“The studio is just a moment in time,” Mamaleek tells me, over a faceless Zoom call. The band doesn’t customarily give interviews, but two members agree to meet with me. They operate under code names; the only thing I know about either of them is a single initial they provide to use in conversation: “Gee” and “J” – nothing else.
Mamaleek began as a project between two anonymous brothers living in San Francisco. They released their first record in 2008 and were signed to the San Francisco label The Flenser shortly after. They refrain from answering any questions about their identities, giving evasive, melodramatic responses—to me, all they say is that they “can’t get into it.” In a past interview, they were quoted as saying: “We remain anonymous like God does.” Their explanations toe the line between farcical and deadpan-serious, as if to say to their interviewers, “Did you really think we would let it up that easy?”
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Mamaleek exist in this strange, liminal space between utter enigma and understandably human. Their music is nearly as unclassifiable as their personae, their particular breed of metal imbued with elements of jazz, noise, and psychedelia. But they write and play as a response to loss, to legacy, and to the glory days of the Oakland A’s—Vida Blue named for the A’s legendary 1969–1977 left-handed pitcher, who passed away earlier this year. They don’t usually release official lyrics for their work, but when I ask them about how themes emerge, they are eager to explain how the music itself evokes the grief they put into it, how the triumphant ending sequence of “Vida Blue” creates a resolution that transcends the musical alone. “It’s really an attempt, however successful, to reach the universal from the particular,” Gee tells me.
Mystery is the centerpiece of their project, but talking to them feels like catching up with a friend—they laugh, crack jokes, ask me questions in the breaks about my job. Since their inception as a duo 2008, the group had grown by 2023 into a 5-piece band, a well-oiled machine of experimental heaviness, until in March of last year, whentheir bandmate Eric Alan Livingston tragically and unexpectedly passed away. Vida Blue is their first full-length album without him. The record became a way for the remaining members to parse through their loss, to continue the audio archive of his legacy, and to capture a moment in time where they were fully and unabashedly grieving.–
“With the death of Eric…” Gee says, “he was a big part of the music. He’s a part of the music because he’s a part of us. And so his death becomes part of the listener… They can experience his life and death through a different source, a different medium.”
Death becomes an absence on the record, but also a presence. “I think grief in general is cumulative,” they say. “ Everything from the death of a person’s childhood pet to their family members, to their friends, to their loved ones—they add up and they play into their own sense of mortality. Their deaths really stick to you, and you can’t shake them off, ever.” For Mamaleek, grieving isn’t necessarily about coming to terms with what is missing, but about collecting so much love that it becomes unbearable. That it must undergo some sort of destruction. And destruction becomes a sort of sonic centerpiece for Vida Blue. Mamaleek orchestrate failure in order to exist in the face of loss.
“There’s at least three instances on this record where things begin with the establishment of a very strong musical theme,” G tells me. “And then things very quickly fall apart. And so we experience this loss. And then we spend time picking up the pieces and rebuilding in ways that I think are mostly unanticipated. We usually either finish triumphantly or failingly”
The moments where they finish failingly emerge as some of the most powerful—take their song “Hatful of Rain,” which begins with a relatively conventional bass groove, albeit atop a strange and whimsical drone, like something that would come from the throat of an evil woodland spirit. The vocals begin in something of a chant; a low, gothic groan slips eventually into a more recognizably “metal” growl. Even as their vocal delivery dips into surreal distortion, the musical theme remains constant, reassuring. There’s a canary in the coal mine, though: a whimpering wind part peeking through their dense soundscape. It sounds a bit like a flute, though I wouldn’t put it past the group to have used something stranger. It’s beautiful, but it unsettles. And so when the song breaks down, when the electric guitars turn to a whirr and the layered vocals turn to a cacophony of growls, it’s just a deepening of the cracks that were already there.
Mamaleek aren’t just pessimists, though. They find and seek the joy and the hope that only music has been able to provide. “I think that’s part of the joy of making music for so long,” J tells me. “Our own personal histories are tied into it.” Their personal histories as Oakland A’s fans merge with their admiration Vida Blue’s legacy, and out comes a record that sounds like nothing else. Out comes a record that fails and rebuilds and steps back up to the plate after a strikeout to hit a home run.
At this point in their career, Mamaleek are still tying their personal histories into it, but they are working to expand the network of people with which these histories can move, tangle, and get bound up They talk about The Flenser with a lot of love, thankful for the “island of misfit toys” that Jonathan Tuite was able to cultivate at the label, but do feel remiss that their process has been largely isolated from personal connections with their labelmates—that they have been, as Gee says, “on an island for a while by ourselves.”
“We have a very strong reflex to say ‘no.’ We’re generally allergic to fraternity,” Gee tells me. “But there’s something in that that’s just totally reprehensible to me. It’s just much too safe. And if this band is about anything at all, it’s definitely not about playing it safe.”
In the fall, they plan to take Vida Blue out on the road, supporting Flenser groups Have A Nice Life and Chat Pile across the states. Though they haven’t done a ton of live performance over their decade-and-a-half career, they understand that playing shows allows them a unique opportunity to expand upon their songs, to “stretch them out and take them for a walk.”
I ask them if they’re excited about the shows. “Terrified,” Gee responds immediately. J follows up, “Excited? Not quite yet.”
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