Love and Fury, the Soft Radicalism of Mamalarky
Written by Jamie Coster
Photographed by Sara Cath
Sitting outside, drinking coffee on a ‘six-more-weeks-of-winter’ afternoon with the band Mamalarky, I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia. It’s a Proustian madeleine moment where I’m brought back to a memory’s feeling of being eleven or twelve, on some Sunday outing with a friend and their family, totally amazed by the ease in which they all move through social interactions, dumbfounded by the way each member seems to bring out the best in one another. Like my friend’s happy family, the joy of being in Mamalarky is infectious; they cultivate such an authentic sense of “being at home” amongst each other, it’s easy to fall right into place within the space and feel like one of the tribe.
“We’re a little band family, we’re always there for each other through thick and thin. Mamalarky has been through so many experiences together over the years. Michael, Dylan, and I all went to high school together, so that shared history is definitely comforting. When Noor joined the band with such an open, positive heart, it felt like a perfect fit.”
The Los Angeles-via-Austin group, comprised of Livvy Bennett (guitars, vocals, songwriter, Capricorn), Dylan Hill (drums, in-house chef, Cancer), Michael Hunter (keys, Strong Silent Type, Virgo), and Noor Khan (bass, harmonist, Taurus [1]), has had a busy year. They’ve just recently put the finishing touches on their upcoming debut album, got signed to Brooklyn-based legacy label Fire Talk, and are a day away from a headlining show at the Bootleg Theater. But right now, they’re coming from an important band meeting about ghosts, prompted by a group viewing of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures. The harmonious sense of balance within the group is apparent in even these small interactions, with Noor’s supernatural inclinations coexisting peacefully alongside Livvy’s soft skepticism.
“We’re trying to stay at a haunted hotel on our next tour, if you have any recommendations.”
“You don’t even believe in ghosts! You were laughing at me!”
“I want a ghost to haunt my ass. I’ve been waiting for a haunting. I invited ghosts, hard, to haunt me right before we got here.”
“Just like Zach Bagan.”
[1] I don’t really know the significance of any of their signs or how they relate to one another’s, but according to their longtime friend Courtney Perkins (creator of renowned astrological meme account @notallgeminis), the band members’ innate compatibility is written directly into their respective charts.
The music they create together is difficult to place within the confines of generic genre tags, and frankly, to attempt would seem like a disservice both to the idiosyncratic inventiveness of their songs and to the band’s unwillingness to be “pigeon-holed” by any particular set of expectations. Dylan puts it succinctly, that “assigning a name or label to something amorphous like that just feels bad and weird.”
The band’s unique brand of psychedelia comes more from the heady restlessness of the arrangements, progressions, and rhythms than it does from any of the expected sonic textures typically signified in ‘psych-rock,’ the closest being Michael’s keyboard work recalling the far-out, free associating experimentation of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis [2].
“Michael’s a keyboard wizard, he’s not tooting his own horn nearly enough,” Noor tells me.
“I don’t play the horn, I play the keys,” he retorts with a smile.
Their influences are, expectedly, all over the map, from Noor and Dylan’s affinity with ABBA’s Spanish-language greatest hits compilation ABBA Oro: Grandes Éxitos, to Michael’s recent dive into the celestial zither music of Ruth Welcome. “A lover of Santo & Johnny,” Livvy describes her listening habits as “very millennial,” in reference to the infinite breadth of musical output our generation has been given instantaneous access to.
“I listen to a lot of jazz, classical, and instrumental music without even knowing who it is.”
Instead of playing to any particular genre, their music plays like a love letter to chaos; a giving in to the unknowable and disorderly, to be met and rewarded with the beautiful surprises that await a willing subservience to Life’s Great Forces.
[2] It feels cheeky to make comparisons this loaded and grandiose, but there is no hyperbole here; he’s like, really good.
“We’re all for taking a chance without necessarily knowing the outcome. I think the turmoil in finding your way, not really knowing where you’re going is something that motivates us to keep creating, and brings us closer together,“ Livvy explains.
This uninhibited outlook guided the band during the year and a half long process of writing and recording their soon-to-be-released debut album.
“Since this is our first album, it was a totally new experience for us. We experimented with a lot of different sounds, recording and writing techniques, and I think that's reflected in how fluid and explorative the album ended up being.”
While previous Mamalarky releases like “Mama’s Bear” or “Hero” echo the effortless groove and deceptive ease of seventies’ singer-songwriter ethos á la Carole King or Karen Dalton, the band’s latest single “Fury,” their debut release for Fire Talk, demonstrates a frenetic ID-driven take on eclectic guitar music, a marriage between the kaleidoscopic playfulness of the Elephant 6 collective with the solipsistic abandon of Deerhoof.
“It feels like our most unhinged song yet,” Livvy writes in a press release for the track. “It’s nice to have a song tumble out into the world like you’re throwing dice, just seeing what you’ll get. That’s the general life strategy for Mamalarky lately!”
“We like to find sounds that will make our ears hurt,” as Noor puts it.
Listening to “Fury” is like hearing the imagined inner soundtrack of a progressively intensifying magic mushroom trip; the fuzzed out cyclical chord progression mirrors the dizzying anxiety of spiraling through a tumultuous thought loop, as synthesizers, oscillating wildly, incarnate cognitive dissonance with every melodic rise and fall, while Livvy’s surreally personal lyrics float over the instruments like a half-remembered dream, sentiments expressed like weaponized sincerity, a doe-eyed melody that sees right through you. The tracks blend and bleed and burst in aural eruptions, leaving you teetering on the edge of an ever weakening grasp of reality, moments away from collapsing in on yourself, only to turn and find your best friends, holding onto you, tethered together, experientially linked, in a web of mutual support and comfortability. Livvy asks if anyone will share their coffee with her and three cupped hands reach out to her. Everyone awes.
“I love you guys.”
The following night, the band is playing to a packed room at the Bootleg, as Noor’s baby nephew, front and center, dances along with reckless abandon to the controlled demolition that is a Mamalarky live set. As the band lean heavily into an unreleased album cut, “You Make Me Smile,” I think back to Livvy’s spectral invitation and I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s writings on ‘hauntology’ and its looming presence in select 21st century music. Mamalarky songs have a way of invoking the past without being ‘retrospective’ or aimlessly ‘nostalgic’ in their intent. The past their songs invoke is one that looked optimistically toward a future much different than the one we share in today. Mamalarky could be the rebelliously Carrollian [3] answer to the hyper-connected, neo-Victorian shit-show that is our current shared reality. It could be said that Mamalarky is already haunted, by a future that we were once on the path towards, a future we deserved, a future that we have unfortunately, collectively strayed away from.
“The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present … what hauntological music mourns is the disappearance of this effective virtuality.” [4]
“The world may feel like chaos … but it also has been … our world has been living with unsustainable practices of body/mind/planet/soul, for a long time … you do not deserve to live in a place with leaders who deny you healthcare, who destroy your planet, who incarcerate your communities, who brutalize those they should protect … but you do … so let yourself feel the grief that is in your body. Rage, weep, cry out. Make your pain visible and impossible to ignore … Fury and Love can coexist.” [5]
“The Hilton and Bill Clinton / They make up lies and apologize” [6]
[3] ‘Mamalarky’ is only a phonetic tip-toe from ‘Jabberwocky’
[4] Fisher, M. (2012). What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly, 66(1), 16–24.doi: 10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16
[5] @gendersauce. Cuspy Wholesome Meme. Instagram, March 11, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/B9m-nCYl6YX/.
[6] Bennett, L. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://mamalarky.bandcamp.com/track/fury
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