bcc:

"Chorus": On Five years of A new theory of nothing and a new theory of nowhere

On February 22, 2020, bcc: released A new theory of nothing and a new theory of nowhere, our/the project’s debut album. Recorded a year prior, the album was ready in Fall 2019, but I had the idea that it was better to put an album out early in the year than late in the year. It was an absurdly hopeful accommodation to think that a 43-minute, one (1) track album would have a better chance of being reviewed and regarded by releasing it after all the year-end hubbub, perhaps highlighted by a few live shows illustrating what it was all about.

Of course, as it turned out, the timing was even worse than that. bcc: managed to get one late February performance before life as I knew it (and certainly my life as an active musician) went into a liminal state I am still trying to understand and recover from. So, five years on, I wanted to spend a little time thinking about this record, an album I am incredibly proud of.

The idea started sometime in late December 2017; DTCC was starting to wind down and I was in our practice space by myself, messing around with a drum machine and a weird tuning a friend taught me (DADFCE–”dadface”). I was recording to tape and basically just kept playing for 30 or so minutes, probably with some interruptions to try and change the drum beat or get to the next thing. Listening back after, I heard a lot of parts I liked that could work as songs, but also heard myself calling back to things. I thought it would be fun to try and do an album that way with a full band: learn all the song-like sections and pieces well enough to play them, then try to string them all together, changing the structure within each performance. It wasn’t a groundbreaking idea per se, but I felt excited about it and thought it could be the right next project. Obviously the parts and melodies would still be heavily influenced by the way I write music (new tuning aside), but I was used to bringing songs to the band with the structure set, so the format of the collaboration felt different and challenging, but still achievable.

The rough plan was to rehearse throughout 2018 and then record. I can’t remember when we started but we probably spent the better part of a year working on the material, occasionally recording practices as reference. I was fortunate to have friends/collaborators who were game for pursuing this idea and down to do that rehearsal schedule. I must have shouted “chorus” into the mic a thousand times, signaling different changes. In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d left one in there, just for fun.

Basic tracking happened in one weekend, February 22-24, 2019. Really it was more like 36 hours, since Bella is strict about keeping the Sabbath. So the rest of us did a lot of set up and sound-checking on Friday and Saturday during the day, and we were able to start tracking Saturday evening. We got halfway through twice on Saturday, and we made it through a few times on Sunday. I remember the experience of doing ”takes” in that context was so much more intense than I was used to. Certainly some songs felt difficult to get right in past sessions with DTCC or recording at home, but in general it doesn’t feel like a huge deal to go through a half dozen takes of a 2-5 minute song. Whereas here we were generally playing at least 20 minutes straight (and ideally the full 40-ish), trying not to mess up in a totally compromising way, trying to pay attention to everything and keep everyone aligned on where to go next. Each take was followed by a break at least as long as the take itself. I recall Kaitlyn saying she felt like she had repetitive stress injury by the end of it.

From these performances, we were able to come up with a base that required minimal stitching–in the end it ended up being long chunks from three different takes. Over subsequent months I would come back to do vocals (after fleshing out lyrics to retrofit to the “final” structure) and additional overdubs to elevate different parts, including some amazing string performances from Karna Ray and Alex Boehm, and trumpet from Alex Minikes.

To me the record is more like a composition than an album of songs, best heard continuously as one piece. Its original release as a single track/cassette reflects that. I didn’t want to compromise on that, just as I didn’t want to compromise by making it available on streaming services that could not value it appropriately, even if they wanted to.

That said, I have become more sympathetic to those who might want to hear it in subsets, which is why I have chosen to republish it on Bandcamp in pieces (though I still think it should be downloaded so buffering is not an issue). I still feel stubborn about making it available to streaming services, but I am considering it.

Over time, I have treated bcc: as “my” project rather than a band assembled of specific people. Some of that was a reaction to the end of Doubting Thomas Cruise Control, and some of that has been an adaptation to changes in how I and my peers were trying to do music post pandemic. But during the rehearsing and recording of this album, it would be dishonest to say we were anything but a band of specific people. Everyone committed well over a year to learning and performing this music, and often would step in to help figure things out when I was over my head on such things as “what chord is that, exactly?” I continue to feel grateful for this collaboration, and am happy that everyone involved is still creating music in their own projects, which I’d like to call out: