The Disco Biscuits Find a New Groove

The dusty brick walls leading to the entrance of Nashville's Cannery Ballroom cough with muffled panic as the four obtuse extremities of the beefy bar bouncer form a stage door palisade.

He smells trouble.

Polychromatic strobe lights flash brief greetings through slight windows of excess, as the bouncer scans the audience for the source of the commotion.

"At least let me get my coat man!" a squinting gentleman screams, moving toward the manned gate. The bouncer relaxes his stance, and inches towards the lone rabble.

"You were caught smoking, you can't come into the show," responds the bouncer. The gentleman feigns indignation as he bends to look into the bouncer's deep-set eyes.

Positioning both hands on the gentleman's shoulders the bouncer levels his voice: "Just leave, I can't let you into the show." The gentleman's crimson face dries pallid as he exits the building crying out: "This is a Disco Biscuits concert for God's sake!"

Folding his arms, the smarting bouncer resumes checking tickets. He knows that in camp Bisco, someone has to be an adult.

The Disco Biscuits began as a University of Pennsylvania college band, and after thirteen years of playing and two band member shuffles the group is now comprised of Jon Gutwillig, Marc Brownstein, Allen Aucoin, and Aron Magner.

Their longevity distances The Disco Biscuits from their cohorts.

"It's easy to categorize them as a jam band, but I feel like they're an epic jam band," Jay Spawn, a satisfied customer of the Disco Biscuits live experience said.

Using an array of digital apple branded samples, distorted song structure and loose jam invention, the band immerses every song into a dialectic experience.

Spawn isn't alone when he says: "I'll be completely honest. I don't know the names of the songs."

The band uses a "dyslexic" performance which inverts, subverts, and distorts the original structure of the songs, making it difficult for all but the most dedicated Disco Biscuits fan to accurately recognize individual tracks.

Undeterred, the Disco faithful fans pour into large venues to experience the organic furry of on stage invention that they are known for.

"The live touring is slamming right now," says Brownstein. "Not everybody, but our touring business is slamming. Every show is healthy, three times as many people as we've done ever before in certain cities."

The Disco Biscuits are primed to capture more attention than ever.

"When you grow it happens in spurts, and it happens at odd times based on lots of different factors. We're going for a huge growth spurt on the live side of the show right now," Brownstein said.

Growth won't corrupt the unfettered idiom that defines their attitudes and sound.

"Yeah no doubt about it, we have fun we're like Peter Pan. Escape what you need to escape that's what music is about, right?" Brownstein clarifies.

Escapism narratives are canonized into the Disco Biscuits pallet, as a departure from linear sequencing is at the root of their performance. It may very well be the source of their appeal.

In the absence of predictability, the immutable discontinuity of experience allows the visceral to precede the comprehensible. The Disco Biscuits connect best when the dissipated sounds open the audience to new ways of experiencing that, perhaps, aren't intended to be understood.

"I feel like you could put it into some major motion picture, and let it play and it would be so completely serious," Spawn said. "It took a while. I was down front and they started out slow, but i don't think people understood where they were trying to come from… not that I understood. I'm not even going to pretend."

The band interacts with the crowd very little and confounds the experience with their derisive brand of instrumentation. In the absence of traditional nodes of interaction, the crowd is jarred into feeling that oppose understanding.

This approach doesn't work for everyone. "They get in these little groves where you lose yourself in boredom," said Roger Bischnor, a frustrated older gentleman. "It's hippie bullshit!"

To truly expand their vision, the band must translate their unique experience into a palatable product. Bischnor clarifies this by saying: "The crowd is a crowd."

The already convinced will invariably pursue the Disco Biscuits show, but gaining new fans is the job of an album. This is the next challenge for the Disco Biscuits.

The band's last studio album was released in 2002, and after three years of writing, collaboration, and expectations they are ready to release their fifth.

The band refuses to simply release an album, but in true form, seeks to turn expectation on its head. "We haven't set a release date. The music business is in such a funky place right now. The record side of the business has changed so much in the last five years. I'm not even sure how we're going to release it," Brownstein said.

"We want to be on the cutting edge. We want to be on the forefront so we don't get stuck in the old model when the model has changed."

The Disco Biscuits may just be in the right place to avoid the rut of practice. "Everything has changed, for me since that last album came out," Brownstein said. "We've all moved back to Philadelphia. We've grown up."

The album has not been leaked, but the details that have been released have generated significant intrigue. The Disco Biscuits plan to invigorate their sound by putting to work an ambitious production team.

"Great producers a couple of them super young early 20's," Brownstein said. "That's how we want to do things, we want to be young."

The album will use what is being dubbed a "5-5-5" method: five songs from Philadelphia bred, hip-hop producers Don Cheegro & Dirty Harry, five songs from Simon Posford & Benji Vaughan from the UK's Twisted Records, and five traditional Disco Biscuits songs.

"There are very specific vibes in the album. We were talking about laying that out all together, but it just works together when you mix it up," Brownstein said. "Go from one to the other, back and forth from one style to another. It flows really well." This is not to be confused with genre hopping, Brownstein clarifies: "We don't genre hop. We pretty much just stick to Himalayan art rock."

Despite their proclivities as Tibetan art rockers, The Disco Biscuits have managed to forge a lasting relationship with the Philadelphia hip-hop culture that may help to redefine the Disco Biscuits sound.

In true fashion the nefarious outliers may have helped the Disco Biscuits stumble into a new writing partnership. "We've been in Philly for thirteen years on and off. We're in the center studio and there's like 10 studios around us like all hip-hop studios," Brownstein said. "There were things that we shared in common. I walked into their studio, and it smelled just like our studio."

During their hazy invention the band was able to find curiosity, and later creative continuity with the hip-hop producers. "At first I don't think they really understood our music ," Brownstein said. "But you know they do respect people who can play their instruments really well. They were able to get that The Biscuits are all really well established players, and so as time went on the more they sat around and hung out and listened to us jamming they started to get really into it."

With the advent of Lil Wayne's dabbling into rock music, considerably more attention has been paid to the possibility of hip-hop redefining the confines of rock music, but The Disco Biscuits and Philly's best hip-hop producing combo have been teasing out a song writing machine for three years.

"We started writing hip-hop and R&B and they started writing rock. It's been three years now and we've written 40 songs with these guys," Brownstein said. "It's like we became a writing team. These producers and the four guys in The Biscuits became like a studio writing team, and over the course of the years you know it ended up being the album."

Being able to jam with practitioners of different genres has everyone excited about the possibilities. "It doesn't surprise me. Music is music, and these guys love all kinds of music," Brownstein said.

"Everyone always want to do something different than what they're used to doing," he said. Embracing difference is what may keep the Disco Biscuits relevant.

After thirteen years of playing, The Disco Biscuits must renew the way that they play music. With whole libraries accessible in a few torrents, changing your sound is not a convenience but a necessity.

By combining their experienced jam band innovation with the fresh ideas of eager production crew, The Disco Biscuits may be able to sell their complicated package to a larger audience.

"We were kids when that last album came out. We're no longer kids," Brownstein said.

Mystifying the lines between impermeable themes is a constant in the Bisco-artistic vision. With bizarre oddity, invention in this business must pervade experience if any band has hopes of not getting lost in their own groove.

As forty year old disgruntled concert goer Roger Bischnor asks: "What new does this bring to the table? What can excite me is what is important."

It is yet to be seen if the bands new concept will move the unaffected and impenetrable in new ways, but we can admire their departure from the lull of nostalgic Barvura.

Reinventing yourself: It's the adult thing to do.