Corpus Callosum | ja

Corpus Callosum is finely-crafted songs and obsessively-arranged music, paired with experimental puppetry, installation and performance-art. Self-produced with a DIY spirit, but a professional ethic, this ensemble manufactures wonderment with quality musicianship and understated magicianship.

A Corpus Callosum show starts small: an accordionist approaches the stage alone. He squeezes a slow chantey from the yawning bellows of his accordion. He sings. One by one his band mates emerge from the crowd. Each member of Corpus Callosum carries a worn brown suitcase. The lilting solo ballad effloresces into full orchestration as the performers divest their suitcases of the instruments therein concealed. Accordion is joined by bells, mandolin, ukulele, banjo, toy piano and scrap-metal percussion, while vocals branch into four-part harmony.

Throughout the performance each member will take several parts, calling for several instruments, and sing harmonies. With Stevie's arrangements Corpus Callosum can effect the sound of a small orchestra. Dax, a puppeteer with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, builds an eight foot long Spanish galleon from seemingly haphazard bits of cardboard. Stephanie, a dancer trained in Prague, twirls with a giant moth puppet. Qarly, a graduate of the Clown Conservatory in San Francisco, dons stilts. Jason hammers a soft beat from his home-made banjo, Avery tears the strings of a guitar emblazoned with an oil painting of a moth caught in a spider’s web, while Andrea spins tender melodies on the strings of a mandolin older than bluegrass.

The EP “Machine Under Its own Spell” was self-released in 2005 and charted across the country. After a break for graduate school, the band reformed in 2009 as a 7-piece music & performance ensemble and were immediately selected for the unsolicited Belle Foundation fellowship. Their first festival-scale puppetry performance, "The Museum Proper," debuted in 2010 and was awarded Editor's Choice by Maker Faire. The first full-length album, also released in 2010, features over 20 different instruments ranging from tuned wine glasses and stylophones to a harpsichord. They have launched three successful kickstarter campaigns, allowing them to function entirely on grassroots funding, and have so toured nationally. Corpus Callosum collaborates with many artists, and have recorded soundtracks for director Jason Rengel and the award-winning game studio Double Fine. When left to their own devices they develop movement-based performance art vignettes, avant-garde puppet shows and physically demanding music videos. In 2011 the band began curating a bimonthly evening of music & performance in San Jose, CA, and collaboratively run a small performance space near downtown San Francisco. A second album, now in progress, is being crafted in a warehouse recording environment, built themselves to satisfy unique artistic ideas. Corpus Callosum has opened for such bands as Yo La Tengo, Xiu Xiu, The Mountain Goats, Isis, Mates of State, Deerhoof, Jason Webley and Laura Gibson.

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"Corpus Callosum" was also the name of a now defunct electro shoegaze side project from Chris Koza, lead singer/guitarist of We Miss the Earth. .