In Thomas Mann’s classic novel The Magic Mountain, the hero, Hans Castorp, observes the mysterious Madame Chauchat, a fellow patient in a swiss sanatorium, only from afar. Over time, a strange understanding develops between the watcher and the watched; when at last the two finally speak, it is the conversation of people who have known each other for years. Tyler Whitney was well aware of the implications behind this idealistic relationship when he borrowed the name Chauchat (pronounced “show-shah”) for his Lancaster, Pennsylvania band.

“I was interested in the relationship between sickness and love, as well as the idea that you could really come to know someone without ever having interacted with them,” Whitney says. “It was an attempt to reverse the common songwriting process, which typically reproduces Hans’ tactics of watching a woman from across the room, making her into a pure abstraction or idealization.” Of course, he adds, the name Chauchat is also shared by a notoriously dangerous machine gun used during World War I. “Soldiers were afraid to use it because it would backfire and explode in their faces. So it kind of reversed what we commonly expect from a gun; instead of shooting the enemy, it shot its shooter.”

This sense of dichotomy, the idea of typical intentions being turned on their heads, the image of a mirror that looks back at you, is the underlying essence of the category-defying music of Chauchat. And this type of thoughtful reasoning is also characteristic of Whitney, the singer/songwriter who has been behind the band since its first release in 1999. Whitney is both intelligent and wholly absorbing. He is Conor Oberst with a Master’s degree. He’s the guy at a party who didn’t really want to come in the first place, but ends up in the dining room talking philosophy to a group of riveted listeners. He is, like his music, a contradiction in terms: at once overwhelmingly intricate and infinitely listenable.

Whitney began his musical career, as so many do, playing electric guitar with a grunge band in the seventh grade. “At that point, I was mainly interested in feedback and breaking all of our equipment,” he remembers. “We lost our last permanent practice space in the guitarist’s parents’ basement after we smashed everything and then went to Burger King without cleaning it up. I got a four-track after that, and it completely changed the way I thought of writing and playing music.” While still in high school, Whitney formed Chauchat along with drummer Tong Ly, and began releasing self-recorded cassette tapes that were passed from hand-to-hand among local friends. Their first project, Unhappiness, was released on a friend’s homemade label, Unread Records, and over time the band developed something of a local following. Whitney even recalls filling a last-minute opening slot (performed entirely while sitting on a milk crate) for Bright Eyes during the “Letting Off the Happiness” tour of 1998. However, it wasn’t until 2001 that the group was asked to do an official recording session, and that’s what Whitney counts as the true birth of the band.

For their recording, Chauchat cobbled together what would become their more-or-less permanent lineup: Whitney on guitar and vocals, Chris Clunk on guitar, Mike Musser on bass, and Erik Sahd on drums. They spent that winter recording in a large old house owned by a friend.

“That remains the single most enjoyable musical experience of my life,” says Whitney when remembering those early sessions. “We didn’t really know each other, but we seemed to have a similar idea of what we wanted things to sound like, which was something I had never encountered in Lancaster.”

Those first days also allowed Whitney to immerse in what would become his overwhelming musical philosophy: the idea of space versus sound. Chauchat is nothing if not a thinking man’s band, and Whitney, as usual, has a very good explanation for what he was hoping to accomplish. “We tried to record in every room there, put microphones at the top of stairwells and recorded the sound of creaking floorboards, to reflect the space in which we were playing,” he remembers. “The history of sound recording has focused on blocking out the world from what is actually recorded, to separate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sounds. I have always been interested in making that boundary a little less clear. There is no reason to erase the sound of a car driving past outside, or the sound of a band member throwing up in the background. Those are also sounds that can make a recording of the song richer and more interesting.”

There comes a point when hearing a kid with a four-track talk about music versus noise and the beauty of “bad sounds” would make almost any jaded music critic roll their eyes. But the miracle of Chauchat is that this isn’t merely talk. This acceptance of the neutrality of noise, the idea of music that envelops and draws its listeners into the very atmosphere in which it was created, is evident in every note this band lays down: there is a sense of time and place, a feeling of songs that rise from the floorboards to work their way naturally into the room’s oxygen. Tracks bleed and run together, eliminating the silence between them. The listener is surrounded by the buzz of the recording until it becomes an integral part of the experience. Even the click of the cassette tape coming to an end is a natural addition. While it’s true that lo-fi has been done to death by plenty of artists who thought it gave them cred, don’t let the idea of tape hiss scare you. Chauchat is both earnest and successful in their intentions.

Of course, atmosphere isn’t everything. What hasn’t been said yet, and what bears repeating, is the fact that the music of Chauchat is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s the kind of thing that sets you back on your heels, knocks you off your couch, and brings to mind every ex-lover you’ve ever had leave you. The hush of soothing drum shuffles and strings are gently overlaid with Whitney’s surprisingly mature, mellow vocals, which falter occasionally but never rise in emotional wails as he delivers matter-of-fact lyrics that border on literature in their eloquent simplicity. The songs are characterized by a certain distance, from the vantage point of a cool outside observer watching as relationships dissolve and dissimilar people attempt to connect. And yet there’s something intensely personal here, too.

“There is something extremely important about the sequence of individual lines in a song and the way that they can talk back to one another,” Whitney says. “There are times when I say something earnest or just plain sentimental, and I will want to follow it up with something that mocks this kind of seriousness.” Once more, it’s the Chauchat dichotomy at work. Distance and closeness intertwine with lines of intense emotion followed by what qualifies as sly self-effacement, all painting a big picture that captures the sheer confusion of the human condition. In the song “Eyelash”, Whitney hops from images of a messy, doomed relationship to an exaggerated stereotypical “lost lover” lyric, which ends glibly with the admission that he has now “stopped making sense.” But he hasn’t. The final result is a better picture of the mess of lost love than could be gleaned from a thousand emo poems. The point is that there’s nothing simplistic or commercial about these lyrics; they’re the German literature of the music world, songs whose many layers reveal a complexity that only reveals itself to those willing to look for it.

As any long-time fan of Chauchat will te
ll you, attempting to locate releases by this band causes something of the same emotion one must feel attempting to track rare species of birds or insects across the globe. It involves a lot of dead ends, plenty of word of mouth, and more than its share of blind luck. However, it’s also well worth the effort. At the present time, Chauchat’s early efforts, Unhappiness and Memory Debt on My Deathbed, are available through Unread Records, while various other songs are available as e-albums or parts of compilations through a Belgian label called Sundays in Spring. A visit to Chauchat’s MySpace page provides a friendly discography complete with links to their various record label homes.

For those in search of what Chauchat has to offer, there are places to find it, and things are looking even more promising for the future. Whitney, who is living in Berlin for the summer, continues to write songs. Yer Bird Records, a small label based in Virginia, will be releasing the band’s last full-length album, Upon Thousands, later this year. In the meantime, no doubt, Chauchat will continue doing what they have been doing for awhile now, quietly and without fanfare: accomplishing insightful, beautiful, intelligent songs that the music world should really be hearing. The miracle is that more people aren’t already listening.

Listen: Various Tracks by Chauchat [at myspace.com]

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