MAC GOLLEHON has toured the planet and recorded in studios everywhere with an endless roster of rock, pop, and jazz artists since the 1970s, including David Bowie, Blondie, Onyx, Madonna, Billy Ocean, Hall & Oates, Chaka Khan, Buddy Rich, Al Jarreau, Sheena Easton, Nile Rodgers, Patrick Adams, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Hector Lavoe, and hundreds of others, including his decade-plus run in Duran Duran. In addition to the Herculean amount of session work, GOLLEHON has released a variety of solo albums since the late 1990s, including records with his ever-morphing MAC GOLLEHON & THE HISPANIC MECHANICS.

Anybody who has heard Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car,” Blondie’s The Hunter, or Onyx’s Slam is well versed in the wide array of brass tactics of New York City-based MAC GOLLEHON, as proven on the well-over two-hundred gold and platinum albums on which the trumpeter has appeared. But GOLLEHON’s exploratory nature led him further from the mainstream path and into the more outre realms of the audio matrix, in recent years collaborating with extreme/experimental solo outfit Gridfailure. In May of 2021, Nefarious Industries released the pair’s fully collaborative album Dismemberment Cabaret, a savage hybrid of industrialized dark hardcore/dark ambient experimental metal rooted in slasher gore and underworld speakeasys, recorded remotely while under Covid quarantine. Upon completion of the record, GOLLEHON and Gridfailure’s David Brenner had already identified several new project ideas to explore, the next of which is embodied in The End Is the Beginning.

The End Is the Beginning sees MAC GOLLEHON writing all arrangements and performing all instrumentation with Brenner engineering/producing the record. Drawing inspiration from trumpeter Lester Bowie’s Art Ensemble Of Chicago, pianist Cecil Taylor, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others, GOLLEHON delivers a mangled storyline that immerses the listener in a daring concept inspired by 1970s film noir, transporting you to New York City and abandoning you in what could be an ongoing mob war infiltrating the city’s five boroughs. Within the record’s runtime, inspiration from classic crime dramas of the era explodes with bold dementia. With Don Ellis’ score for The French Connection and Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry suite at the forefront, one can hear a convergence of styles tracing to Ennio Morricone, Goblin, Miles Davis, Elvin Jones, Riz Ortolani, and more contemporary creators David Lynch, Mike Patton, and John Zorn.