Museum of Love Announce NYC Live Debut

Museum of Love have announce their first live show in New York at this month’s special DFA summer soiree, taking place at The Wick on August 23rd alongside DJ sets from Sinkane, Holy Ghost!, Nancy Whang and a special guest. The musical project of Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany, Museum of Love will be releasing their debut eponymous record for DFA on new release date October 14th, and newest single “In Infancy”.

Founding member and drummer for LCD Soundsystem, Pat Mahoney was brought up on an intriguing diet of folk music and reggae – not the typical musical fare in Ithaca, New York, but he developed an insatiable appetite for music and rhythm from early on. Experimenting with saxophone in middle school, vocals for a punk band in high school and finally settling on drums, Mahoney ended up with an art school education and a spot in the original lineup of Les Savy Fav in the late ’90s where he found a good friend in their sound engineer, the indie/punk home-studio recording guru James Murphy. James and Pat forged a close friendship that together with Nancy Whang, Tyler Pope, Phil Mossman, and later, David Scott Stone & Gavin Russom resulted in the formation of LCD Soundsystem. The band retired in a big fashion at Madison Square Garden in April 2011, and Pat has gone on to play and record with Planningtorock, Shit Robot, Hot Chip and Chromeo, in addition to drumming in this year’s ATOMIC BOMB! The Music of William Onyeabor alongside Damon Albarn, David Byrne, Sinkane, The Lijadu Sisters, Money Mark and more. Museum of Love is Pat’s first personal musical endeavor since LCD Soundsystem.

Dennis McNany first came to experiment with sonics in a shed in the back of his house in suburban New Jersey at the ancient age of 17. Before discovering the four-track that would be the experimental quicksand of future days, he fronted as a screamer for his high school band and was enthralled by Gangstarr and Pete Rock while his friends played Nirvana. In 1999, he moved to New York where he met Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy, soon becoming the first intern/assistant engineer at the Plantain complex that would go on to birth DFA Records. He worked on records for The Rapture and Turing Machine and his own projects as Neutral Mute and SKISM, while also starting his own label and production house Run Roc Records. In 2008, McNany joined The Juan Maclean and toured in support of their Human After All LP, releasing various 12”s as Jee Day over the following years on DFA and Tim Sweeney’s Beats In Space label.

Longtime friends in New York, McNany and Mahoney found a similar sensibility and a shared vocabulary for interpreting surroundings, something that began with their remix of Battles’ “My Machines feat. Gary Numan” and extended into their creation of a record together. They felt they needed to hear music that wasn’t being made already by their peers, or as McNany puts it, “we’ve been friends for a long time and we dug what each other did. So naturally we sat around and talked about books and the history of the world and then we made some jams.”

Naming their duo in ode to Daniel Johnston’s song of the same named, Mahoney divulges, “I had always loved the song, and had been thinking of what such an edifice would contain when we were trying to name the project.” McNany continues, “Pat’s a sculptor, I’m a painter, we make music . . . museums are sacred spaces and love is an elusive thing.” With collective influences as diverse as Roxy Music, John Cale, Harry Nillsson, Love, Arthur Russell, Paul McCartney, Robert Wyatt, Sly & The Family Stone, Public Enemy, Fleetwood Mac and the Ying Yang Twins, Museum of Love looks to the classics while also maintaining a timeless and current sound.

McNany did most of the songwriting as well as production and instrumentation, while Mahoney is on vocals and of course, drums, but Museum of Love was an entirely collaborative process as the two edited and arranged tracks in the studio. Mahoney says the process of collaboration was energizing, while McNany simply explains, “making the record was pure pleasure. Waiting for it to come out has been the hardest thing.”

Museum of Love comes out October 14th, 2014 on DFA Records.

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