Pelican Movement

Pelican Movement is a “fictitious supergroup” ... it is the musical performance project of Kevin McMahon, a New Paltz-based producer and owner of Marcata Recording who's work includes records by Swans, Titus Andronicus, Walkmen, Pile, Widowspeak, and Real Estate.

Fistful of Ivy was written, and musically performed as a single 37 minute piece intended to be listened to in serial form.

If you look at the great works of collage art created after the advent of Modernism, you see patterns emerge; an urgency, a barely controlled chaos, evocation through the grouping and clustering of often unrelated iconographies, waking fever dreams. The concept of the collage, as Guggenheim curator Diane Waldman notes, "[emphasizes] concept and process over end product... [bringing] the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary."

This observation on the function of collage works nearly perfectly when applied to another waking fever dream, the hulking Fistful of Ivy, the newest record by Pelican Movement. Like a collage, Ivy is both a unified piece—the record is a single track spanning nearly 40 minutes—and a storm of individual musicians and instruments, unmoored and wandering in the dark. The process of listening to Fistful of Ivy is fitful; wiry, frenetic guitars, theatrical brass, and monstrous bursts of percussion punctuate the record, which feels like it could come apart at any moment.

Holding the entire thing together is the man in the middle of the project, songwriter and producer Kevin S. McMahon. McMahon, who started Pelican Movement decades ago, understands it to be as much a social endeavor as it is a musical one. Originally a “fictitious solo project” centered around a record written for his newborn daughter, Pelican Movement slowly morphed into an artistic community, one born out of McMahon's desire for the relationships between musicians to focus on real connection, and for the music to tell the story of those connections.

Since inception, Pelican Movement has always been a revolving cast of characters. Authors, painters, and musicians are easily drawn into the orbit of McMahon, who is a storied record producer and owner of Marcata Recording, a studio built inside a ramshackle barn in New York’s Hudson Valley. The current iteration of the band came together during the recording sessions for Pile’s Green & Gray, produced at Marcata in 2018. After being offered a support slot on the tour to promote the Pile album, McMahon pulled together a diverse group: Pile’s Kris Kuss & Liquor Store’s Sarim al Rawi; Elk City guitarist Chris Robertson; veteran coronet player and historian Ray Sapirstein; viola player Anni Rossi; Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin of underground mainstay Big Blood; and artist Gideon Bok, a childhood friend who played baritone guitar on the recording, and for many years created oil paintings during many recording sessions that took place when McMahon set up in the painter’s studio in Rockland, Maine, dragging bands from NYC to the small mid coast setting to get away from the distractions of the city. Despite the length and complexity of the composition (particularly with fluid and ever changing time signatures) none of the players had much, if any preparation time, only working one-on-one with McMahon for a few rehearsals before recording; the band never fully met until the first night of their tour supporting Pile.

The decision to present the album in its monolithic single track format was a very intentional move on McMahon’s part; according to him, this was conceptually important as it represented “a lack of cooperation with, and a kind of statement against, the mute acceptance of shrinking attention spans as an unavoidable byproduct of our modern life.”

Musically, Fistful of Ivy was originally conceptualized as a memorial to McMahon's mother and a chronicle of her experiences living with Alzheimer's. Anyone who has seen this disease will recognize the dynamic ebb and flow the record has; violent and aggressive moments, musical whirlwinds followed by long spans of tragic beauty, minor chords played flamenco style only to be punctured by wails of dramatic trumpet and Kuss' exclamatory drumming. Originally intended as an instrumental piece, the twin vocals of Izzy Hagerup (a college friend of McMahon’s daughter) and Michael DiSanto were added in at the 11th hour, augmenting the piece dramatically. Neither singer knew that the other existed, or would be singing on the piece, and through sheer serendipity laid down their parts in distinct and complementary places, as if it had been orchestrated that way. It is worth noting that the basic tracks for the piece were recorded as full length, 40 minute takes in just two live ensemble recording sessions.
Nothing about this record should make sense together, and yet it does. The listening experience is a mental and emotional marathon, and, as Waldman says of collage, emphasizes the process—a community of artists, untethered from each other but still somehow aligning, ships slamming into each other in the night. The music, which wears the psychedelic influences of early Mahavishnu Orchestra and Pink Floyd on its sleeve, is almost secondary to the emotional thruline of the piece, which finds McMahon relinquishing control; after having conversations with the players about what the piece meant to him personally, he let go, relying on the empathy of his collaborators and the strength of their collective vision.

Diane Waldman also says that collage "[gives] expression to the unorthodox." Fistful of Ivy is nothing if not expressive, and Pelican Movement is nothing if not unorthodox.