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

The mostly local trio prog-pop/post-punk trio More Humans, whose Chad Clark-produced Demon Station EP has won over plenty of local critics, dropped a new video on us this week. The track, "Mason-Dixon," with it's tight harmonies and quick rhythmic change-ups, gets treated to a cross-country road trip alongside a mischievous ghost clad in a Halloween-appropriate sheet. See the story for yourself. (h/t Babystew)

For my feature this week on Fugazi's new online archive of live shows, I discussed some of the subtle changes you can hear in live version of the song "Repeater." Since then, I spoke to some of the people involved with the song about its inception and development. According to MacKaye, it all started with drugs. During the late '80s in D.C., “Crack came in, and then guns—there was a serious bloodletting, a big spike in gun homicides,” says MacKaye. “It was such a repetition. In the papers, they started to take a count. People would become numbers....it was a repeating situation.” The frustration spawned the searing song that would become a hallmark of the band’s live show. Lyrically, MacKaye takes on the persona of a dealer. Chad Clark, who worked on the 2005 remaster of the album of the same name, notes, “People love this line, ‘You say I need a job. I’ve got my own business. You know what I do? None of your fucking business.’ It’s actually an authentic reading of that character—that’s exactly what he would say. The capturing of that voice is such a profound accomplishment.”

LISTEN: "Repeater," Frederick, MD, Weinberg Center, 2/16/90

The song goes on to address the detached response of someone reading the papers. “With every death, there are people who had lives,” says MacKaye. “There are people around them being forever changed, and the tendency we have as a culture to stand back and blur our eyes, I saw that being exercised in a really intense way in our city.”

While the song is no doubt a heavy post-punk anthem, Clark notes that the musical elements were actually influenced by the hip-hop coming out at the time. “The musical style of the song was inspired by Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad,” he says. ”All those squalling bursts of guitar are kind of impressionistic versions of samples.“

LISTEN: "Repeater," Copenhagen, DK, Umdomhuset, 7/4/92

Guitarist Guy Picciotto confirms the band was seriously interested in what Chuck D. and his crew were doing. “‘Rebel Without a Pause’ would be specifically one song that we all looked to,” says Picciotto. “The main ascending, whistle-y sample on that one was so nuts. It’s hard to remember now how hardcore that song sounded when it came out, but it really was shocking and so bad ass.”

Imitating those climbing bursts of noise, Picciotto developed an unusual technique. “It’s a sound that came out of playing a Rickenbacker, which has a really long gap between the back of the bridge and the thing that holds the strings at the base of the guitar,” he explains. “If you play back there instead of over the pick ups like a normal human being and find the right notes on the fretboard, some weird dissonant harmonics shoot out.” Of course, it’s not all dissonance. “There’s this really simple clean arpeggio that’s so simple at the heart of the chorus. It’s so light, it’s like a Smiths song,” says Clark.

That contrasting chaos and melodic simplicity reinforce the lyrical themes of gun violence and detachment butting against real human loss of life. It’s a duality that makes for a powerhouse of a tune. “I was trying to write the D.C. anthem,” says MacKaye.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Mechanicsburg, PA, Decibels, 8/19/93

It’s hard to pinpoint the very first live performance of the song. The earliest recording of the song in the archive appears in February of 1990, but the song likely debuted before that. Searching his memory, MacKaye recalls, "Greed magazine—Kurt Sayenga used to edit it and he did graphics on some of the early records we did—he hosted a ‘Greed Night.’ I have a recollection of us playing the entire Repeater album instrumentally. While I kept rather copious notes of the tour dates, I just didn’t write some stuff down. I don’t know when it was, and it was unannounced so there are no fliers."

From that night the track went on to become a major crowd favorite, a definite show highlight for many audience members. Clark says, “All Fugazi songs to some extent sound like alarms—they have a charge, which is why they’re famous and why we love them—but here, it’s got this instant reset button effect on the show. I just remember it as such a blast of cold water and frantic energy.”

LISTEN: "Repeater," Dayton, OH, Dayton Fest/Brookwood Island, 8/21/93

Every night wasn’t as intense, because so much depended on the moment. The makeup of the crowd, the feel of the room, the personal situations of the band members all contributed to the particular execution of the song each night. "Sometimes it would flatten out and feel like we weren’t playing it correctly,” says MacKaye. “And then it would snap back.” Picciotto’s guitar sound was heavily dependent on the physical interactions between his guitar and his amp, so the space could seriously affect the song. “Sometimes it would depend on the room–it depends on feedback, and rooms have different acoustic properties. Some have soundproofing, so when we played that song, you'd get a skeletal feeling, like you can’t find the heart of the song,” says MacKaye.

There are moments throughout the archive, where the song indeed feels like it pulls back, like the guitars aren’t quite as screeching and Brendan Canty doesn’t hit his crash cymbals with as much ferocity, but often in those moments, the strength of the actual songwriting shows through. Joe Lally’s bassline stays remarkably consistent from show to show, and the locked-tight, Bomb Squad-enamored rhythm section comes to the forefront.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Adelaide, AU, Adelaide University, 11/12/96

As the band progressed over its 15 years, the meaning and vibe of the song would mutate. “Obviously as we got farther away from those particular years, that specific [crack epidemic] situation wasn’t on my mind as much,” says MacKaye. “But I actually think it’s a condition that’s a permanent condition for society. If you look at our military situation, there’s a constant count of American dead.” When situations changed for the band, the song would transform bit-by-bit. "If I’m playing that song to someone in Washington, D.C., in 1990, it’s probably different than in Brazil in 1994," says MacKaye. In this 1999 performance in Milan, the guitars scream less and chug more while Canty focuses on more tom work than usual.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Milan, IT, Leon Cavallo, 10/2/99

At the end of their live career, Fugazi were still at the top of their game. With a deep and complex catalog at their disposal, they still managed to bring nuance and dynamics to their older work. This 2002 performance of “Repeater” in Leeds, U.K., showcases the kind of subtle strangeness that the band made their name on without losing the urgency of the song's core.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Leeds, UK, Metropolitan University, 10/31/02

"For me to really lean into my music, I have to feel it, I have to believe it," says MacKaye. "It’s just my nature to think about my world, the city I’m living in, and write about it."

The duo appeared yesterday at the Future of Music Policy Summit at Georgetown University to discuss their work and plug the new app to the gathered music and tech wonks. They even brought something of a teaser trailer with them: a documentary about the making of the work that included interviews with AOL founder Steve Case, Ian MacKaye, Beauty Pill's Chad Clark, The Washington Post's Chris Richards, and others.

In that film and in a conversation with Clark and Richards that followed, the brothers Holladay pondered just how novel their app concept really is. After all, there is a long history of algorithmic composition in music. And artists certainly experiment with apps—the most famous recent example being Bjork. But where Bjork's Biophilia apps are ultimately secondary to her new album—kind of like toys, Hays said—Bluebrain's apps are the albums. That they use a technology until recently unavailable to musicians may be ground-breaking; what's truly canny about The National Mall and Listen to the Light, I think, is that they can only be used in one place.

All of the above has provided plenty of hooks for journalists, and The National Mall scored Bluebrain write-ups in The Washington Post, Wired, and Pitchfork's video-game vertical. They didn't mind the exposure, the band said, when Richards asked if they worried the app was being covered more for its novelty than its music. Clark had an answer: that nobody experiencing Bluebrain's app projects would mistake them for anything other than art.

There's a preview of Listen to the Light in the New York Post. Check back here in the next week, and we'll have our own review. You can download Listen to the Light for free for iPhone via the app store.

Bluebrain has another app in the works: a location-aware album for California's Route 1.

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'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"

Chad Clark

The news is out today that Beauty Pill, the longstanding D.C. indie rock band, will finish its new album next month—in public. As reported by Click Track this morning, from July 16 to August 2 the band is taking over the Black Box Theatre in Rosslyn's Artisphere, where each day from noon to 10 p.m. the band will make music while fans and passersby watch from an observation deck a floor above. Think of it as an indie-rock zoo: "Sometimes the monkeys are doing something interesting, and sometimes they're asleep," the band's leader, Chad Clark, says.

The project is called "Immersive Ideal," and immersion is exactly the point. “In my mind it’s the best way to make music," says Clark. "Just sink into it. Do nothing but that for whatever period of time."

If you've followed Beauty Pill in recent years, you know the band hasn't exactly been immersing itself in its music. The group has long been known for using mobile recording set-ups. And its last album, 2004's The Unsustainable Lifestlye, was assembled over a long stretch of time. Music has trickled out since: The band posted the song "Ann the Word," a gloomy and electronic left turn, to its MySpace in 2006. It soundtracked the play suicide.chat.room by the local Taffety Punk Theatre Company in early 2010, working in a similarly eerie and cinematic aesthetic. Clark and bandmate Jean Cook remade a Franz Nicolay song in November. Meanwhile, Clark faced serious illness in 2007 when an infection caused his heart to swell to the point of nearly killing him. While recovering, Clark was unable to pick up a guitar. His bandmates kept busy with day jobs and other musical projects.

I like to think of Beauty Pill as a band's band—if they've never been very widely known in indie-rock circles, they've certainly been adored by critics and other musicians. Which is why the prospect of the group's first album in seven years is welcome news.

For Clark, the project is both scary and thrilling. "We could fail—the circumstance could affect it negatively or positively. I don’t know," he says. “Everyone in the band—they’re really profoundly musical people, so I’m relying on the fact that it will feel alive, and therefore the result will feel alive. But there’s no way to know…"

So what, exactly, is the band finishing? And how will the project work? Some answers:

The music

While Beauty Pill hasn't released a full-length since 2004, a new album has been sitting on the horizon for much of the time since. In addition to his job as a producer and mixer, Clark has been working on songs he'd hoped would form his band's next record . He's done a lot of composing remotely, using a laptop and Monome and other tools, and had his bandmates record parts in his home studio. Last year, when I profiled Clark on the occasion of suicide.chat.room's opening, he told me he hoped to release two new albums in 2010, and he meant it. But it never happened.

"The way I’ve been working is inviting various members over to my house and having them play a guitar part or a bass part over time, in a very desultory, kind of aimless way," Clark says. "I wouldn’t have admitted to myself that it was aimless at the time, but it really became clear, 'I don’t have a plan to finish this.' I have a lot of this material and I love the process of exploring and I kind of could do it forever. If you talked to me a year ago, maybe two years ago I wouldn’t have known this about myself."

Not long after I wrote about Clark, he was approached by curators of the then-embryonic Artisphere, who wanted him to pitch an idea for a performance or installation project. One suggestion was creating some sort of ambient work, but Clark says he became interested in finding a way to present individual songs in an artistic way. Artisphere's new media curator, Ryan Holladay of the electronic pop duo Bluebrain, asked what Clark would need. "I said, 'The record’s in this kind of perpetually 80 percent complete stage.' I’d love a couple of weeks in the studio with my band to kind of render this stuff and put it into a fixed form," Clark says. Then the idea popped: Set up at Artisphere and invite the public to watch.

Some of the songs that Clark will bring with him to the studio date back to 2005 or 2006—like one dealing with themes of mortality called "Dog With Rabbit in Mouth, Unharmed," which Clark describes as simple, strongly emotional, and dreamlike. Another song is called "Afrikaner Barista." The band recorded a second version of "Ann the Word" after posting the original rough mix to MySpace, and may end up working more on that song.

While Clark's past releases have been tonally eclectic, he says in recent years he's become interested in making an album of "useful music"—a recording that evokes a single mood, like Kind of Blue or Sea Change. Hence the two albums that he hoped to release last year. "Some of this music is bright and kind of electric, and some of it is nocturnal—that was my mental design for a long time and it still may happen."

How it'll work

Or maybe they'll just walk away with one record. The point is that the project is completely unpredictable. "If you present a piece to a room of pretty musical people, by nightfall can they make it sound like a record?" Clark asks. "That’s the challenge."

Each day, Clark says, "we’ll begin from a skeleton of a sketch that is an existing thing and we will undo it, supplant it, replace it, augment it, pull it apart, or not. Use it as a map, as a vague guide of how the thing can be, or leave it be." One possibility is that the band will re-record a song totally from scratch.

The band will have a few days to set up the studio before the observation period begins. On the technical end, Clarks says the hope is that band members will be able to pick up an instrument in the room and record right away. There'll be photographers in the room, snapping away for the final version of the project, a musical art exhibition culled from the sessions that the band will present at Artisphere in the fall or winter. Local studios Bastille and Airshow are sponsoring the project and providing some gear.

As for personnel: Some of the group's members from recent years—Clark, Cook, Devin Ocampo, Drew Doucette, and Basla Andolsun—are on board, along with Abram Goodrich, who played with the band in the early 2000s. They're all multi-instrumentalists; half of them are engineers, which is useful, Clark says, because there isn't room in the budget to bring in an outside one. And because of the unusual set-up, they'll have to figure out the rules and possibilities of their method as they work.

"Everyone’s nervous about it," Clarks says. "In a good way."

Artisphere is at 1101 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington. "Immersive Ideal" takes place from July 16 to August 2, from noon to 10 p.m. each day (the band will take a three-day break during the sessions). Free.

You can catch the punk-addled performance on Friday at 8 p.m. and on Saturday at 3  and 8 p.m. at Capital Hill Arts Workshop on 545 7th St. SE. $10.

UPDATE: There will also be live music composed and performed by David Arbury (The Better Automatic, Resin Records).

Brian Schanck was 15 years old when a friend played him Emergency & I, the third album by The Dismemberment Plan. “The music was euphonious and the lyrics hit home,” he says, recalling the D.C. indie rock band’s oddball pairing of funk rhythms and emo narrative. He dug it.

When Schanck turned 18, he tattooed the album’s cover art—abstract cartoons doodled by the band’s singer, Travis Morrison—on his ribcage beneath his right arm. He started playing bass in bands in the Tampa, Fla., area.

Schanck, now 24, has since made some regrettable decisions—he’s currently serving a three-year sentence in a Florida prison for a drunk-driving conviction—but he stands by his ink.

“[I liked] how diverse and eccentric they were,” he says, answering questions sent via Facebook and posed over the phone by his parents. “How intriguing the time signatures were, how Travis sang, and how amazing they were as musicians. They had no barriers, [the music] seemed crazy but created comfort.”

He cites his favorite lyrics, from “Spider in the Snow”: “The only thing worse than bad memories is no memories at all.”

An album’s legacy can’t be measured in permanent ink alone, but more than a decade after its release, it’s clear that Emergency & I struck a special chord. Since the group disbanded in 2003, the record has accrued cult-like adoration—the kind of indie-kid love fest otherwise reserved for bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Pixies. People remember where, when, and who they were with when they first turned it on. They climbed in vans and followed the band on tour, Grateful Dead-style. Fans didn’t just love it; they lived it.

And for some reason, now there are more of them than ever.

To commemorate the release of a remastered, double-LP version of Emergency & I, The Dismemberment Plan is getting back together for a string of concerts. After seven years of relative inactivity—they reunited for a pair of benefit shows in 2007—the band will play to capacity crowds in venues it might have struggled to fill in its peak years. In 2003, the Plan could pack one night at Chicago’s Metro. This time around, two shows there have already sold out. So have gigs at the Black Cat on Jan. 21 and the 9:30 Club on Jan. 22 and 23.

Emergency & I’s appeal is easy to parse. It’s a high-energy and high-emotion record—an album that softened mid-20s angst with self-deprecation and noodle-dance-ready beats. It also showed up at the right time. Released in 1999, Emergency & I caught the music industry at a crossroads—it was paid for by a fading major label, yet popularized, at least in part, through the explosion of music culture on the Internet. Jimmy Iovine wrote the checks. Napster and Pitchfork got the word out. The band, which had long toiled at the margins, finally got some fans.

The Plan formed in 1993, and its sound congealed from contradictory impulses. The rhythm section—Eric Axelson on bass and, eventually, Joe Easley on drums—skewed funky. Guitarist Jason Caddell played fuzzy and jittery riffs. Morrison spit out lyrics like post-punk’s answer to the Micro Machines man. “We felt kinship with bands like Brainiac, and Enon after them,” says Caddell. “Any band that was trying to take a bunch of different music streams and see how convoluted they could twist them together.”

In a landscape populated by dour men with giant amps, the band stuck out. “They had this Technicolor, DayGlo, ultra-colorful sound that contrasted with gun-metal-gray tonalities of the time, particularly in D.C.,” says Beauty Pill founder Chad Clark, who co-produced Emergency & I.

By the time the band released The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, its second album, in 1997, it had built a modest following. Major-label ears perked up and, around that time, the band signed to Interscope. It was able to record for three weeks at a pricey studio—Water Music in Hoboken, N.J.—and hire Clark and Jawbox founder J. Robbins to produce.

But it became clear Emergency & I was not a huge priority for Interscope, which was then being batted around amid a series of corporate mergers. “‘Ice of Boston’ was the main hook for Interscope,” theorizes Clark, who says the label pushed for the song, which was already on Is Terrified, to be included on the next record. “The banana-in-the-ear, wacky, zany, alt-rock hit was a viable way to get a band noticed back then. My feeling was they were dismayed by increasingly serious character of the Plan’s music.”

Interscope dropped the band, which got an unusually good deal—the label returned the master tapes and let the Plan keep the advance. After a year of waiting, Emergency & I came out on D-Plan’s longtime indie home, DeSoto, in 1999.

It wasn’t an immediate smash. Emergency & I gradually percolated into popularity through traditional means—fanzines, extensive touring, some print write-ups. But the record was also among the first wave of indie records to see tangible benefits from the Internet.

Emergency & I arrived in the year of Napster, which made MP3s of the record easily available to college students who had noticed the buzz. The band maintained a presence on the then-newfangled MySpace and frequently updated its website. Fan-run sites like Knerd (now defunct) also posted—unbeknownst to the band—a few free, downloadable bootlegs of concerts. “We benefited from being on the cusp of the first true Internet generation,” says Caddell. “Kids who from childhood were conversant in the language and used it as an intense cultural resource.”

Emergency & I didn’t get much traction with glossy music magazines, but indie-oriented music sites paid attention. “Now get ready—I’m gonna gush because I’m embarrassed I didn’t put this on my top 10 list and because they deserve it,” wrote Sarah Zupko in Popmatters. Pitchfork Media gave the record a full-bore super-endorsement. “I could spend pages examining this record,” wrote Brent DiCrescenzo. “Everything down to the art is stunningly unique and perfectly appropriate.” He published a more direct review at the top of the page: “If you consider yourself a fan of groundbreaking pop, go out and buy this album right now.” The website named it record of the year in 1999. (Disclosure: I’ve written for Pitchfork since 2007.)

Web hype, however strong, doesn’t account for Emergency & I’s long-term resonance. The songs sold themselves. “It’s too simple to say songwriting got better,” says Josh Modell, editor of the Onion AV Club, who compiled an oral history for the vinyl release. “They calmed down. The weirder, goofier elements balanced out with serious lyrics.”

Morrison edged away from straight-up wackiness and applied his playful, self-effacing sense of humor to more adult themes. Songs like “A Life of Possibilities” captured the free-flowing aimlessness of post-college doldrums. “The title sounds bright, but it’s a dark and surreal story,” explains Clark. “It’s a life of possibilities, but one of those possibilities is that nobody gives a fuck about you.” It’s a coming-of-age record set halfway between Shudder to Think and Jimmy Jam.

Morrison is a little self-conscious about the lyrics now and laments their unambiguity. “You know on ‘Once in a Lifetime,” where David Byrne is singing, ‘There is water at the bottom of the ocean,’ and you’re, like, ‘Why is he saying that?’ There aren’t a lot of those moments,” he says. “But at least the single entendres are fully felt.” Morrison cops to listening to a lot of pop country at the time, keying in on the songwriter’s ability to generate a linear narrative. “Country is not interested in the sublime at all. The story is told and you relate to the story,” he says. “Nobody was writing stuff like that in our context.”

That much is true. But The Dismemberment Plan, thankfully, did not play sad songs and waltzes. Part of what sells Morrison’s über-earnest songwriting is the context—“Memory Machine,” with its foreboding, angsty vibe, is presented not as singer-songwriter mulch, but atop an odd time Meters-informed bass hook.

“It was like going to a party and they’re playing four different stereos,” says Robbins. “One guy is DJing Daft Punk, another Stevie Wonder, and another Radiohead. The synthesis worked, even though there were a lot of times where the right hand had no idea what the left hand was doing.”

Photo courtesy The Dismemberment Plan/Illustration by Brooke Hatfield