99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-45- Immersive Ideal

Episode Date: January 19, 2012

Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to be Afraid) and their last album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, came out in 2004. In … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. The boys and I have fixed up a session of dance music for you. And we hope you like it. One, two, three, four, five. This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars. Four, five. Constraints are good. I think, I mean, constraints are healthy. I'm not the only person to make this observation. 3.4.5. Take five notes. 1.2.3.4.5.

1.2.3.4.5. My name is Chad Clark and I'm in the band Beauty Pill. Beauty Pill is a band I really like from Washington DC. Their last album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, was released in 2004. Since then, Chad Clark had a serious illness that nearly killed him. I had a near death experience in 2008. A virus infected his heart. So usually it swells and you die and I didn't die.

I don't think it's entirely accurate to boil this down to cause an effect here, but at the same time his practice as a musician changed dramatically as well. And I just kind of became dismayed about putting stuff out. I don't think I was even aware that that was happening to me. If you talked to me like two years ago, I wouldn't know all the stuff that I know now. Clearly I was resisting, actively resisting, putting out a record. And because he was sick and making music but not putting out music, people began to wonder about Chad Clark.

Being perfectionistic or reclusive. Those are the two words that have been repeated to me a few times. There were rumors. The Brian Wilson fantasy that I like, oh he's going crazy, he's in a sandbox somewhere. So that was the problem. And the whole point of what I want to do with music is communication. So I will admit that it was a misguided path. Here in voice is one of which we'll never sing again When this is over

And this looked like the way things were going to be But then Beauty Pill got an intriguing invitation From Artosphere, a new multi-media art space in the D.C. area They had just asked me to come down to see the space and talk about doing something creative with music Very open-ended, very... We just want you to be creative, kind of idea... The best kind of invitation to receive.

And I came down and we walked around the space and we talked about different things that we could do. And the obvious idea is sprang up. He could create ambient looping music to fill the space or some kind of audio installation. But as they were walking around, they came to a room in the space with a very distinctive fenestration. And we looked into this black box theater and there's a window that looks down into the

theater. Distinctive to Chad Clark that is. I had no idea. And the first of all, the black box theater looked really cool to me, but mostly the window was an interesting idea because the window looks down into the space and I'm a huge Beatles fan. idea because the window looks down into the space and I'm a huge Beatles fan and if you just Google Abbey Road Studio 2 and you will see this design, the famous Beatles Studio has a window that looks down, a second floor window that looks down into the space.

It's angled almost exactly like the window at Artisphere and that excited me. Beauty Pill would record a new album, that now album that no one thought was going to happen, in the Black Box Theater, in front of everyone. Letting people watch us work. All inspired by a window. And there you have it. The closest one could ever hope to get the dancing about architecture.

They called the project the immersive ideal. And immersive ideal would be accessible and visible to everyone, and we would hopefully lose ourselves in the process. Which is where the title comes from. The ideal way to make music, which is to just sort of drop yourself into it and do nothing but that for a period of time. They had two weeks. There's a deadline now.

Now I think there's a way you could view the constraints of this project as a form of confinement. But to chat the immersive ideal was not about putting himself in a fishbowl and being forced to perform a task with everyone watching. It was about opening up the walls and inviting people into the process. In the studio, you can lose yourself entirely, and that can be a really narcotic and wonderful thing. But it can be easy to forget that the main purpose of what you're doing is to make a piece of music that is heard by someone else

and that communicates and transmits an idea or a sensation or an emotion to someone else. It's easy to lose sight of that when you're in the antiseptic, closed wall environment of a studio. Working in the open air, you never lose sight of that as an objective, of moving someone else as an objective. Case in point, the theater slash recording studio was set up so people could only observe through the Abbey Road window. Now the reality is we're nice people, and if we saw someone standing at the window for

two or three hours, watching us work, I don't know it just seemed right to invite them down. So what I would do is I would wave them down. I would wave to them at the window and I would say, come on down and we did this quite often. Sometimes the people invited in the recording area would erupt into a pause, which is not something you generally want in a studio recording. This was one of the manifestations where you could tell people were on our side or invested and wanting it to work.

But the other effect was that the crowd began to guide some of the creative process. On the song Stephen and Tuange, Chad Clark came into the room with a vision for the song. My original demo was kind of slow disco, kind of somewhat erotic, somewhat dark, but kind of slow, too slow to dance to. And I thought this was provocative, that you could feel that there was a dance beat, but it was slowed down to the point where you really couldn't dance to it. And the rest of the

band was feeling that it should have a brisker pace and I was pretty adamant on trying to pursue this vision of slow disco. Who hasn't pursued slow disco but when they were recording this song there's something like 12 guests also in the room. And I could feel as the band was trying to honor my vision I could feel that it wasn't working. I could see that the band wasn't on my side and that I was outnumbered by the band, but I could also feel from behind me. I was like, this is only one in this damned room.

There's like 18 people in this room, and I'm the only one that thinks this song should be slow. I think I'm probably wrong. You know, like it was like this. I think I'm probably wrong. You know, like it was like this. I think I'm wrong. And I probably let go of my concept that it should be slow. Sooner, I think, than I would have had I not felt the presence of other people in the room who the spell wasn't working on.

And if we'd been working in a studio, I think I probably would have eventually acquiesced. I do trust the band, but I certainly feel like the social presence of other people helped me realize that my approach wasn't working at all. But that's not to say that inviting the crowd in the room, even the metaphorical crowd, is the right way to create something. It's a paradox, because if Radiohead, when they were making Kid A, had allowed a crowd

in, while they were working, that crowd might have been completely dismayed about everything they were doing. Why are you doing this? You're a guitar or a rock band. Why are you, I liked your last record. It was great. Why don't you just do another one of those? The crowd doesn't always have the vision.

So there are times when you have to knowingly push beyond what is socially desired at that point to arrive at a fresh and worthwhile result. So it's complicated. It's not just one way or just the other. You could never design the perfect situation for creating great art. It just doesn't work that way. But sometimes you have to make some rules.

And sometimes you have to decide that five notes are all it takes. And sometimes the circumstances dictate that disco is supposed to be fast. It's probably all the time, actually, I know that I think about it. Yeah. Sorry, Chad. 99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, with Sam Greenspin, and may possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW-91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute

of Architects in San Francisco, in the Center for Architecture and Design. The program is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public at prx.org. To find out more about this program and beauty pill, you really want to find out more about beauty pill. Go to our website it's 99% invisible. If I say no, then I'm gonna take no way to be afraid So I'm not gonna face to get to a shot of it

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