This month marks the tenth year anniversary of the formation of The Brown Christmas; That’s a decade worth of strange, noisy, circusy, synth sounds. It’s a strange thing to try to put into perspective. I always imagined being able to look back at time in solid chunks, but when I try to picture this past decade as some kind of physical cube of time, it doesn’t seem to have the massive spacial presence I imagined it would.
There is no towering structure behind me on the horizon to gaze at nostalgically. There is no defining line that separates what was from what now is, instead everything seems piled upon itself in the now; ever present and infinitely accessible. Every jam session, every note, every outburst of musical ecstasy is present now, able to be called forth at will from the void of my memory. There is a chronological order to these events, but wether they occurred a few days ago or several years ago seems impossible to tell and irrelevant to consider.
It all began as a chance gathering between my two very good friends; Todd, Joemazing, and myself. I can’t say I fully remember how we decided to start playing music or why it finally happened that particular day. There had definitely been talks of jamming for at least a few months prior; I had recently picked up my saxophone again which hadn’t been used since middle school, and had requested and received a sitar that christmas in anticipation of jamming. These two instruments, in combination with Todd’s bass, and Joe’s Casio rapman seemed like the proper tools to start a band. So we gathered in my cramped bedroom with a single bass amp, a worn out cassette, and a cheap stereo with a built in microphone, and let loose a torrent of sound.
It is also unclear why we continued playing music. It’s quite obvious now, and must have been just as obvious then, that we had no idea how to make music or even really how to play our instruments. I imagine most bands start with kids who know a few chords on guitar and want to play some covers of their favorite band. Maybe they get good enough and start writing a few original songs. Then maybe after a few rehearsals they start forming dreams of rock stardom, or at least appearing cool to the kids in high school. We never really did any of that.
There was no learning chords, writing songs, or rehearing; you just pounded on your instrument until the tape ran out, transferred it to the family computer, and then recorded over the tape again. You ‘wrote’ the music as you played it and you only played it once. It didn’t matter if it sounded good or not, you’d play something completely new the next time. It was a desire to create and perhaps more importantly, a desire to have fun that sustained this.
I could write page after page about everything that’s happened in The Brown Christmas over the past ten years. There are tales of new instruments being added to our collection, screen printing clothing found in a dumpster, performing in crowed basements (and empty basements), instrument malfunctions, abandoned projects, music video shoots, and a particularly zany few weeks involving a character known as the boot. These stories however are probably best left for another time, seeing as I’ve already written quite a bit.
Instead I’ll close with this; it’s quite amusing to think of all the local indie rock and metal bands formed around the same time who have long since changed their lineup or broken up, and here the three of us are continuing to record weird shit and have fun. In these ten years we’ve recorded over 45 gigs of music, which equates to at least a full week worth of audio, we’ve put out 25 albums, and have played about 20 live shows.
Roman numeral ten is symbolized as an X, and if you were looking at a treasure map X is where you’d want to dig. Joemazing once said, “It’s a lot like a big pile of trash; you have to dig through all the garbage …to get to the good tasting garbage underneath.”
