He’s Mac, with a vengeance

Disillusioned with the response to his previous release, Paul Mac has found a new music passion.

Paul Mac at his home studio with little mate George Michael . Picture: Hollie Adams

If you’re a regular patron of the Sydney train system, you’re accustomed to the sight of travellers wearing noise-cancelling wireless headphones while staring out the window, lost in thought.

If you happened to observe Paul Mac in that environment, though, what might look like an average commuter absorbed in a personal soundtrack would instead be a distinctive artist with his ears and mind alive to the endless stream of new musical discoveries.

Since he emerged with electronic duo Itch-E and Scratch-E in the early 1990s, Mac has played a starring role in the rise of Australian dance music.

He has seen the form evolve from underground rave parties to festival main stages. His 2001 solo release, 3000 Feet High, and its hit single, Just the Thing, won ARIA and APRA awards, and he has collaborated with the likes of Kylie Minogue, Daniel Johns and Sia.

Yet, at 53, the man born Paul McDermott has had a fairly quiet career during the past few years compared with the bluster of his 20s and 30s, at least in terms of his artistic output. “My heart broke a little bit when (2015 album) Holiday From Me came out,” he tells The Australian. “In different reviews, there was just no excitement for it, which in my mind came as a real shock.

“I felt like I did heaps and heaps of work on it. I spent about seven years writing it, then it came out and went nowhere, and did nothing. I was like, ‘Oh, OK; I don’t know if I really want to do dance-pop any more.’

“It felt like a natural full stop to that trilogy of solo albums with melancholic breakup songs, done to dance rhythms. I thought: ‘That’s enough of that.’ ”

Lesser artists would toy with hanging up the headphones, powering down the home studio and flicking off the lights for good. Not Mac, who found new muses in an old locale: the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he was classically trained in the 1980s.

There he returned to study a doctorate of musical arts in composition while also working as a casual lecturer to students enrolled in the bachelor of contemporary music program — or, as he describes it with a smile, “helping kids with pop music”.

By immersing himself in the art form’s past and present, he has produced an artistic reinvention named Mesmerism, a solo work of experimental electronic music whose inspiration lies in his return to university.

“When I started teaching, I was quite confronted by some of the kids, as they’re so much younger and quicker than me,” he says. “It took me about a year to realise, but what they don’t have is 25 years of creative decision-making. Now, I f..king love it. I really enjoy being able to share what I know, but it’s a two-way street. Their enthusiasm, their level of non-jadedness, what they’re listening to — I find it all really inspiring.”

As well, he is studying the evolution of the dance music aesthetic, and has found a Mac-shaped gap in the existing literature.

“A lot of the other academics that approach electronic music come from the culture that surrounds it or from a historical angle, but not from creating,” he says. “Whereas I can do this forensic going back, listening to tracks, and thinking about how they were created, with my knowledge of what Itch-E and Scratch-E was doing at the time. I can express the creation process a bit better, and trace that — and with all of that insider knowledge, I’m also trying to extend my music this way.”

Mesmerism emerged from his doctorate studies and it forms one part of his creative portfolio. The unusual noun appeared on his screen as a word-of-the-day creative writing prompt, which was different to how Mac had approached songwriting in the past.

“Everything else up to this point had been to sit down at a piano or keyboard and think, ‘I feel like this’ or ‘I’m going to write about this thing’,” he says. “I wanted to challenge all of that. Every song on this album had an external starting point: I’d throw the fishing line out as far as I could get it, then see how I could make sense of it.”

In 2017, invited to perform at the Vivid festival alongside multimedia artists Damian Barbeler and John Taylor, Mac took the chance to debut several of these experimental tracks. The positive response he received from a cap­acity crowd at that one-off City Recital Hall show got him excited enough to consider releasing the work soon after, but his record label and management weren’t quite so keen.

Those completed songs were set aside for a while, until Mac’s friend Kim Moyes — one-half of Sydney electronic duo the Presets — visited his home studio one day, heard the track Flamenco and loved it, and asked to release it on his independent label, Here To Hell. Given that Moyes and label co-founder Mike Callander claim to be inspired by “the spirit of commercial suicide”, it seems a gleefully apt home for Mesmerism.

With the eight-track album’s only vocals being provided by former prime minister Paul Keating in a six-minute composition named Redfern Speech (In Memory of Vision), the artist is unperturbed by whether or not fans of his earlier dance-pop work come along for the ride. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier making music than at the moment,” Mac says. “I feel like I’m making really good and eccentric music, but it has the wealth of whatever knowledge I’ve built up over all of these years being expressed quite freely — disciplined, but really freely.”

As he describes himself, Mac is just another avid listener in the age of streaming services and noise-cancelling headphones, where music discovery is limitless. It just so happens, then, that between those train rides, he’s also creating a soundtrack for listeners just like him.

Mesmerism is released tomorrow via Here To Hell. Paul Mac will guest program Rage on ABC television this weekend.