Turn the beat around

Michael Columbia, the Chicago-based duo, faces a dual quandary. First of all, it is a psychedelic pop band on an indie-hip-hop label — Alabaster/Galapagos 4, home to Meaty Ogre, Denizen Kane and Offwhyte. “I think we are disappointing for some of the label’s fans,” says Dave McDonnell, who plays keyboards and saxophone. “They expect to hear rappers, but instead they hear a song about a radioactive mouse, with a jazz saxophone. But that just makes us leaner and meaner. I would hope that for one out of five of the label’s fans, hearing Michael Columbia is a mind-opening experience.”

??
The greater dilemma is the contrast between the minimalism of the group’s songwriting and performance, and its onstage persona. “We play music that people think of as arty, but when arty people see us joking around on stage, it turns them off,” McDonnell says. “When people go out to have a good time and see a band that jokes around a lot, they hear this weird arty music we do and they’re turned off.”

??
Since 2002, McDonnell and drummer Dylan Ryan have tried to strike a balance between art-rock loftiness and party band irreverence. While they know not everyone will be into it, their fan base is growing. The first time the group performed at Lenny’s, it was in front of a crowd of only a few people, but audiences have grown exponentially with each successive return.

??
The group builds from improvisation and psychedelic pop minimalism, expanding a musical palette colored by the likes of Can, Savath + Savalas and Philip Glass. McDonnell’s musical background includes playing trombone for Athens’ Elephant 6 progenitors Olivia Tremor Control, as well as playing in the critically acclaimed San Francisco group Need New Body and Chicago’s Bablicon. Ryan, meanwhile, also plays with Icy Demons, which includes members of Need New Body and Bablicon. That combined résumé links the twosome to a vast and experimental indie-rock lineage.

??
Michael Columbia released its debut album in 2002, taking its name from a mistake that McDonnell made. Ryan had a friend who played guitar and lived in New York City. McDonnell forgot the friend’s name and called him “Michael Columbia.” They thought it was so funny that they adopted it for their group.

??
Much of their music is derived from improvisations and jams that inevitably produce riffs that turn up later in songs. “Whenever we practice, someone starts doing something and it gets looped,” McDonnell says. “Then we try a bunch of different stuff over it. We have a tape player set up, so we’ll just roll the tape and every couple of weeks go back to find things that sound cool and work them into a tune.”

??
This approach first took shape with the spacious ambient pop that appeared on the group’s self-titled debut and evolved significantly with 2005’s These Are Colored Bars. Michael Columbia’s latest release, an EP titled Stay Hard, makes use of undulating melodies that churn while staccato drum and saxophone lines overlap, forming a web of rhythm.

??
In “T.E. Lawrence,” for example, simple percussion is static in motion. But by placing an emphasis on different cadences, the rhythms mutate into entirely different structures. That hallucinogenic quality gives Michael Columbia’s sound much of its depth. “We went through a phase of running two drum machines at the same time,” McDonnell says. “We’d have two time signatures going at the same time, creating this weird combination where you can decide where the beat goes.”

??
Though Michael Columbia’s songs are mostly instrumental, vocals occasionally work their way into the mix and are subject to the same psychoactive experimentation as the beats. In “Dog Dog Camel” and “Predator,” McDonnell and Ryan craft misshapen, vocal harmonies, layering high and low voices. “Dylan is good at singing low and I can hit really high notes,” McDonnell explains. “We realized we couldn’t do anything more live, because we’re already busy doing two or three things at the same time. We figured that if we could sing, it would add another layer. One thing that’s really cool about the human ear is that once you get three voices in harmony, you can’t tell how many voices are there. When we play live, we can only do two-part harmonies, but on the recording it sounds like three to six.”

??
Because Michael Columbia is a duo, it limits McDonnell and Ryan in terms of the complexity of the material they perform. “We can have a simple melody or bassline, but if it doesn’t sound the same every time it repeats, you end up with different textures even though you’re playing the same thing over and over again,” says McDonnell.

??
The results are a sensory-jamming concoction of rhythms that strike the brain differently with each go around. “We’re not very pretentious about the music,” says McDonnell. “We try to come up with stuff that people could do drugs to that is entertaining to us as well.”