Interview Volcano Choir gets ready to explode

Milwaukee band Collections Of Colonies Of Bees first met Justin Vernon in 2005, when he was a member of Eau Claire-based Americana outfit DeYarmond Edison. The instrumental post-rock group quickly befriended the singer-songwriter, and soon began informally collaborating with him, exchanging musical fragments online and fleshing out each other’s ideas. This process continued for years, even as Vernon gained notoriety as the leader of acclaimed chamber-folk group Bon Iver. What started out as a lark gradually turned into something more as the doodles coalesced into actual, fully formed songs. By 2008, everybody agreed that they had a new band on their hands: Volcano Choir. In advance of the forthcoming Unmap (due out Sept. 22), The A.V. Club recently caught up with four-sixths of Collections Of Colonies Of Bees to talk about the album. (Download "Island, IS" here.)

The A.V. Club: What are the roots of Volcano Choir? It seems like you recorded with Justin Vernon for years before releasing anything.

Jim Schoenecker: It wasn’t this conscious, “Hey, we’re going to start this band together, and here’s the material we’re going to work on.” It was all very loose. Chris and I had talked about doing stuff with a vocalist, which we’ve never really done before. We had a couple of ideas of who that would be, and once we met Justin that came up as a possibility. Chris and I have always done recording projects, and this is how it started. It’s just ideas, and you see how it goes, and then years and years go by and it’s like you can keep working on this forever and ever. Over the last year Justin really stepped up and said, “Let’s fucking do this.” Then it started to become more than a four-track swap sort of thing—this could be a record, a good record.

Chris Rosenau: I think the whole point of the thing for Justin is he was working on experimenting on this whole new vocal idea—this choir, falsetto thing. And he was experimenting with it on some of the songs that ended up being Volcano Choir stuff at around the same time he was working on For Emma, Forever Ago up north. So, it’s not a linear kind of thing. Things were all sort of happening in parallel. We were really just having a shit-ton of fun with him.

AVC: How did the process of swapping and working on each other’s song fragments begin?

JS: Justin did a self-released record called Hazeltons right after DeYarmond Edison broke up, and he asked us to do a song that ended up on there. That was the first thing we did. But I think he threw a bunch of stuff our way.

CR: We have an FTP site where everyone would post files, and pick and choose what we wanted to work on. Justin would post stuff, and we’d take it down and work on it. And we’d post stuff and he’d take it down and work on it.

AVC: It sounds like your collaboration started out more playful than professional.

Jon Mueller: It was like checkers or something. Here’s my move, here’s your move, and seeing how it was all laying out after a while.

CR: It all stemmed from internal excitement, like, “Whoa, listen to what Justin sent us now! And listen to what we sent to him and he sent back.” And we’d send stuff, and he’d e-mail back with his lid blown off. We were all super into it together.

AVC: How did this project go from being a fun lark among friends to an actual band?

Dan Spack: The first time we were up there recording and getting all the stuff aggregated, we realized it was now going to be a band somehow, and we had to be something else, because it had nothing to do with either band at all. Our friendship took an awesome spike, as did our desire to make it a real project.

JM: We went up there and hung out for a while, and Justin was like, “I think we’re playing now.” Look how long we’ve doing this shit. It’s not just this side, fun thing. We’re doing some pretty serious stuff. And then there’s the dream thing.

AVC: What’s that?

JM: It’s just this goofy dream that involves another guy, and he was like, “I’m not down with this at all.” But then we told Justin about it and he said, “I am totally down with it.” [Everybody laughs.] I had a dream about a specific situation about Chris and I playing music with a vocalist, which we’d never done before, so it was kind of a weird dream. But the weirdest part of the dream was I sitting in the audience watching us play, including myself. So, it was like, “Whoa.” [Laughter.]