It’s been a long time coming. For almost 18 months, the mysterious MP3s and live bootlegs of one Disappears, formed by Brian Case and company after various hiatuses (hiatii?) of his other projects 90 Day Men and The Ponys, floated around the Internet. A few 7″ inches mimicking Can’s Delay 1968 appeared, and the group was invited to play an early afternoon show at last year’s Pitchfork Festival. Now at last, Disappears prepares to drop their proper debut Lux on Kranky April 13 and make like babies and head out on their first headlining tour with Austin’s Woven Bones.

Shortly after their opening set for Tortoise back in February at Headliners, Brian was awesome enough to step outside in the cold with me for a few and chat. However, Brian, despite being a formidable presence on stage, is a polite and soft spoken dude, and Tortoise, despite being smooth on record, gets scary loud live. I wasn’t able to transcribe everything we talked about below, but that was probably for the best, as we shot the shit about Faust and whether we’ll have to time to go bowling in June when they return to Louisville, which may or may not be editorially interesting. Below, Brian discusses Disappears’ origins, their collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and some excellent Chicago noise bros, and why they opted to give away their early stuff.

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Right now, all of your releases are available for free download on your site. Though  it’s not super uncommon, it’s still a bold move. What led you to go that route?

We were just hoping that people would share with their friends. Not make money or anything, ya know. When we first started playing as Disappears, we wanted as many people to hear about it as possible. And we wanted to give it away so people would share the music with their friends. And ya know, people will be more inclined to check it out something new if it’s free than having to buy it, and then be inclined to come out to the show, which really works out in the end for us.

Has there been a good response to the material so far?

Yeah, I mean, it’s cool. We did our 7″ ourselves and they’re all almost gone now. I don’t know our traffic or anything or how many people have been downloading the songs…

Well, they’ve begun to spread across a few blogs, that’s how I found out about you…

Yeah yeah, and that’s definitely why we approached it that way.

Alright, so Lux is going to be the first official release on Kranky in April. What can we expect with the record? Will it be similar to the live show, a curveball, something in between?

Well, it has a bunch of songs from [Live Over the Rainbo], and a few that aren’t. They’re all different versions, so you’ll hear something different for sure. It’s funny because now live, we’re playing past it, playing more songs from the new new record – we’ve been writing a lot…

Yeah, I heard some songs tonight I didn’t recognize …

Yeah, yeah. Lux has been done for a year now. Now that’s it’s coming out, it’s cool, ya know, and we’re excited, and the next record is almost done too [laughs].

Was it a conscience decision to make your first full length a live album, or how did that come about?

Well, we did this tour with Deerhunter and Times New Viking and we had the singles at the time, but we wanted to make something like a CD. We didn’t want to count on just 7″s. We recorded a show and made 100 copies, but we didn’t mean for all the live songs to be out before our first album. Just a burned CD in a black slip case with a sticker.  It’s not our first full length, just a live document we were hoping people would share with their friends and get the word out.  It kind of took on a life of its own, being issued on LP and cassette by Plus Tapes and Rococco Records here in Chicago.

How did you decide to start up Disappears instead of continuing stuff like 90 Day Men and Ponys?

Disappears started between me and Graeme, of Boas, just doing some recording.  He really added a lot to the feel of the songs while we were demoing, and seemed to like them so we figured we’d see where it went.  He brought on Jonathan from the band, which i was really happy about and Jonathan brought on Damon, which was a real gift for us.  It was a really organic process and that was exactly how we wanted to play it.  I could never do music like 90 Day Men without the guys in the band, it was a totally unique experience to thefour of us and trying to recreate that would be a real disappointment.  As far as Ponys goes, we were taking a break when Disappears started so doing something like that didn’t even cross my mind as i was already doing it.  To me Disappears is sort of a bridge between those two bands – structurally it’s got the straight forwardness of Ponys but conceptually it veers more toward 90 Day territory.  With that said, I look at it as completely separate from those two – it is definitely the sum of its parts and I think we’re all pretty lucky we fell into it as easily as we did.

Speaking of 90 Day Men, any chance of a Lichens / Disappears collaboration?

Oh, maybe! We played a show with Rob and it was fun. I would totally love to do that. We did do a collaboration with this band with Rob called White/ Light. He put out a record with them called White/Lichens, and do shows together. So yeah, we made a record with those two guys, and they’re kind of a droney noise project with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth on drums. So, it’s cool. It’s all of Disappears, Steve Shelley, and these two noise dudes [White/Light]. Some guys are putting a 7″ out soon. We recorded a bunch of songs, but for now, just two are coming out. We’ll see what happens.

Awesome. And ya know, that’s something I noticed about Chicago when I lived there. Despite its size, the music there is totally interconnected.

Yeah, it’s a big small town.

Yeah, that’s kinda how Louisville is. It’s kinda six degrees of Slint and Bonnie Prince. I’m assuming that’s how this big Tortoise tour happened…

Yeah, totally. We know all these guys really well. A couple of us have worked with a couple of them, and we hang out outside of music. We were going to tour with them before, but had to pull out. And they asked us back again to make up. It’s more out of friendship than anything, and it’s cool.

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And from here, Brian and I talked about random stuff for a few minutes before heading back in to catch the remainder of Tortoise. Lux hits shelves, iTunes, and the Kranky catalog next week. Last but not least, the band returns to Louisville with a Decibel Tolls sponsored show at Zanzabar on June 10th with Woven Bones (more info). Should be a scream!

MP3 :::
Disappears – Magics