Lofty Ambitions: As Michael J. West lamented yesterday on Arts Desk, tomorrow marks the final Jazz Loft concert at Gold Leaf Studios, the arts space in Mount Vernon Square whose tenants have to move out at the end of the month. At TBD, Andrew Beaujon chats with Loft organizer Giovanni Russonello, who says he'll announce a new location for the series soon. (I nominate Subterranean A.)

Also a Necessary Sacrifice: Craig Wallace will now play Frederick Douglass in Ford's Theatre's production of Necessary Sacrifices, the company announced yesterday. David Emerson Toney, who was originally cast in the role, withdrew earlier this week because of a "private health matter." The Post reports that the play's four previews, which were set to begin today, were postponed; it'll still open next Thursday, and run goes to Feb. 18.

Also: Positive reviews of Screen Vinyl Image's Wednesday show at Black Cat. Windian Records curates a mix for GET BENT! featuring some good D.C. garage rock.

Today on Arts Desk: New Bop Alloy tunes. All your weekend plans.

D.C. rapper yU included the empowerment jam "I Believe" on his strong 2011 album, The EARN, but his label Mello Music Group sent out a reminder this morning that the song has some serious MLK vibes. In it, yU rhymes:

I draw from dreams. Cuz they're talking to me at night
Loud and clear, and I never bow to fear. Greater
Thoughts I have right now, happen some years later
The weird way the universe works,
trust is the crust of life's pie, I succeed because I believe

Rousing! But maybe not as rousing as this, a vocal-only edit of Marvin Gaye's classic "What's Going On" that Beauty Pill's Chad Clark shared on Soundcloud a year ago. He reshared it today. "It is a file that is passed around a lot," he writes. "It's not hard to find. It's on the internet. It is common for music producers to share it with each other as an example of the magic of performance." That's not the reason he's sharing, Clark says:

I am putting this up on our Soundcloud today for obvious reasons. Today is MLK Day. You have the day off. It's nice to have a day off. But take a couple of minutes to enjoy this lovely song anew and think about what this day means. Tolerance, love, courage, empathy. Try to imagine a horrible world where people like this don't come along to rescue us all from our ignorance and our gnashing teeth.

What's Going On (vox only) by beautypill

Photo Slideshow: Beauty Pill's "Immersive Ideal"

It was nearly 1 p.m. on the eighth day of Beauty Pill’s public experiment in creativity and captivity when Morgan Klein, a photographer and friend of the band, looked up from his laptop and announced the sad news: Amy Winehouse was dead.

“That’s terrible,” the group’s leader, Chad Clark, said genuinely. She was an original, Clark said, who made lots money for a music industry that ultimately opted to invest in less risky analogues. Later that afternoon, he fired off a tweet: “Our whole band feels sad to learn about Amy Winehouse. Just want to say that.” For one of the only times during the band’s two-week residency there, the studio felt heavy.

A day later, Clark was feeling like the tribute was pretty trite. “Just learned about Norway,” he tweeted, referencing the previous day’s mass murder in Scandinavia. “Madness.”

Like any musician who’s reached a certain level of professionalism, Clark makes a compact with seclusion when he enters the studio. Artists in process aren’t supposed to read the news; we expect them to disconnect from the real world. But for two weeks last summer, Clark’s band set out to upend those expectations: The group converted the Black Box Theatre in Rosslyn’s Artisphere into a recording studio and invited the public to watch them make their first album in eight years.

Now, with the ensuing record ready to be heard, Beauty Pill is embarking on a second phase of their experiment in transparency: While most people listen to a new recording in private, the band starting this Saturday will unveil its work before an audience in the same Rosslyn theater. The recordings—which will make up the first of two still-unnamed albums—should be available for purchase later in the year.

Beauty Pill and Artisphere conceived the whole project—the public recording, then the public playback—as a sort of art installation, which they’ve dubbed “Immersive Ideal.” In reality, this second installment is more like a listening party gone slightly art-world, complete with surround sound and a morphing display of photographs captured during the session. Overall, the project is a real-time test of how musicians keep control over a recording’s message.

As of this week, the album’s finally done. From what I heard sitting in on the sessions, I’m pretty sure fans will recognize many of the group’s signatures in the new recordings—Clark’s melodic stamp, a balance of male and female vocals, and evocative lyrics that frequently dovetail between everyday life and the politics of race and class. In other ways, Beauty Pill sounds like a different band—hardly surprising, since the outfit hasn’t released a commercial recording since 2004.

The first part of “Immersive Ideal” demystified—or at least complicated—the old rock fallacy that a new recording can represent a rapid artistic evolution. “The reality is that every creative leap is 1,000 small decisions,” Beauty Pill member Jean Cook, a multi-instrumentalist and singer, said in July.

But following several months of mixing, this part of “Immersive Ideal” just might remystify things. “The blend of sampled and electronic and treated, and live and untreated and natural is pretty elegant, I think,” says Clark. “I think it’ll be pretty difficult for people to discern how things were done, even though they were able to watch it.”

—

Like a lot of envelope-pushing artists preparing a comeback album, Clark thinks the time might finally be right for Beauty Pill to be understood. If so, it’s been a long time coming.

Following the breakup of their well-regarded art-punk band Smart Went Crazy, Clark and Abram Goodrich formed the group in 2001 with their friend Joanne Gholl. Beauty Pill started as a sort of effete rebuttal of the District’s tradition of aggressive post-hardcore. “Our interest in femininity, grace, and detail developed as a kind of ‘fuck you’ to what we perceived as a stale hipster orthodoxy at the time,” is how Clark once described it. Critics and indie audiences warmly received Beauty Pill’s first EP, The Cigarette Girl From the Future.

In 2003, following the departures of Goodrich and Gholl, Beauty Pill released a relatively lo-fi follow-up, You Are Right to Be Afraid. A genre-hopping but flawed full-length, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, landed in 2004. That album moved even further from D.C.’s austere rock idiom—it was prettier, more sarcastic, more eclectic, and much more contemplative. Pitchfork panned it. When the band went looking for a booking agent, “we were pretty explicitly told we didn’t fit in,” Clark says.

Clark got some encouragement in 2006 when he posted a demo to Beauty Pill’s MySpace page. Centered on distant, delicate vocals from Cook, “Ann the Word” was a sharp left turn, a distraught and skeletal song with an Eastern feel and a synthetic, almost trip-hop cast. It’s clocked more than 50,000 streams; positive feedback from fans convinced Clark he was heading in the right direction.

In early 2008, surgeons opened up Clark’s chest; an infection had caused his heart to swell, nearly killing him. For the next year, his musical activity was limited to laptop and piano. He couldn’t lift a guitar. When new music surfaced in January 2010, it was rich in eerie, chopped-up orchestral samples and tinny, paranoid drum hits. And it was explicitly concerned with mortality: Clark’s first recording in four years was the soundtrack to Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s play suicide.chat.room.

The whole while, Clark had been amassing a large body of material, with band members occasionally joining him in his home studio. He started working in public spaces with a laptop and a Monome, a kind of minimalistic sampler controller. He returned to good health. He and his wife had a son. When I interviewed him a few weeks before suicide.chat.room opened, he said he hoped to release two albums—a “nocturnal” album and a “DayGlo” album”—in 2010. But the albums never arrived.

These days, Clark admits he didn’t really have a plan to finish the records. “I recognize that music is communication, Clark says. “I can easily forget that and I can seriously experiment on my own and be really happy, and it would never occur to me that no one’s heard it. And that’s the point of making it. That’s something I will admit that I lost sight of.”

But he still had his devotees. Ryan Holladay, of the band Bluebrain, asked Clark to visit Artisphere, which had just hired Holladay as its new media curator. A germ of an idea came out of the visit: presenting Beauty Pill’s music like an art exhibit. But they didn’t want to assemble a typical sound installation; it would center on songs, instead. Artisphere’s Black Box Theatre had an observation window, à la Abbey Road’s. Holladay suggested they record before an audience.

—

“I come bearing caffeine. Caffeine! Caffeina!” Clark announced with a flourish on day one of the sessions.

The band started with the song “Steven and Tiwonge,” a fictional riff inspired by a Malawian couple jailed in 2010 for being gay. Clark conceived it as a slowed-down disco song, he says, but in the studio, they decided to speed things up. “Is this Hedwig?” asked an Artisphere tech. The group—playing the part of the Angry Inch, in this metaphor—didn’t appear to hear the question.

The personnel on hand during the sessions were Clark, Goodrich, their Smart Went Crazy bandmate Devin Ocampo, Cook, Basla Andulson, and Drew Doucette. They’re all multi-instrumentalists; half of them, including Clark, are professional recording engineers. Yet another engineer, Nick Anderson, helped behind the boards. Five photographers documented it all.

As an exhibit, “Immersive Ideal” wasn’t exactly Warhol at the National Gallery of Art. Visitors tromped past the observation window in small clusters. Various friends and local music luminaries stopped in.

What visitors saw was a recording process that typically began with Clark playing a demo, and his collaborators reworking it—though usually not by trying to blow the whole thing up. Over the two-week session, the band worked on about half the tracks Clark presented. “I think a lot of this process is reaffirmation for [Clark] because he’s been creating this stuff in a vacuum,” Ocampo said. “He’s been super-surprised when we’ve just accepted what’s on the demo—stuff that he’s been considering just placeholders.”

The sessions were mostly additive, although there were plenty of tiny epiphanies. The band invented parts to play over Clark’s sample-heavy sketches. For his first shot at “Near Miss Stories,” Clark had sampled the bassline from The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”; since “Immersive Ideal” wasn’t conceived to include any appropriation art, the band wrote a new part.

If you stopped by Artisphere and you caught the band between takes, you probably caught some of the Beauty Pill Show. On day four, as the band advanced the song “When Cornered” from Beatles territory circa 1967 to Beatles territory circa 1968, four members slipped on sunglasses. “It can be our thing,” Clark said. “We need a thing.”

“You have to make an effort to see if the public’s there,” Cook told me one morning. “The only time we remember to turn around and look up is when someone says something they probably shouldn’t have.” Usually that meant an in-joke bordering on innuendo. “Chad is really uncomfortable with how we’ve all started calling the pocket piano the ‘pocket rocket.’”

Abbey Road parallels notwithstanding, there were no rancorous Let It Be moments. Only one song, the carnivalesque “Drapeotomania,” caused any sort of creative sparring. (Ocampo respectfully dissented when the band decided to rework the chorus.) In individual interviews, most of the members described Clark as playing a directorial role to which they were comfortable deferring. “Beauty Pill is Chad’s thing,” said Goodrich. “I think he’s had to figure out what he needs a band for. He’s the guy who can do it all. But he still has an attachment to what can happen in a band. And what can happen is the unexpected, when someone kind of pushes you off your center of gravity for a moment and opens some doors for you.”

—

When we met up in mid-December, Clark said he’d completely finished about half the songs. He was rapidly nearing his deadlines; the surround mixing would have to happen on-the-fly.

Everything should have been farther along: The record should have been mixed; Beauty Pill should have already found a label to release it. But not long after the Artisphere sessions wrapped, a sudden, serious illness in Clark’s family began to consume much of his time. He tweeted elliptically about the situation from time to time. Transparency gets tougher when you step outside the studio.

The band ended the Artisphere sessions thinking they’d produced a single album; this fall, they decided to split it into two discs, to be released separately. This month’s exhibition will feature nine tracks from the first album. “This seems like a smart way to both cope with the [family] situation, and it’ll probably be good for the art,” Clark says.

Clark says he feels good about the material—it feels like a sequel to Cigarette Girl, he says. “I feel really strongly that in a couple of ways, the world has gone our way,” he says. “What’s happened with the popularity of TV on the Radio, of later-period Radiohead—the stuff on Cigarette Girl now sounds current…I don’t think we’re going to be that alien.”

"Immersive Ideal" runs Wednesday to Sunday from Jan. 7 to 22 in the Black Box Theatre at Artisphere. An opening reception takes place this Saturday at 7 p.m. For more on "Immersive Ideal," see my blog posts from throughout the summer residency. Photos by Darrow Montgomery

It's been a while since we've heard from Soccer Team. Their wiry 2006 album, 'Volunteered' Civility and Professionalism, is excellent (or at least I think so!). And the duo's Ryan Nelson donated some music to a Taffety Punk Theatre Company dance performance earlier this year, and recorded a guitar part during Beauty Pill's public recording sessions at Artisphere. I'm looking forward to the new tunes.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

It's Thursday, and Beauty Pill is working on "Near Miss Stories"—the band's only song that addresses the illness that nearly killed frontman Chad Clark in 2007 and 2008. "You’re in a desperate situation," says Clark, explaining the lyrics. "You’re in a shipwreck, you’re out at sea, holding onto a piece of wood. You’re at the bottom of a well, and you have fantasy of it being a story-"—you know, the kind you look back on later.

The band is working out with instruments sounds that Clark, recovering in the hospital from his illness, assembled on his laptop. "All these notes they’re putting together right now are mouse notes,” he says. Hearing it as a rock 'n' roll song is “really intense.”

Intense, sure, but the vibe is still jovial. Clarks pulls up a click track.

“I’m sure Chad spent a week perfecting that click," says guitarist Drew Doucette, earning a laugh from the room.

"Undeserved," says Clark, smiling.

Devin Ocampo records a drum part. "We need to kill that last bass note. It’s comical," says Clark. "Like a guy who just joined the band. It’s like when Les Claypool joined Metallica.” He's not being mean; this, I'm later told, is a reference to a joke made the day before. "Immersive Ideal" may be a public project, but it doesn't come with annotations.

From inside the room, today doesn't feel especially efficient.There's some brief tension between Jean Cook, who's learning her piano part for "Near Miss Stories," and Clark, who's eager to track the song—hardly the stuff of Some Kind of Monster. Later, the band realizes that it has to rerecord Doucette's bass part. "City Paper, let it be known: We have been recording the bass through a high-pass filter," yells Clark in my direction. "That’s how Beauty Pill rolls. We record the bass without any of the bass.” Turns out it's a blessing: Not every part was lining up, but the problem is fixed with the new bass part.

—

On Sunday, it's clear the band has more or less kept pace: It worked on 10 songs in nine days. It's the early evening, and engineer Nick Anderson has to check out. "I never liked you," says Clark. "Never liked you." Good feelings abound.

The band is about to take three days off, after which Clark and Cook will return to Artisphere for several days of vocal tracking and post-production. It turns out the other members will have some time to come in and record parts, so tonight's 11 p.m. deadline doesn't feel so final.

The plan was to work on a years-old song called "Claustrophobes" tonight, but at around 9 p.m., the band is experiencing some technical difficulties. Clark walks over to tell me about the track: It's one of the grittiest songs of the current batch, "the 'Helter Skelter' of the record." It's germ belongs to former band member Ryan Nelson, who Clark says will come to Artisphere later in the week to record a guitar part. The lyrics were inspired by a pair of Clark's friends who, intrigued by the possibilities of the Internet many years ago, imagined a world in which they could completely cut off communication with the world—for example, by ordering whatever they needed and leaving a note for the delivery guy. "They liked the idea that you could make pizza appear without communication," he says. His friends don't know they inspired a song, Clark says, but he thinks they'd appreciate the portrayal: Think sexy vampires, hopefully without any contemporary pop-cultural baggage.

We start talking about the album that will result from these sessions: Clark says he thinks he's let go of the idea of releasing a double album. And while he went into the "Immersive Ideal" project interested in making a "useful" record—something evoking a single mood—that's clearly not going to be the case. "I have a feeling it will be more varied," he says. Not a Sea Change thing. More of a Sgt. Pepper's wild tour through different colors."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Beauty Pill fans and me

It's Tuesday afternoon at Artisphere, and Beauty Pill is advancing the song "When Cornered" from Beatles circa 1967 (frontman Chad Clark's demo of the song is rich in sitar-like sounds and "Lucy in the Sky" lilt) to Beatles circa 1968. Specifically: a layered guitar line that's poppy and hyper-chromatic and heavy and messy. It also contains a moment the band is referring to as "the Metallica chord."

Clark returns from a coffee run to lay down his guitar track. He's wearing sunglasses. So is Drew Doucette. "It can be our thing," he says. "We need a thing." Pretty soon, so are Basla Andolsun and Jean Cook. They don't seem to mind that Artisphere's Black Box Theatre is, in fact, a very black box. "The birth of a thing!" Clark says.

After Clark records his part, the band plays back his original sketch of "When Cornered." “That’s what happens when you record at four in the morning, and you imagine you are Paul McCartney.”

Abram Goodrich is trying to find the right reverb-y clavichord sound, Devin Ocampo is working out a powerhouse drum part, and the band slips into the kind of record-nerd back-and-forth that's become common during these sessions.

"It’s very Power Station,” Ocampo says of his drum part.

"That's not where we want to land," laughs Clark, who then starts singing the chorus from "In a Big Country," by Big Country.

"I'm pretty sure it's the same drummer"—an old session dude, says Ocampo.

Clark comes up to me and, chuckling, makes sure to stress that Ocampo and Goodrich are not wearing sunglasses, and that this is an important detail.

The view from above

"I come bearing caffeine. Caffeine! Caffeina!" announces Chad Clark near the top of his band's first day in Artisphere's Black Box Theatre, where his band Beauty Pill is holed up for most of the rest of the month to complete its next album, and where runs to the Starbucks down the street are both required (the band is pulling 10-hour days) and probably unavoidable (this being Rosslyn, there are only so many places to go for coffee). The project is called "Immersive Ideal," and should it succeed it'll result in the band's first record in seven years, not to mention an accompanying art exhibit.

When I enter, the band is making sound and lighting tweaks. A massive white frame is suspended from the ceiling, separating the ad-hoc engineering booth from a string of ad-hoc music-making stations. The first hour or so is about figuring out how it'll all work. That mostly means the technical stuff.

There's also a certain amount of built-in discomfort, which the band doesn't seem to be sweating. There are photographers (two at a time, four total) whose collected work will help form the art-exhibit component of "Immersive Ideal." There are journalists (at the moment it's just me) observing from inside the studio. Later, Fugazi's Brendan Canty, who co-owns the video-production company Trixie, will stop by. And perhaps most jarring: There's the literally hovering presence of onlookers, who occasionally stop by the observation window a floor above, where they can peer in and listen to the sessions.

Part of getting comfortable means easing in, and Clark has chosen what he describes as a fairly simple song to start the project—it's called "Steven and Tiwonge," after the Malawian couple that was jailed for being gay last year. Each day or so, Clark plans to present a "sketch" of a song to the band, which will then decide what to do with it. In this case, Clark conceived "Steven and Tiwonge" as a slowed-down disco song, but the consensus is it's too slow, so while the band practices playing it, Clark plugs headphones into his laptop and begins trying to speed it up. Devin Ocampo and Abram Goodrich are each manning a drum kit. Drew Doucette and Basla Andolsun are on guitar and bass. Jean Cook joins in on vocals and Wurlitzer. "Is this Hedwig?" asks the Artisphere tech assigned to help set the room's lighting.

There are more sonic adjustments to be made. Clark is still messing around on his computer, so Ocampo volunteers to test his guitar. "Now Devin's going to do a cruel impression," says Clark, to laughter. I leave around 3 p.m.

The next day, Sunday, the band is just getting ready to track "Steven and Tiwonge." Clark is both a maximalist and someone who believes, as he puts it, in the merits of "subtraction"; he describes how last night Goodrich helped simplify the song's bass line for the better. After the band debates the right BPM, Ocampo records his drum part.

They play back the beat, while Ocampo and then Doucette strum an acoustic and Clark and Cook share vocals. The band can feel it, and sitting off to the side, so can I: This is a Beauty Pill song. The acoustic guitar stirs something in the band. It's earthy, they agree, and it sounds right.

Maybe "Steven and Tiwonge" will change later. At 5 p.m., I have to get going.

Beauty Pill's Chad Clark likes to say that "Ann the Word" changed his life. The song, a haunting and cinematic demo the band posted to its MySpace in 2006, was a sharp left turn from the band's earlier material—and Clark says the positive response to "Ann the Word" has influenced the band's direction since. You'll be able to see exactly what that means next month, when Beauty Pill sets up at Artisphere to finish its new album. In the meantime, the band's publicist just sent a press release containing an mp3 of "Ann the World," which was previously only streamable on MySpace. Enjoy:

DOWNLOAD: Beauty Pill – "Ann the Word"