March 10-16, 2005

cover story

Mad Pop

LUCKY NUMBERS: (L-R) Doug Holton, Mary Bichner and Brian Hopely. Box Five's debut EP was downloaded about 800 times in the first month. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Box Five makes music out of math and color. Feel free to dance.

by Patrick Rapa

"Pop music is getting a very bad rap these days," says Mary Bichner. "I don't think necessarily it's that pop music is bad. It's that the current wave of songwriting has been, kind of, not so wonderful."

"The same four people are writing all of the songs, and one's listening to what the other is doing. Eventually it's going to be the same four chords. It's very — what's the word? — homogenized."

Box Five's singing, piano-playing frontwoman acts a little let down by her radio. Besides Radiohead, Bjork and a few others, Bichner, 22, eschews popular music altogether. Mozart's more her speed. And that predilection toward the classical is certainly evident in the subtle complexity and wisps of grandeur on Box Five's new online-only EP, Exercises in Modern Pop.

As the title implies, the six songs represent a cross-section of the band's capabilities. "Allright" is the big rock anthem, fueled by Blondie beats from drummer Doug Holton, 31. Bichner's ghostly keys and cosmic vocal range, though the middle register is her wheelhouse, light up the torch song lucidity of "Snow Hymn." The swooning grooves of fretless bassist Brian Hopely, 25, give a dancey undertow to the midtempo "Nice Boy/Blow My Cover," a story-song about an outlaw saying goodbye to the boy with no "background in adventure."

But "Microscopic" is the track that says the most about how Box Five thinks. "It's 200 [total] beats, and because of that, it can be counted in either 4/4 or 5/4," explains Bichner. So she plays the piano in one time while Hopely and his bass are in another. To keep time, "I came up with a dance in 5/4," he says. Eye contact in the early days of rehearsing the song would often send "Microscopic" crumbling. It's a complicated procedure.

"And there are all these number correlations," continues Bichner. "Everything can be counted in fives except for four measures that are 6/3, 9/7 ... ."

Wait a minute, "Microscopic" is a two-minute pop ditty. It doesn't sound like math rock.

"Math rock is cool, but a lot of the math rock that I've listened to, it's almost unlistenable. Like, they use things like the Fibonacci Sequence, and have one measure be like one beat, then two beats, then five, eight, something like that. And that's cool, but it's not very catchy. You can't dance to it," says Bichner. "I wanted to make something that sounded like a regular song on the surface, but at the same time, if you really were interested, you could see what was underneath. It's kind of off-kilter, but I tried."

The lyrics to "Microscopic," "underminded / unresponsive / walking wounded / turn to ashes," are similarly confounding, but don't waste your time investigating. "That one is actually about nothing," laughs Bichner. "I was just singing syllables for a while, and then eventually pieced something together." Still, the busy message board on www.boxfive.org has been aflutter with interpretations. Fans either didn't know or didn't care they were being experimented on.

What kind of a person dreams up a Beautiful Mind-style algorithm and then buries it in a catchy but meaningless little pop song?

Bichner has what you'd call perfect pitch, which is why she finds the three chord monte of pop radio particularly boring. After one listen, she could name the notes in Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" or reproduce Green Day's latest hit note-for-note on the piano.

Before the band and a day job (she's a bank teller in Center City) started taking up more of her time, Bichner worked on "Radiohead for the Pianoforte," a Web site dedicated to her hand-written transcriptions of Radiohead music. About a year and a half ago, the British supergroup's publisher Warner/Chappell ordered her to take the site down. She responded by pointing out the lack of Radiohead piano books available and noted the errors in the guitar primers currently available. Warner/Chappell relented and hinted a job offer could be in Bichner's future. That was the last she heard from them.

"That was probably just, you know, to keep me quiet," she says with a smile. And besides, "Joining the other side? It wouldn't have seemed right to me."

Perfect pitch is not the extent of Bichner's musical superpowers. She's also a polymodal synesthete, which means she associates certain colors with certain notes. She describes it as a sudden but subtle tint on her mind's eye.

"You know when you close your eyes really fast and you see red? It's almost something like that. You just see purple really quick," Bichner tries. Her brother Joe, who played guitar with Box Five before leaving to concentrate on school and his ska band 80 Proof Soul, is a polymodal synesthete, too. He sees different colors than his sister, which could be because guitar tablature is a number-based system, while the piano uses letters. Both siblings are self-taught.

"Sometimes when I look at the keys, the ones that I'm going to play next will light up in the appropriate color," she says.

"I could play a piano if it did that," jokes Holton. He and Hopely seem to take their bandmate's creative and biological eccentricities in stride. Though they're not polymodal synesthetes, they share Bichner's affinity for pop music with hidden depth. "We're trying to introduce Mary to the pop chorus concept," Holton says. "At least one."

That's not to say Exercises in Modern Pop isn't accessible. The EP, recorded by Grammy-winning producer David Ivory, is finding an audience worldwide thanks to word of mouth and some kind placement from popular music blogs. It's a happy accident, considering the band's original plan to release a tangible CD had to be scrapped for lack of funds.

"We were thinking we would use this as an experiment: How far could the album reach if it was only released online?" says Bichner. "Even in the first month we've had a little more than 5,000 downloads from the site, I think it's like 800, 850 albums. We would never have sold 800 albums in a month, you know? No way."

Box Five has set four goals for 2005, ranging from possible to pipe dream. "Number one, do an R5 show," says Bichner. That one's already in the works. "Two, be in Venus magazine." A CD has been sent. "Three, play Conan O'Brien. Four, play the Q Awards in England." Still working on those.

"We have no idea if we can get those goals accomplished, but if you put them out there, you never know what'll happen," she says. "I think this is gonna be our year."

Box Five Exercises in Modern Pop (Clean Cup) For all their theorizing and mathematizing, Box Five's six-song debut is a pretty, accessible pop EP, complete with recognizable structures and hummable hooks. The classical-music and math-rock undercurrents never drag Exercises into unnecessarily deep art-rock waters. Mary Bichner's formidable vocal range takes the spotlight on moody ballads like "Write It Out" and "Snow Hymn." Box Five is at its most powerful on "Nice Boy/Blow My Cover," a swift adventure song with a piano-driven melody and a story to tell. —Patrick Rapa Download for free from www.boxfive.org.

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