Draft:Mac Christensen (music producer)

Michael "Mac" Christensen (born January 1991) is an American music producer and sound designer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has worked with chart topping artists such as TesseracT, Daniel Tompkins, Outline in Color, Caskets, The Amity Affliction, Bury Tomorrow, Periphery , Atlus, and is a member of Kscope's cross-continental music group White Moth Black Butterfly. Mac has work featured in documentaries as well as session produced with frequent collaborator and band mate, Randy Slaugh for TV shows such as Mayans M.C.

Early life
Mac Christensen was born in Los Angeles and lived there until the 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged his home to the point that the family had to live on the lawn. Shortly thereafter, his Father would go on to accept a work opportunity that relocated the family to Kaysville, Utah. Mac was introduced to music there through school and church. In 2004, the family relocated to Glendale, Arizona where Mac would join the school band for the first time and from then on he began to form bands with his friends. Later, while at college, he met Randy Slaugh. This began a strong friendship and frequent collaborations between the two over the following decade.

2017 - 2019
Christensen relocated to Salt Lake City and began producing for local artists/bands in the area; Occasionally performing Session gigs as well. In mid 2017, the band White Moth Black Butterfly was wrapping up their album Atone. The group was planning on moving forward with programmed drums due to upcoming deadlines. However, Randy Slaugh who had joined the band in 2015, reached out to Christensen to see if he could perform and record the drum parts to meet the deadline. Christensen spoke with the band and committed to the album within a week prior to final mixing and mastering. The sessions concluded in time and the drums made it onto the album prior to its release via Kscope. The track "Evelyn" was later nominated for a Progressive Music Award for Video of the Year in 2018.

Later, with cinematographer Jonathan Ramanujam, Christensen would shoot a cinematic playthrough of the song "The Serpent" at the Bonneville Salt Flats. This would get picked up by the online publication Music Radar and would play a role in him joining the project as a member. Subsequently, he and Jonathan would shoot two more cinematic performance videos for the songs "Rising Sun" and "Evelyn"(Unreleased).

After joining White Moth Black Butterfly, Christensen would continue on to collaborate with Randy and the Tesseract (band) team both performing at and conducting a portion of the choir session for their 2018 album Sonder (Tesseract album). Also in 2018, Christensen would engineer the choir session for Anup Sastry's album, Illuminate.

In 2019, alongside Slaugh engineering/producing, Christensen would session produce the orchestral performances for the band Murmur's album The Boundless Black which went on to have songs featured in 3 episodes of the television show Mayans M.C. This would solidify Randy and Mac's partnership in music production moving forward.

2020 - Present
Mac would take a more prominent songwriting and producing role in WMBB for the follow up album The Cost of Dreaming. Among other songs, Christensen would take a lead in writing and producing one of the singles "Soma". He joined Slaugh and the rest of the band in full collaboration rather than focusing only on the drums/percussion.

From this experience, Mac was contacted by bandmate Daniel Tompkins (musician) to co produce a series of singles for him. In collaboration with Alpha Delta Brewing, the first single "The Abyss" was released with a signature IPA named Liquid Hype.  The second track, "Frenzy" followed shortly thereafter. Each single was released via Kscope.

Between 2021-2023, Mac performed additional production and sound design on Bury Tomorrow's singles "Life(Paradise Denied)" and "Death(Ever Colder)" ; Christensen co wrote and programmed for Outline In Color's 2022 single "Quicksand (Ft. Michael Swank)" via Thriller Records; Made beat production and sound design for two Atlus singles "Hometown Hurricane" and "Wish I Didn't Give a Shit" off of Atlus's independently released 2023 album, High Expectations; Engineered the piano sessions for The Amity Affliction 2023 record Not Without My Ghosts via Pure Noise Records; Produced and Sound Designed on Caskets 2023 album, Reflections via Sharptone Records.