The road to recovery from a major health condition can happen in stages. Confronting a disease when you’re in its grips, determined to keep moving forward, is one thing; putting yourself out in the world once the worst of it is over is another. Having gone through hell, you realize things about yourself — things you can’t forget.
That’s one way into WANDS, the new instrumental album by IMAKEMADBEATS, aka James Dukes, which arguably marks a new aesthetic high point in the producer’s career. That much will be evident on Saturday, November 16th, at the Pink Palace’s Sharpe Planetarium, when MAD (as he is known) will premiere the album live, in an extravaganza of light and projections that will likely be seen as a defining moment in Memphis’ Afrofuturist scene.
It should come as no surprise that the producer who named his dream studio Outerspace has been fascinated with the cosmos, or characters like the Mars-dwelling Watchmen character Doctor Manhattan, all his life. “The only field trip I cared about as a kid was to the planetarium. I didn’t care about nothing else!” he says, as we chat amid the glowing buttons and dials of Outerspace.
“I’ve always been attached to space and the unknown,” he explains. “In WANDS, the general idea is that I have to leave here to find out where home is. The very first song is about me leaving here. The second song is the soundtrack to me making my way through the Earth’s atmosphere. The third is about flying through stars. The fourth is about me running into an alien that is telling me where to go to find home. The fifth song is about me descending onto that planet where there are clouds of bubbles that sing to me. And so that song is called ‘Choir of Bubbles.’”
If such a tale captures the album’s epic sweep, that last title hints at the album’s sonic palette. While there are indeed mad beats throughout, sporting MAD’s trademark glitches and tweaks, there are also orchestral passages both ethereal and bombastic, at times sounding eerily like the ’70s synth-meister Tomita. It’s an interstellar trip in audio form, in which you’re never sure if you’re hearing a sample or an intricate new composition by MAD himself. The track “I’m Losing My Mind I’m OK” even features lyrics, hauntingly sung by Tiffany Harmon.
Another track, “James Michael,” features the producer — typically seen behind a console of sample triggers — playing a solo keyboard passage. And that, it turns out, is a clue to how the entire album came to be, starting with MAD’s decision to take videoconference music lessons (full disclosure, from me) during Covid’s early months of social distancing. As with the great Sun Ra himself, MAD’s latest voyage to outer space began through that trans-dimensional portal known as a “piano.”
“I wanted to be a jazz pianist since I was a teenager,” he says. “I just didn’t have any kind of keyboard. What I did have was access to old records and a sampler. So, you know, I had a professional career in music before I had an instrument. Then I bought this keyboard, the Korg SV-1, with the weighted keys on it, and it feels like a real piano. And I felt drawn to that, like, ‘Yo. This is my time to actually learn this.’”
But eventually there was an even more compelling reason to play. During his first forays into playing keyboards, “I was just messing around and having fun,” MAD says, “until I got sick.” Just as Covid emerged, the producer contracted a rare autoimmune condition which initially threatened his motor skills. “You know,” he reflects, “I spent my whole life making things with my hands, and suddenly I couldn’t use my hands, with any real accuracy, for a couple of months. That scared the shit out of me!” He points to our surroundings to underscore his point. “I mean, I’m literally surrounded by buttons and knobs.”
Nonetheless, he kept at it, often with Kid Maestro twiddling the dials under MAD’s direction, and eventually the material that became MAD Songs, Volume 1 and Volume 1.5 came together. Those albums stood as proof positive that he could soldier on artistically through the hardship of his illness. Yet after that came a recovery of sorts, and it was in that period that the seeds of WANDS were planted.
“A few months later, my hands came back and I started hitting you up.” MAD was a student of singular focus and determination. “One of the top things I remember in those lessons was how you would slide from one note to the next, and it would just add these, like, half step emotions. Which I am addicted to: half step movements in any chord progression I ever write.”
But beyond the raw knowledge of harmonies and melodies, or the basic physical therapy of strengthening his hands, playing the piano became a skeleton key, thanks to the infinite library of sounds available to any producer now, into the world of composing and arranging. (If this was a film, we would insert the heroic montage here.) Taking long sabbaticals of studying only piano, MAD began experimenting with the complex jazz harmonies that had always fascinated him. At that point, pairing music’s infinite plane of harmonics with his love of space was an easy leap to make. That in turn led him to an insight into his own condition.
“There’s no one else in my family with any sort of autoimmune disorder. So for me to have this is an extreme anomaly. And so it made me wonder, you know, maybe I’m an alien?” Which brings us back to the story of WANDS, soon to be premiered musically in the planetarium (on his birthday, no less), but later to be revealed narratively, a bit further down the road. Look for a second edition of the album early next year that includes voiceovers recounting the tale in all its world-building glory. In the meantime, just know that an alien walks among us, and he is MAD. “I literally was telling my mom a couple weeks ago,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mom, if you didn’t actually remember birthing me, I would swear I’m not from here. You are the sole evidence that I am from Planet Earth.”