Volcano Choir is the experimental pop/post-rock combination of a few excellent Wisconsin bands. Fronted by Justin Vernon of Eau Claire’s Bon Iver and backed by members of Milwaukee’s Collections of Colonies of Bees and Madison’s own All Tiny Creatures, Volcano Choir offers some of the most intricate and beautiful music to ever come from the state of Wisconsin. The band will be playing at the Orpheum on Friday night, and all signs point to the fact that this should be a very special show.
Volcano Choir formed in 2005 in the simplest way: Vernon greatly admired the work of Collections of Colonies of Bees and started to exchange music and sounds with members of the band via email. When I talked with Volcano Choir and Collections of Colonies of Bees guitarist Chris Rosenau, he spoke to the band’s origins as a sounding board and the release of their debut album, Unmap.
“For half or more of the time that Unmap was being written as a record,” he said, “Volcano Choir didn’t exist. It was literally a musical playground to screw around with ideas, to have fun and to try whatever we wanted.”
Unmap was released in 2009. The album was highly experimental in nature, owed largely to the band’s unique, decentralized way of creating music.
Volcano Choir is now touring in support of its sophomore release, Repave. The album feels extremely cohesive when compared to Unmap. The debut album featured mostly unintelligible and unimportant lyrics, but the songs still inspired great feeling, not unlike a Sigur Rós album. Repave feels like a traditional album in the fact that one can make sense and associate meaning to Vernon’s lyrics. While Unmap is the epitome of an experimental studio album, Repave feels like a conventional group effort, created with a live setting in mind.
“The process of actually reinterpreting those Unmap songs for a live aesthetic — those were the seeds of Repave,” Rosenau said. “Doing that, making parts of those songs bigger and more solid and more playable live, and really trying to elevate those songs to a more engaging live performance told us and informed us what was possible for the future.”
Milwaukee band Field Report will open for Volcano Choir Friday night. Chris Porterfield, the singer for Field Report, was a member of the legendary and now-defunct Justin Vernon-led band DeYarmond Edison. Rosenau has nothing but absolute praise for the band.
“We love Field Report,” he said. “We love all those guys. We’ve played with all those guys for years and years. They are our total brothers.”
When asked about Porterfield’s lyrical storytelling, Rosenau offered up a massive compliment: “Chris Porterfield is one of the greatest lyricists that I can even think of. He’s at a Springsteenian level.”
I asked Rosenau what we could expect from Friday’s show at the Orpheum.
“We’ve designed it to kind of be everything—from super quiet, really emotional stuff to the most bombastic shit that can be played on a stage. We’re going to really try to bring it and have a great time while we’re doing it. Everything is really worked out technically at this point, so we can just have a blast,” he said.
Rosenau said he is especially excited about playing a show for a crowd in their home state.
“We’re super psyched,” he said. “We’re all from Wisconsin, and we’ve all been to shows at the Orpheum. To be able to bring this music that we all really love to a place like that is just a total honor. We’re really humbled and super excited to do it.”