Although some would argue that the on-campus music culture has been deafeningly silent this fall, a few student musicians are as busy as ever composing melodies and pushing the musical envelope. Seniors Louis Weeks and Brian Wu are two such musicians.
Both Weeks and Wu have been performing at Bowdoin since they arrived as first years in 2007. Weeks has performed at numerous pub nights and coffee houses, while Wu and his cover band, Mr. Suds, have long been a favorite College House performer.
After going abroad to Dublin and Amsterdam, respectively, in fall 2009, Weeks and Wu developed their own unique musical styles and have spent this semester collaborating to create music they both describe as very different from what they played before. The duo played a well-attended gig at Frontier Café early in the semester and has been known to play what Weeks calls "the occasional blitz show" on campus.
Both musicians have been making music long before they came to Bowdoin, and it is their vast musical experiences that have allowed their current partnership to blossom into success.
Weeks grew up playing piano throughout middle school and high school.
According to Weeks, his lack of formal education in music allowed him to write freely without set rules.
"I just started writing, and it gradually started to sound more and more like what I thought songs should sound like."
Weeks played guitar in a band in high school and recalls performing all around Baltimore, at one point performing between two to three times a month.
"We did the high school thing," Weeks recalled. "We had t-shirts and bumper stickers. We cut an album in my drummer's basement on this Sony 16-track with one shared microphone, so recording took quite a while."
The band would sell albums after shows, since they didn't know how to sell music online.
"We were just peddling discs where we could," said Weeks.
Wu, too, began playing piano at an early age, but stopped in sixth grade.
"I hated it," he said.
Wu stopped playing music until high school, when he took up guitar and participated in vocal lessons, chorus and a few musicals. Wu attributes his rediscovery of music to his high school Music Theory class, in which he had the opportunity to "write fugues and chorales and all sorts of cool stuff like that," and challenge himself musically. However, Wu's musical interests didn't completely solidify until he came to Bowdoin.
"I hadn't really intended to get into music before I came to college," he said.
Now, both Weeks and Wu are active in the music community on campus. Weeks is a music major and Wu is a music minor. Both have been members of the The Meddiebembster a cappella group since their first year and are currently working on independent projects within the music department. Weeks is completing an independent study with Shende in which he is composing a chamber opera based on Huckleberry Finn. The experience, Weeks said, has been very unique and enlightening.
"I've been spending a lot of time writing and composing for performers other than myself, which has been a challenging and humbling, but also a really awesome experience," said Weeks. "I take for granted just how many steps you skip when you're writing for yourself, but there's that whole level of communication that's missing."
Weeks is also a member of Chamber Choir and composes his own music.
Wu's independent study focuses on electronic music with Professor and Lecturer of Music Frank Mauceri.
"On the side, I've been continuing to work on my own, trying to dig deeper and deeper into the electronic side of things," said Wu. "Electronic music exists in so many bands that I listen to now, so I'm trying to extract that and incorporate that into my music."
Wu has also performed as a member of Mr. Suds since his sophomore year at Bowdoin.
Weeks and Wu both said that they are excited about their current collaboration, one that fuses their unique musical styles into, according to Wu, a "darker sound" than either Weeks or Wu has produced before. According to Weeks and Wu, the process they undertake to create their music involves one of them writing a song and bringing it to the other to listen to and edit.
"We trust each other enough to say, 'Here's an idea that I've written, and then we'll swap it and ask the other to think about it and get back to us," said Weeks. "It feels like one person is the writer, the other the editor, and in that there's collaboration."
In turn, there is a fusion of their unique styles of music, a combination between Weeks' witty lyrically-driven harmonies and Wu's emotional, accordion-driven melodies.
As Weeks said, "The stuff that I've done with Brian is more emotionally honest than the stuff I've written before. I tend to personally hide behind language, but I think the stuff that we do is a little bit more emotionally driven."
"Our goal is to be less explicit with our lyrics and instead let the audience feel the same kind of thrill we feel when we play our music," Wu said.
Both Weeks and Wu said that the music they are making sounds inherently more brooding and "ghostly" due to Wu's incorporation of the accordion.
"It is a bit dark and ghostly," said Wu. "The accordion does that—It might be a good reason to include other forms of instrumentation."
Likewise, their newer music is not attempting to tell a story or be "pretty or tidy," according to Weeks. Instead, they are experimenting with different sounds and textures and incorporating falsetto into their vocal harmonies.
"Falsetto has a way of cutting through in a darker way," said Weeks.
Whatever future results from their individual songwriting and collaboration, there are surely exciting things to come from these two musicians. Both Weeks and Wu said they have enjoyed taking advantage of all of Bowdoin's venues thus far, and that they plan to play as often as possible around campus next semester.
They also hope to record a few of their songs in order to gauge public perception of their novel sound. They say the project will be pretty self-contained, since both Weeks and Wu are able to write, edit and produce the music themselves. In general, though, they simply hope to continue collaborating and see what happens.
"I would love to continue writing," Wu said. "When Louis and I get together, and play together and write together, things happen."
Weeks and Wu will be performing this Saturday at the Bowdoin Music Collective Showcase at the pub.