Jason McMahon is a mainstay of the music scene in Brooklyn and beyond. Not only has he spent the last decade as a member of and/or touring with the likes of Skeletons, Chairlift, Fashe Mello, Glasser and Janka Nabay and The Bubu Gang, but he is also a founding member of The Silent Barn in Queens, as well as the collective Shinkoyo Records—a label described as “the ectoplasm connecting a group of composers, visual artists, improvisers, instrument builders, thinkers, scholars and conceptual artists exploring a new synthesis of sound and vision.”
Since 2017, McMahon has been working on his debut solo album, Odd West. Releasing on Shinkoyo at the end of the month, the record is what McMahon describes as “his first thorough investigation into his own creative voice,” and sees him draw upon his career as an experimental musician to craft beguiling and dream-like folk. There’s a sense of warmth and accessibility too, the result of McMahon’s “searching for something to play for his parents and several wedding ceremonies,” though this is captured without compromising any of the ambition or complexity of his previous work.
Today, Jason McMahon is unveiling the album’s third single, ‘Sunshine For Locksmith’, along with an animated video directed and animated by McMahon and Pixel Mozart (Andrew Strasser). The perfect introduction to the Odd West aesthetic, the track lifts and drops like an early summer breeze, bright guitar pealing behind wordless cooing vocals and swelling strings that knit into an affirmingly dramatic crescendo.
Despite the various supporting instruments, the song could be read as an ode to the acoustic guitar, the centre around which the rest of the track orbits. Indeed, the instrument is the focus of the video too. “My father fell in love with the Girl from Ipanema and moved to Brazil,” explains animator Strasser, “so I’ve had my life to think about beautiful fingerstyle guitar music. Now[…] I have a unique opportunity with this video to illustrate the power and beauty of just a solo guitar.”
However, to view the song as a simple tribute is to underestimate its ambition, and each listen helps unpick further layers of interpretation. Indeed, that there are levels of meaning below the surface is a theme in itself, as the phrase ‘Sunshine For Locksmith’ attests. For the title takes its inspiration from an unlikely source—digital security, namely the fact that a large number of North Americans use the term “sunshine” as a password. “Unlike other common passwords such as ‘123456789’ and ‘pa$$word’, there is no obvious explanation as to the widespread use of such a seemingly random word,” McMahon describes. “There is something dark and beautiful about everyone poorly hiding their own identical sunshine.”
Odd West is out on the 31st January via Shinkoyo Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.
Photo by Kristina Loggia