There’s nothing wrong, per se, with electronic music. But mourn, if only for a moment, the loss of the finite space that has accompanied its recent proliferation. EDM and the like have achieved the abstract idea of place foretold by composer Edgard Varèse almost 100 years ago: “music as spatial—as moving bodies of sound.” In other words, a Skrillex track doesn’t sound like it was made in a room. Electronic musicians have successfully burst beyond three dimensions, and, you know, bully for them.
But while electronic music has leveled the idea of space, it’s also locked into a calendar: It only sounds as good as the technology will allow, and is thus instantly dated. So while that stuff goes beyond space, the music Donovan Quinn and Ben Chasny create as New Bums goes beyond time. The group’s music could be from any point in the last 40 years, so sunken-in are its mysteries.
On New Bums’ debut album, Voices in a Rented Room, out now on Drag City, you don’t just feel like you’re in the titular room with the two musicians; you feel like you should be kicking in a share of the lease. (Quinn is known among psychedelic circles for his work with the group Skygreen Leopards, and Chasny has wrought ample amounts of gnarled-out sounds with Comets on Fire, Rangda and his long-running Six Organs of Admittance solo project.)
Even the pair’s collaboration is a consequence of physical proximity. They met after becoming neighbors in San Francisco’s Mission district in 2009.
“It took a while before we became friends—it probably took a year or so of living right next to each other,” says Quinn, speaking to Flagpole while preparing to head off on a 40-day tour of the United States. “At first, we weren’t thinking about doing the band—we were just talking about music and listening to records.
“Because he lived so close, we’d be up ’til 2 or 3 in the morning, just record after record. We’d listen to a lot of ’70s country like Waylon Jennings, ‘Dreaming my Dreams,’ Big Star, that kind of thing. We talked about what appealed to us about those recordings. [Those artists had] different ways of balancing tragic lyrics with humor. Then we’d listen to John Prine, who is hilarious and also really dark.”
Having already been aware of one another’s work, listening and talking inevitably led to a songwriting partnership. “There was a lot of theorizing and talking about different ways we could make a record and write songs before we actually tried it,” says Quinn. “We already had an idea of what the band would be, long before we would ever try to write a song.”
Quinn describes the ensuing approach as “totally collaborative. That’s one of the things we talked about before we even started, long before we started recording. A lot of times… [one person will] have their song, another person will have their song, and they’re really distinct. What we wanted to do was get away from that kind of individuality. We wanted it to be more like a real band. So, every song, we wanted it to only be possible coming from the two of us collaborating. If it sounded like a Donovan Quinn song or a Six Organs song, we wouldn’t have wanted it for New Bums.”
The effect of subsuming the musicians’ individual voices in favor of this new hybrid creates a woozy, grim intimacy. While the album’s tendency towards the dirge often makes Neil Young’s On the Beach sound alert by comparison, Quinn and Chasny’s humor emerges in paranoid send-ups like “The Killers and Me” and “Your Girlfriend Might Be a Cop.”
As for the sounds, each song retains the same sonic space, dominated by the pair’s well-worn voices singing in unison, peppered with the sound of fingers roving over acoustic guitar strings and drums covered in so many blankets they practically seem to have been put to bed.
While the two songwriters are known for their prolific output via multitudes of outlets, the Bums are eager to be taken seriously.
“I’m really proud of [the album]. That’s one of the reasons we’re touring so much,” says Quinn. “We all have a billion different projects, but we wanted to make sure people didn’t think it was a one-off or side project kind of thing we didn’t care about. We have a lot of plans; we have almost [another] album’s worth of songs ready to go. And the next album, we’re thinking of recording it in a studio with a band.”
Same people, different room, big difference: With this music, space matters.
WHO: Circulatory System, New Bums, Amy Godwin
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Monday, Mar. 17, 9 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $5 (21+), $7 (18–20)
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