Right: Drew Doucette Below: Chad Clark
and Basla Andolsun
producer and/or engineer for D.C. bands like Fugazi, the Dismemberment Plan, Burning Airlines and others. But never quite like this. Eventually, the group begins recording several violin parts from Cook, who shares vocal duties with Clark. The very last note feels especially intense. “That note just gives me chills,” says Clark. “That note is profound to me. I feel like that note is the Mona Lisa smile. There are so many interpretations.” Then he laughs. “Our band talks differently than other bands.” It’s true. Beauty Pill is not like other bands.
Despite forming in 2001, the outfit has only released two EPs (2001’s The Cigarette Girl From The Future and 2003’s You Are Right To Be Afraid) and a full-length (2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle). There’s been some turnover in the lineup. But there’s something else almost indescribable about this band— an ethnically mixed group that’s recorded for Dischord while making music that veers far beyond the punk-based sound the D.C. label is most famous for. Beauty Pill’s songs embrace both seductive, groove-oriented melodies and darkly witty lyrics. “Chad brought to [Dischord]—and all of his projects—a different approach to the recording process,” says Ryan Holladay, half of electronic duo Bluebrain and the new media curator at Artisphere. (He and Clark conceived the Immersive Ideal project.) “He was one of the first in that wave to really experiment with the studio, with instruments, the same way someone like Brian Eno would.” In 2006, Clark posted the demo of a new song, “Ann The Word,” on MySpace. The band’s relationship with traditional indie rock grew ever more distant. Yet Clark received a great deal of positive response to the track, giving him confidence in the new direction. As of this writing, it’s been streamed on MySpace more than 50,000 times. “Ann The Word” was seemingly built equally from Japanese folk instruments and eerie laptop sounds. Cook delivered arguably Clark’s finest lyric yet: “In the dream, the car fills up with water/And you and I are kissing just the same … /And you turn to me and whisper/‘You and me, we’re fucked, we’re free.’” In 2007, Clark got sick. Real sick. In a MySpace blog post dated Feb. 22, 2008, he revealed that in four hours, he would undergo open-heart surgery. He had been diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy. The valves of his heart were not connecting properly, causing the organ to grow increasingly larger. He almost died.
photos by morgan klein
Meanwhile, back at Artisphere,
the whole band is here now: Clark, Cook, Drew Doucette, Basla Andolsun, Devin Ocampo and Abram Goodrich. They begin working on a new song. Clark plays a demo over the sound system. The other band members—they are all multi-instrumentalists; most of them have other bands and projects—play along, trying different ideas, switching instruments from one person to another. It starts with Ocampo on drums and percussion and Goodrich on bass, while Clark provides a wordless vocal melody. Then Doucette takes over on bass, and Goodrich moves to percussion. Cook starts trying out different motifs on piano. Andolsun begins playing guitar. “This makes me so happy,” Clark exclaims at one point. “I couldn’t do it on my own.” “The song’s called ‘Near Miss Stories,’” he later explains. “I started to put it together when I was in the hospital and couldn’t really play any instruments.” During open-heart surgery, doctors must break a patient’s ribs to get to the heart, so in the aftermath, Clark’s ribs were held together with metal rings in order to heal. The surgery was a success, but his movement was severely limited for several months. Playing guitar was not an option. “I was experimenting with my laptop on a hospital bed and experimenting with samples,” he says. It’s the only song Clark has written about his illness. “You ever see in movies where people are in the bottom of a cave, and there’s a cave-in, or they’re out at sea and they’re shipwrecked?,” he says. “The thing that they hold onto in that moment—and I can tell you this is true—is the idea that someday, it will be a story. You turn to someone and go, ‘We’re gonna make it, and I’m gonna see you at a table, and we’re gonna clink glasses, and this is just gonna be a story.’ I remember at a really uncertain point— every heartbeat could be my last—thinking, someday I’m just gonna tell this story to a bunch of friends, and it’s gonna be, ‘Wow, 2008 was crazy.’ I found myself fantasizing about that a lot.” Clark has a real way with words, in lyrics and conversation and on Twitter (@beautypill). “Having worked with Chad for a number of years now, he has a gift of talking about music or pretty much everything,” says Ocampo, who also played with Clark and Goodrich in the band Smart Went Crazy in the ’90s. “And a lot of the time, on the other side, it’s
frustrating,” he continues, as Clark laughs in acknowledgement. “We’ve had to really work on that, because a lot of times we do have the same image in our heads. But when we vocalize it, it ruins it. That’s why I’m always saying, ‘Well, let’s just speak some other way, because the language sometimes gets in the way of the thought.’” “Meaning is important to me,” says Clark. “It’s one of the things I loathe about indie rock. I really can’t stand the combination of supercilious, aloof elitism, at the same time as not having content. I don’t want to suggest that, oh, everything needs to be this clear narrative and linear idea before I care about it. It’s more that the person feels something inside and they’re trying to get that across. I can tell when that’s not the case.” A few weeks after Immersive Ideal’s first
phase wraps up, Clark takes time from his vacation to talk about the project so far. He still needs to finish recording vocals and mix the album at his home studio. A lot of musical ideas were recorded for each song at Artisphere, and it’s not entirely clear yet what the finished album will sound like, how many songs it will have or even what label it will be on. Elements of Clark’s electronicsbased demos will likely be utilized. And, he says, “Ann The Word” will definitely make the track listing. (Although “it would be a hilarious mindfuck if we didn’t put that on the record,” he laughs.) For Beauty Pill, the experience of recording an album in public wound up being overwhelmingly positive. “If you were to ask any member of the band, everyone would say it was very successful,” says Clark. “It brought us closer together in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Immediately after, we were saying, ‘We have to do this again.’” —Michael Pelusi
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