In late October, the elusive electronic musician Mickman played one of his biggest gigs to date opening for Jade Cicada at the PlayStation Theater in Times Square in New York City for a sold-out crowd of 2,200 people. Since he began performing in mid-2016, Mickman has gone from bedroom producer and one of bass music’s best kept secrets to a real rising star because of a crazed, obsessive, and fiercely independent approach to music found in few, if any, other people.
For a long time, Mickman was an enigma. Four or five years ago fans marveled at his heavy-hitting SoundCloud discography, but he had never performed live. His prolific productions were sort of a secret among the bass music literati. Even as he’s become more popular, he still barely promotes his music. But beneath this blurry public image is a deeply intelligent, fiercely independent and fiendishly energetic man - Cameron McMahon Ingraham. At the PlayStation Theater, I sat down with Cam - a friend since his first New York show in 2017 - to peel back the layers of his career and craft.
Mickman performing at Summer Camp Music Festival in Illinois in 2017 (Credit: Emerald Tide Photography)
We’re sitting in a green room after soundcheck and before doors open for the night. There are beers in a mini-fridge. “I want to see if I can have one of these,” Cam says. He goes to ask the man in charge if he, one of the main draws that evening, can have some beers. He comes back and settles onto the couch with a Modelo, characteristically dressed down in a black Mickman hoodie, jeans, and skateboard sneakers. Curly brown hair hangs down well past his shoulders.
Along with other recent milestones including a slot at Infrasound Music Festival and a headlining performance at the Black Box in Denver, this PlayStation performance is the product of years of single-minded hard work. Since one “defining moment” around New Years Eve in 2012 when Cam knew he needed to make music, he’s climbed towards success without a booking agent, manager or any formal musical background.
“Looking back to that time,” he reflects, “basically not having a job, fresh out of high school, I’ve never been more inspired and I’m still riding that wave of inspiration. I’ve normalized it now. But when the fire gets sparked again, like right now anticipating this performance…I’ve literally had butterflies all day and my energy levels have just been off the charts.”
Anyone who’s spent 30 minutes around Cam is familiar with his frenetic energy. It’s one of his most memorable character traits and also a defining factor behind his success. The depth of his obsession with production is matched by the depth of his energy reserves. He points a thumb across the green room at Eric Mallon who’s on another couch quietly sipping a Topo Chico mineral water and looking at his phone. Eric is a close friend, consigliere, and frequent sound engineer for Cam. “This morning, I woke him up with a water bottle and a trash can just slamming them together. ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’”
For some, Jade Cicada and Mickman go together like peanut butter and jelly, though many attendees that night were either unfamiliar with Mickman, or they knew him but were just now catching their first performance. No one left disappointed. The energy in the air at PlayStation was already feverish by the time Cam took the stage, but he sent it into orbit, provoking gasps and hollers from the crowd with quick-footed breakbeats, unexpected drum and bass, and gigantic glitch hop bangers.
Cameron grew up in Rockport, Maine, a town of 3,300 people. He describes it as an “an everyone-knew-everyone situation,” and perhaps it was the type of rural, far north place that breeds independent thinking. Andy Widdecomb aka DeeZ grew up one town over. “We were listening to Prodigy together, and he and a couple other friends of mine got sucked into this stuff,” Andy says. “We would hang after school and talk music. He ended up moving away to Illinois before I graduated. After a year or so, I found out that he’d also been making music - secretly, kind of low key. His sister told me, ‘he never leaves his room, he’s trying to be a dubstep producer.’”
That was almost eight years ago. “As the new year hit going into 2012, I was pedal to the metal balls to the wall,” Cam says. “Every day, all the free time I had was going directly into making music. After the third or fourth year, I started becoming more comfortable with my sound and my knowledge about music.”
I first came into contact with Mickman’s music through a vocal sample from Terence McKenna about an “ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness” in a mix by Brian “Levitation” Jones. Unaware of the song or sample source, I asked Brian about it. “That's actually part of one of my favorite tracks of all time, “Dissolution” by Mickman,” he wrote me. “This guy is a production tank and every song on his SoundCloud is just fire. He actually doesn't even perform, just an awesome dude who sits in his room cranking out tunes.” That was the Summer of 2015. Just under one year later, Cameron would perform for the first time at a show he and Eric threw in Peoria, IL. It would be the first of many shows that Cam put together himself.
“I think there’s a curve for people once they really start saying, ‘okay I think I’m onto something.’ You’re becoming a little more comfortable rather than being shy and bashful showing someone your music. That’s when I gave up the notion of, ‘well, I don’t have a musical background.’ That means nothing.”
Cam’s approach to sound design is stripped-down. “Less is more,” he says. Andy, who is still the only producer to officially collaborate with Mickman, touches on this. “Many times we’ll go over a tune and I’ll ask him how he made something sound so cool. It will be the simplest thing like a square wave with some reverb just tweaked in an interesting way. Nothing crazy or complex that takes a lot of time. I think he’s one of those people who is pushing things forward with composition, although he also has great sound design. Composition is one of his strong points.”
His sound design is absolutely ferocious, but as Andy alludes to, it’s Cam’s songwriting that sets him apart. His melodies are straightforward yet infectious. His note relationships are simple but undeniably powerful. His songwriting prowess perhaps shines brightest on Mending the Riven. A primarily downtempo album with just a few dance floor bangers, it finds Cameron experimenting heavily with time signatures and musical ideas.
Mickman after his performance at Summer Camp Music Festival in 2017 (Credit: Emerald Tide Photography)
“Riven” means torn or split apart violently. I asked Cam what’s been split and how are we mending it. “I feel like it can be interpreted in many ways. If I were to define that myself, I don’t want to take away from anyone else’s interpretation. But in terms of all the definitions of the words mashed together, I definitely think it was one of the more intellectually stimulating things that I did.”
Mickman music has always been full of messages, from the ocean of consciousness in “Dissolution” to songs sampling Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. “In my older music, I was so definitive about the message that I was trying to get across. I still am, but I’ve definitely toned down the deliberate, direct messaging.” One can hear the drop off in vocal samples over time across the Mickman catalog.
“If you’re trying to convey a message in music, I feel like you can almost get farther with just the intention and idea you have when you’re making it than with the samples and words you’re putting into it. There’s a big power in the subconscious nature of music. I’m trying to leave it more up for interpretation now rather than being like, ‘you’re being lied to and your mind’s being controlled!!’ That’s a little too on the nose,” Cam says with a chuckle, “but I was super big on it back in the day.”
He was willing to share thoughts about “Branch Point” from the album Ether Excerpt when I pressed him. “I think there’s definitely going to be a branch point, a tipping point, a threshold that we cross when there will be a pretty definitive outcome in one way or another. It’s going to either be a nice, fluffy utopian ride in the park or quite literally the exact opposite. The average person that you pull off the side of the street, I don’t know if they’re ready for it. I think they’re more ready for the latter than they are willing to put in the work to make a better outcome.” Macro perspectives like these on the purpose and path of humanity appear constantly in Mickman’s music.
Hearing Cameron speak about his career from start to finish, it crystallized in my mind at PlayStation just how crazed and obsessive his approach is. Through sleepless nights, countless hours in front of the computer, long car rides, dozens of load-ins and tear-downs, he made his own lane and did so without compromising his ideals. Once I thought back, I remembered past glimpses of his obsession and his undeniable desire for independence.
He performed at a Rust show in the basement at Brooklyn Bazaar in 2017 when he and DeeZ were touring. Eric was on sound and the three of them were carting Cam’s purple Funktion One rig from city to city. Once the show ended at 3:00 am, there was Cameron spry and ready to carry these gigantic subwoofers back up the slim stair set. Earlier this year he played the early arrival party at Solasta Festival in North Carolina, then flew back to Illinois and threw a show in Peoria the next day, essentially without sleeping. “That was a pretty exhausting mental run.”
Mickman performing at Solasta Festival in North Carolina 2019 (Credit: JV Photography)
What motivates this madness? “The whole chute and ladder game, in terms of, ‘you gotta start off small and play in bars, then open for these people, you’ll get a little bit better and a little bit better and then maybe you’ll get on a show that has some pro audio,’ I just put all of that off the table. I was much more interested in curating my own experience rather than being involved in someone else’s…Trying to materialize and manifest my own vision.”
“You’re mighty ambitious, I said to Cam. “I never truly realized how ambitious, because in person you’re a pretty laid back dude.”
“Move in silence, baby,” he responded.
“Like lasagna,” I added.
“Exactly,” he laughed. We toasted.
Now, Cam’s career is accelerating. He’s playing out more and more frequently, he’s moving upwards on lineups, and he’s become comfortable enough to get a booking agent - Hasan over at Envisioned Arts. It will be fun to watch how Cam’s creativity evolves as the context around that creativity changes. What’s not likely to change? His obsessive, single-minded focus. On top of priceless musical talent painstakingly developed without musical training, it’s his energy and intensity that make Mickman special. “There have been a bunch of different things that I’ve been passionate about in my life that have ebbed and flowed. Then the whole making music thing came into play, and I’ve just never been more sure about something ever.”
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