Milwaukee’s instrumental post-rock ensemble Collections of Colonies of Bees have been unusually quiet the last few years, as members have spread themselves across outside projects. It was a bit of a surprise, then, when the band ended their long drought by posting a new album online this summer, SET—though as band leader Chris Rosenau explains, “new” might not be the correct word to use to describe the release. The group recorded it nearly four years ago, at the end of 2011, before releasing it as a Japanese-only CD.
“To give you an idea of the time frame, Nick Sanborn plays Rhodes on that record,” Rosenau says. “And when we were done recording it, we played shows with Nick frequently, and the major reason that he had to stop playing shows with us for that record wasn’t Sylvan Esso; it was because he was playing with Megafaun. It’s crazy; the record just sat and sat and sat.”
SET was recorded with the same lineup the band toured behind their 2011 album GIVING with, and while it shares the same bright, triumphant spirit and forward thrust as its predecessor, it was recorded under different circumstances. Where GIVING was the product of incalculable studio hours spent coordinating countless tiny, moving parts, the group approached SET more traditionally, the same way they would a live show. The album plays in more or less the same order as their setlists from the time.
“Every song on GIVING has got to have 100 tracks on it,” Rosenau says. “Some of them aren’t mixed in and some are barely audible, but there was effort put into 100 tracks per song. I really liked that way of recording for a long time, but for SET we spent a lot more time upfront the way most bands normally do it, thinking about sounds and crafting good sounds and laying down far less tracks. That was a fun way to work that I hadn’t really worked before.”
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With Rosenau focusing on solo projects and recording periodically with Volcano Choir—another band that works intermittently with no real deadlines in mind—Collections of Colonies of Bees aren’t an active concern right now. He says it’s unclear what form new Bees music might even take, but given the project’s long history (it’s existed in some form since 1998) smart money says it’ll record again eventually.
“It’s funny; both of the main bands I’m involved with, Volcano Choir and Bees, have ended up in the same place in some ways,” Rosenau says. “The idea for Bees has come back around to where Volcano Choir has landed, which is that it can be anything. There are no rules or limitations on it. Anything can happen.”
Stream or purchase SET below via Bandcamp.
