hang out with those guys and have them each show me really different things, which have all been instrumental in what I do as an engineer, as well as enabling me to fix a lot of gear. Before I got really busy producing, being a tech was saving my ass in terms of making a living. I mean anybody doing recording is like, "How do you actually carve a living out of making records? What do you have to do to make ends meet?" And people think it's just, "I wanna be a recording guy. It's gonna be awesome." But every dollar you make, you had to work all these different ways to ensure you could make, or to keep, it and not give it away. I never wanted to be a studio owner, but there's no way I could afford to do half the records I do on their budgets if I was giving a studio fee to someone else.

If you could push a button and make the economics of the music industry go back to what they were in the ‘90s, would you do it?

No, I don't think so. Back then there were definitely labels giving out money, and it's sad that it's not happening now, but it's really not that sad. At that time period it was like all the bands were basically waiting for permission, in some form or another, from somebody. People weren't in the headspace of saying, "We're gonna make a record." And frankly the deals that many labels gave were impossible for the bands to ever recoup. The labels usually gave money that represented 20 times the amount of money that it actually takes to make the record. Then the band has to recoup $300,000 before they make a cent. I learned this firsthand, being in a guy's band [ A Don Piper Situation ] who was signed to Capitol Records. They'd signed him, in my opinion, on the strength of one song that really had only a little something to do with what he was about. It was a pop song, a great song in itself, but a lot of his music was way more atmospheric than that. He's still around now, and doing some very awesome music, thankfully. But he was close to a casualty of war and the effect of the artist going through the machine, which is often traumatic. He's a super inspiring guy, and another role model for me as an artist. The label inevitably dropped him without releasing that record, after sitting on it forever with ever changing promises about its release date — something many artists go through. His lawyer was smart enough to wait it out. The label eventually bought him out and allowed that he could sell 2000 of his own records and keep all the money from it. This has become a model I quote bands about; what it means to keep 100% of your income and what is sustainable as an artist to survive, which is important to consider more than going for the goal of a platinum record as the only statement of success. Now things are totally Wild West. A band can put out their own records and know they are making the record because they're paying for it, and hopefully make real decisions about how much they can spend, based on a realistic goal that they can handle. That's opposed to thinking they aren't paying for things that really are all being tacked onto the bill that they have to recoup before making any profits. I think it is essential for bands to know what the stakes are for them in any record they make, and who, in the end, is really paying the bill. Bands are!

How do you feel about Kickstarter?

I was positive that it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. And I've been totally shocked that in this day and age when you ask people if they buy music, they're like, "What do you mean, do I buy music?" The record's only going to cost them fifteen bucks, but they'll donate $50 if you're saying you want to make a record! There are a lot of bands doing that, and it's certainly a better deal for them than paying the label back. Whether it's on a small label or self-funded, a lot of times you get to the end of your budget in the studio and you're thinking, "Do I actually want my name on this thing if I stop now? No, I probably don't. So there's gonna be a ton of extra work that's gotta happen on this." Which is awesome to do. If you're doing that, it means you care.

If you're working with a lot of bands that don't have big budgets, and you really love the album, are you going to wind up doing work for free?

Oh, my god. I am always doing that. I believe that you can't know what all is going to happen when you start a record. I mean, that's the story with Titus Andronicus' The Airing of Grievances, which started when a band from Glenrock, NJ, still in high school, contacted me to do a record. They were the first band I recorded when I took over engineering at Marcata, with their moms dropping them off in Harlem. They were very rough around the edges. They were called Seizing Elian at first and then, years later, they became Titus Andronicus. When they got their deal with Troubleman [Unlimited Records] they were presented with $2500 to make what became The Airing of Grievances . I easily did three times the amount of work I was paid for, because it was just, "This stuff is awesome. It's gonna be awesome. I can't stop now." The Walkmen are a well-known name, and that opportunity provided a lot for me certainly, but I would say the foundation of my career came from that Titus moment. Working with a band that was very young, not really in a great space, in terms of the ability to make the record that needed to be made to put them on the map, and they were heavily underfunded. It was a lot of work beyond the pay, and had I operated on a level of "business as usual" and not cared about the finished product I'd be in a very different place now [in my career]. If you're just engineering, your day conceptually stops at the end of that day. I mean, great engineers put their heart into it too, but a great producer could never be like, "Your budget's done, I'm done." I need to be smart enough to know that I'm not going to get paid for every hour of work I do, and set up a situation where I can control or absorb expenses. I'm doing that right now on five records.

I love that album Days by Real Estate. Tell me about that.

I thought it was part of a successful transition. The first record they made [Real Estate] also did really well, critically, but it was clear that the jump from that record to Days was ten or twenty fold from where they were, and Days was everywhere. I believe a lot of that was the process being way more focused on detail, and raising the bar of how people play the music, which is sometimes about perfecting the musical notes, as we would see on this record. That process was a choice of mine to push them hard. Temperament–wise, they have to be ready to be pushed, and not take that as a sign of disrespect, a vote of no confidence, or failure. I think we redid the guitars in their entirety like three or four times, because everybody's playing these chords and everybody's out of tune. We spent so much time intonating their guitars, tuning, tuning, tuning, and then I realized it wasn't about the tuning or intonation, but rather, "Okay, you're playing this shape of a chord, and when you get up here and play this voicing you're bending your finger this way and bending one string." That's a big part of what I perceive my job to be. I was like, "This is not good enough, and somebody's gotta tell you that." They were probably pissed by the end from doing those guitars over and over again! But it made a huge difference.

You had to be the bad cop.

It was difficult. It took a long time. I hadn't done a lot of music as mellow as that — I have done mellow music, like Laura Stevenson's Wheel, which has a huge dynamic spread with incredibly quiet and delicate passages. A lot of The Walkmen projects, as well as many moments in [Swans'] The Seer, and [Titus Andronicus'] The Monitor are incredibly quiet, along with my personal music as Pelican Movement. But a lot that I work on has an intensity behind it that you feel while making it, which can be really inspiring. It makes it very easy to know where you are supposed to be going. Days is certainly not loud; but it's not the quiet [that is the issue], it's the lack of intensity, which is very different than most of what I do. I do think that record came out really well, and I am really proud of a lot of things about it. Especially the way that record sounds, which I think has a timelessness to it. I have a grain silo that I use as a reverb channel, which I put together for that record. I probably put every single sound through it — I spent close to two weeks sending sounds into the silo to make that record have a special sheen. The drums are also a great presence. Matthew [Mondanile], the guitar player, was really good at drums and played some drums on it, and Martin [Courtney] played a lot of the drums too. There was a lot of sound design to them while recording them, which is always a lot of fun to be able to do. It was not live, as many things I record are; it was all to a click track. Put the drums down. Put the guitars down. Layers. One of the things I think is brilliant about their music, which also makes it elusive, is that there are no bells and whistles. We had to make it awesome.

How was it moving Marcata into its current location?

The studio that was here before me had changed hands a few times. The current incarnation didn't do a ton of recording, but had an amazing Harrison 32 console, which they used to hire me to work on, from time to time. I had originally set up my control room in the outer barn and also used it as a live room — in-the-round style — because, when I first moved in, I thought it was temporary and did not want to integrate my setup with theirs. I eventually made it into a facility with a separate control room, as it is now.

How did you like that?

In the round? I had already worked that way for a super long time. It definitely keeps you on your game. All my personal spaces I had in the city were that way, and there was a really good studio called 33 & 1/3, owned by Eric Ambel [Tape Op #13] and Mark Roule, who taught me a great deal. That studio was on Grand and Kent Ave [in Brooklyn] back in the mid-‘90s. It had a Neve console and really good equipment, located in a former bank.

So you used in-ear monitors while you were getting drum sounds?

Yeah, headphones. A lot of it was also based on my live sound background. I got my real formative experience at Brownie's, where I worked for about 10 years. I couldn't afford to be an intern at a studio, and with live sound nobody's asking you to work for free. It's not a lot of money, but it also brought me into contact with clients. What I didn't know at the time was that I was training with no safety net, where shit is breaking all the time, and you're hearing what the band actually sounds like. I saw one band play five times, and one of the shows stood out in a magical way. Why is that? What is it about that playing? Because when you're making records, you're trying to capture this, and if you don't understand that it's all about the nature, the organic relationship humans have with playing music, then you may be missing something. This accounts for the sterility. Maybe it's because people over-perfect and fix things. Maybe it's because bands get uptight when they go into an expensive studio. Maybe it's because there's not an audience giving them the energy back. Whatever it is, I know that during that time period I was seeing bands that I loved, as well as hearing the records that were made and thinking, "These records are bullshit, compared to their live energy." There's nothing magic. It's clean, well- recorded music, and the band is playing in a vacuum. Although I did a session in the city recently at a studio that was in the round and I had forgotten the other aspect, which is that you'll fucking go deaf!

Swans must be — not that you're recording them in that way — but they must record live and loud, right?

They are super loud. I'd say half, or less than half, of The Seer was cut live. I flew to Berlin to meet up with them because they were on tour, and I found this old concert hall-based space called Studio P4. We recorded about four songs there live, but we ended up redoing some of those again here in this space, along with many other tracks that we did at andereBaustelle [Tonstudio, in Berlin], which was a totally fantastic place to work! A lot of that wasn't done fully live. But, more than them cutting live, there is also the volume that Michael [Gira, Tape Op #53] wants to listen to in the control room — deafeningly loud, at all times! Frankly, you're always in danger of blowing out your speakers. I actually added a second set of speakers and ran them together so I could get the volume we needed without risking the speakers. When we would do mixes, he would go out to the car, turn up the stereo all the way, and then give notes like, "The low end is rattling the car." [laughs] For the mastering session, the mastering engineer and I stood 200-feet away from the car and heard metal shaking. But that does give useful information.

Tell me more about making that album.

I'm probably still recovering from it, actually. Michael doesn't stop being in the moment, ever. There's no plan that isn't subject to being turned on its ear, often on a whim, and then acknowledged to be a wrong somehow. So you turn and go back to something you fully dismantled, no matter what the consequences are and no matter when. To say that you can't go back, or do a given operation, is not an option. The minute that you think you have a way to protect where you are, that is your undoing. You must be prepared to be in the moment, at all times, and figure it out. There are things that come out of that place that are really affirming, and then, at the same time, it's a very difficult process. It's incredibly rewarding, and the fact that the record did what it did was incredibly important to me, because that was the only one I had done with him, from top to bottom. We're all using the same tools, and it's not about getting a good sound as much as that I am interested in making the best thing that that person may have ever done. I mean, with Michael, I am more the lucky one, in terms of working with him at that time period, because the vision he has, at this time, also has the perspective of all these other years where he's tried other things. But I believe that record is something that is special, because it also felt like my life mission, which I think shows. Does that make sense?

The Two Kick Drum Setup

I always keep two kick drums like this. It really gives that big, open marching drum sound. I have a microphone inside the drum being played, getting the dead kick drum sound, and then I mic this second kick drum. While I'm describing this drum setup, I also want to mention the square ribbon mics on the toms, because they are amazing and it seems no one knows about them yet! They are Potofone mics, made by Ed Potokar. potofone. com

Yeah, I think it does. I'm also a fan of that album Almanac, by Widowspeak.

I love that record, and I love that band. I love how easy it is for them to make an amazing record because their vision is so palpable. They're living up here now. They got jobs, integrated into the local community, are woodshedding, and they are probably going to write another awesome record. Almanac was very interesting because it was their first, sorta bigger, record that they had made. Kyle, the drummer, had only done metal music before that. He was very open to anything, and was very inventive. The whole Fleetwood Mac comparison with that record was something I heard when I went and saw them play the first time. But they sounded like Mazzy Star on their earlier record, which was not a comparison they were into. I was totally hearing this Fleetwood Mac thing that was screaming to happen, and Rob [Earl Thomas, guitar] was like, "I fuckin' hate Fleetwood Mac!" [laughs] I had dug up Tusk and became obsessed with that record before meeting Widowspeak. When I met them, I said, "What kind of synchronicity is this that I'm totally in love with this Fleetwood Mac record?" I think [Tusk] is some of their best work. It was fun to have a drummer on it where he's like, "I am an open book." It was like the Real Estate record, in that we did songs to a click and built it up. It was all about creative sounds, every step of the way. They live in this very visible, animated world — you feel like you're in it. It makes it easy. Working with them is like walking into a cartoon; a world that they have fully understood.

She's got her voice.

Molly [Hamilton] is phenomenal! She was petrified singing live, and in the studio. She was super shy, at that phase, but worked hard at taking it seriously and the need to overcome that. One interesting thing — she got started recording by using the microphone built into her computer. She couldn't sing if there was anybody around. Towards the end of recording Almanac, and then on The Swamps EP, I set her up in a room, and Rob and I cleared out for two days. I had her set up her computer; I ran a mic through a preamp and back into her computer so she could do it herself in [Apple] GarageBand. So she recorded all of her vocals with a [Neumann] U 47, through a really good preamp, and her doing it herself. Bands sleep here sometimes. During Almanac they were living here, making fairly intricate meals on a little grill, and to shower they'd come to my house. The bass player, Willy [Muse], is a tailor and he was tailoring clothes for them to do some video shoot. So we're doing overdubs, we've got Kyle [Clairmont Jacques] on drums, Molly's in there working on this drawing [points to a drawing on the wall], Willy's out there hand-tailoring a coat. They moved in and were really involved, creative people the whole time.

Time Travel

Instead of putting mics in the rafters, one way to get a big room sound is to put a cardioid mic next to, but facing away from, the kick drum, possibly facing down, with baffles behind the mic so reflections travel as far as possible to the mic.

They did that concept album, The Monitor [a Civil War themed record].

Yeah, that's a concept record. This is going to be a straight up rock opera. There are some things about the follow up to The Monitor [Local Business] that won't be appreciated until after this next record. It's incredibly exciting. Patrick [Stickles] is so smart. A completely raw, but sublime, brutally honest, and visceral visionary fucking genius, if you ask me. He should be a filmmaker. I mean, he is a filmmaker. It's gonna be awesome. I tend to attract difficult characters!

Well, it sounds like you like music that is rough around the edges, so...

The people themselves, maybe more than the music — I have learned more about psychology and mental illness than I ever thought I wanted. Mental health is an incredibly misunderstood topic, and especially amongst any of the arts that we celebrate, it may be the very thing behind someone's genius that may be making it hard for them to actually function to what our society says is "normal." Being submerged in this, for extended periods of time, takes its toll, especially when you are not aware, because it "comes with the job." I think I attract complex characters. The Seer led into the last Titus record, and right into a string of other records. There were eight records in a row where everybody, at the heart of them, was super intense, and many having real mental health challenges. I started having panic attacks! It's one thing if you do five records a year; but the last two years I've averaged like 20 to 25 records, per year. When you're spending all of your time surrounded by this, it becomes another universe and, as a producer, it becomes important to be ready for it on your end. As I've gotten older, I'm very thankful for what I have — I wanna make the most artistically awesome, visceral records. Where it's like, "Here are the minutes of my life that are going by, right now. We're not getting them back. We're gonna be dead, and this record is what I want to do with them."

www. kevinmcmahon. com

Zac Meyer works at Ishlab in Brooklyn, NY, and plays in The Dust Engineers and Tiny Victories. zac. r. meyer@gmail. com