CHIRP: Chicago Independent Radio Project

Posted by Michael A. on April 28, 2008 around 2pm

On March 21st, I went to see Collections of Colonies of Bees perform at the AV-Aerie. I’ve been a fan of the band for some time, though keeping track of their limited releases and off-shoot projects is no simple task – however, their entire discography has recently been made available digitally through drummer Jon Mueller’s DIY label Crouton Music. Behind Mueller and fellow co-founder Chris Rosenau, CoCoB was a Pele side-project that formed as an outlet for the ever-antsy musicians to explore the more experimental and quirky tangents of post-rock. This began the Milwuakee-based band on an interesting evolution that has morphed from exploring the possibilities of folk and bluegrass instrumentation mingling with digital post-production effects to the heavily tinkered, melodically stuttering sound of their 2004 release for Polyvinyl, Customer.

Regardless of style though, the band’s talent was in the texture and subtlety of their music, which in turn led to fascinating headphone listens. This detail is what made their show last month so surprising. It was loud. Very, very loud. And bombastic and striking and just completely aurally encompassing… to such a degree in fact that I was worrying about my ears’ health for the following few days. Their latest record – Birds released via Table of Elements subsidiary Radium – though an indication of their expanded sound, just didn’t completely warrant their recent comparisons to Rhys Chatham and the like… the live show, on the other hand, very, very much does. Not to mention that it now fully makes sense why the band is included in the Guitar Series Volumes 3 & 4, a series of twelve limited-edition, single sided LPs pressed on clear vinyl with laser-etched illustrations that includes other guitar noise-makers like Oren Ambarchi, Thurston Moore, Christian Fennesz, Stephen O’Malley and even Chatham himself. It also makes me snicker a bit at the reaction the Bees must have received opening for indie-pop darling Bon Iver throughout April. One of wide-eyed, attention-grabbing surprise I would venture to guess (a recorded collaboration between the touring mates will also be released via Jagjaguwar hopefully in the fall of 2008). Prior to their ear-splitting show, the four touring members of Collections of Colonies of Bees huddled in a hallway to chat with CHIRP.

Photo by John Kannenberg
Collections of Colonies of Bees - "Flocks IV" - Birds (Radium 2008)

CHIRP: Please introduce yourselves.

CR: My name is Chris Rosenau.

JM: Jon Mueller.

JS: Jim Schoenecker.

DS: Daniel Spack.

C: Your first few records as Collections of Colonies of Bees utilized a lot of folk and bluegrass instrumentation. I was just curious of what attracted you to that particular sound and style as a launching point for your experimentation.

CR: We kind of started out as just a side project for a band that Jon and I were in called Pele. And so, Pele was all rock instrumentation and in a rock setting, so it was just a way for me at the start to just play around with different things on acoustic guitars and different instruments and try to make something interesting. It just started out with me playing in the basement with really no idea of making records at all. But then we did the first one and it got released in the UK, which was about the same time Jon was starting up Crouton Music. So there was this outlet, and whenever we had time we just did another record. As far as what inspired me, I was listening to a lot of Gastr Del Sol type of stuff, so I think I lifted a lot of shit from those guys. Not just those guys, but all that kind of stuff: John Fahey-type things and Doc Boggs, and all sorts of other old stuff. You know, I had a shitty banjo, and it was kind of what just came out. There was no pretense, it was just kind of what happened.

C: Did you tour at all after those records? Or was any attention paid with each release?

CR: Oh no. Nothing. It was nothing, but it was all gravy.

JM: We did some shows

CR: But every time we did we never had a set practiced, and we never played the songs off the records. We tried to take little parts and incorporate them into the set.

JM: Ah man, we had a set practiced. What are you talking about? It was all scored and everything!

CR: Oh no! I misspoke, yeah. At every show, we had a full scored set that we’d write and rehearse, but it never was the same twice I think.

JM: Right.

CR: The shows would be a year in between. We’d have to get together and figure out something totally different. There was no touring, there was no… We played four or five shows probably in the first eight years or something.

C: As Collections of Colonies of Bees? That’s interesting. I had heard of the Rance record, and it took me a long time to try and get a hold of it. I had to get a friend of a friend of a friend to burn a copy of it, because it just wasn’t available. How many of those were pressed?

CR: I think a thousand. We did five hundred, then five hundred more.

C: Well this was only a few years ago, so I guess it had been a while since it was initially pressed.

JM: It’s digitally available now.

C: Oh yeah?

CR: Yeah, it’s true. I mean that’s something to put in something. All of the Crouton Music stuff you can get digitally now.

JM: All the stuff that was out of print is now available digitally. So it will make it a lot easier for people to find stuff. We have another record, this EP thing called MeYou that we only did two hundred of. And those sold out right away, so that’s digital now too. I think it’s only like two bucks or something. The point is that all this early stuff we were doing, it is kind of strange because it’s this. Now everybody knows about this Birds record because of the bigger distribution, but all of the path up to it is really diverse. If you listen to some of the early stuff and then listen to this, there is no big correlation you know.

C: Well that was kind of my next question: Was there a particular reason you eventually moved away from the folksy sound?

JM: It’s just us you know. I don’t think we ever really moved away from anything; we just kept moving. So it wasn’t a conscious decision like, “we don’t want to do that anymore, now we’re in to this.” Everything we’ve ever done in any setting is just what we wanted to do. It wasn’t based on “we should do this now” or like a planned thing.

CR: I think there was this transition period between Pele and doing the Bees thing, and I think because of the void of no rock from Pele not existing anymore, it seeped into the Bees. We just started writing and I think it just happened.

JM: That’s how it happened with the performances too. I’m jumping ahead, but with Customer too we had these songs and we started to rock them out when we played them live.

CR: Right. It was a super gradual evolution over like four years.

C: So is the Bees your concentration now as far as a band?

JM: Yeah.

CR: Yeah.

C: When did that transition happen?

JM: Since Customer.

C: In comparison to the last record, Customer, this record is distinctively intact as far as post-production and editing is concerned. Was there anything that sparked that approach versus the more cut-up method of producing Customer?

JM: With Customer, it was difficult to do some of that stuff live. Some of it is physically impossible. With Birds, an important thing was to make a record that we could play live. Kind of like how Pele was: we played the music that was on the records, but when you saw it live it was bigger and better and louder and more energetic. So we wanted to do that with the Bees. With Customer, we were struggling to keep up with the record as opposed to like taking the record to another level.

C: It certainly does sound like you wanted a more live sound; was this a response at all to reactions you got when performing after Customer?

JM: No, more internally really. We liked playing the Customer record. It was fun and it was different. But after awhile, it was like I said: the nagging feeling for wanting to have rock and taking rock even further than we had with Pele.

CR: Birds is really a documentation of the live set we were playing at the point when we recorded the record.

JS: Right, then we just made a record based on that live set, which does seem a bit backwards and weird.

JM: We were playing these songs that you’ll hear tonight long before this record was even considered.

CR: Kind of with a different line-up too.

C: Well how much post-production went into Birds, as far as editing and overdubs versus a live take?

CR: That’s kind of a slippery question just because…

(At this point Jon Mueller leaves to go set up his drums for the impending show.)

Photo by John Kannenberg

CR: So it’s weird because when we do the live set, it’s all based on multiple loops. So multiple instances of a lot of different repetitive patterns. And so, yes, technically Birds is riddled with post-production; I mean the whole thing is an overdub. However, it’s all reproduced live with loopers and Jim’s processing and Dan’s guitar.

JS: The only post-production is, like you’re saying, is only to make it live.

CR: And it goes back-and-forth. The record is an example of the live show, but the live show are significantly exactly what the record ended up being.

JS: That’s very true. There were certain things that evolved from what we were doing live when we set down the recording. New things happen in the recording process, and then we moved those to the live set as well.

DS: And a lot of that changed too.

CR: Customer was all post-production; I mean it was all put together by computer editing. On this record there was no computer editing at all. It was all recording the skeleton and then filling in all of the stuff that makes the live show.

C: How did you get hooked up with Table of Elements and Radium?

CR: Uhhhh… shrimp boils with Jeff Hunt. [laughs]

JS: The owner of the label lives in Milwaukee right now.

CR: Jon and I have been fans of the label for a long time, and Jon actually bridged the gap and got to know Jeff. And then it was kind of this serendipitous thing where we had the opportunity to record this record for him, and he had a slot he could put it in and was interested. And that’s how it happened. We got to know him as a friend, really through Jon first.

C: It’s a huge roster, they put out a lot of different records.

CR: They put out a shit-ton of records! And not everyone on the roster page is, you know, a devoted to just the label, but he still has a lot of bands working for him.

C: Is there anyone in particular on the roster that you get excited being associated with?

DS: Chatham.

CR: Yeah, Rhys Chatham!

JS: Jonathan Kane.

CR: Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt. I mean all these things are kind of… Now that we kind of found this home for what we were doing, now it all kind of makes sense with this other type of rock minimalism that Radium is interested in. [pause] Did I just say “rock minimalism?”

DS: Yeah I think you did.

CR: That’s terrible. [everyone laughs]

C: Well you guys have been in so many bands and just recording music for so long at this point, is there anything you do to make sure you don’t repeat yourself?

JS: I don’t think you can repeat yourself if you try. There is something significant about all the bands that any one of us have ever been in: they are not based in anything we’d bother repeating at first, but then it’s already over when you’re done.

C: So it’s not even something that you think about?

CR: It doesn’t enter into the equation at all. I mean there may be riffs that are fucking the same from one record to the next – I have no idea – but it’s just not something that we focus on.

DS: The line-up has so much to do with it.

JS: We all bring things from all over.

DS: The whole record and the whole live performance could change just by adding one extra musician for a show… and that’s happened.

CR: And that’s happened, yeah.

C: Well is there anyone over the years that in particular made a huge impression on your musically?

[everyone pauses to look at each other and laughs nervously]

DS: Well that’s another enormous question.

CR: That’s gigantic. I mean everyone, everything. When we were at South by Southwest last week, we literally went from a Norwegian black metal show to go see Akron[/Family], and literally the span in between the shit we all like. That influences all of us to a certain degree.

C: Crouton Music’s goal according to the website is to “enact ideas instead of records.” What kind of unexpected results have stemmed from this ethos? Anything that you would have never even considered being part of happen as a result of that?

CR: I think it’s really enabled us to work with a lot of people that we may not have been able to work with, because it’s not like “oh you’re going to put out my record.” Jon goes out of his way, you know, times ten to not release a record, but to release a box with little leaves and all this idiosyncratic stuff. People respect that, and people want to be a part of that. Whereas, if Jon were just releasing stuff, CDs, maybe you wouldn’t have the same opportunity.

C: Is that an approach you had since the beginning of Crouton? Even looking at it now, that idiosyncratic touch is the only way to fight back against the completely digital world and the just glancing intake of music.

CR: Yeah, that’s very true, but it’s almost coincidental.