Volcano Choir's Formation 'A Total Experiment'

Perhaps if Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver) began a long-distance collaboration with the guys from Collections of Colonies of Bees back in, say, the early 2000s, they would've called their little alliance the Postal Service. But now that the name is already taken and, more importantly, broadband is available even in Wisconsin, there'd be no reason. Despite the physical distances that often stood between Vernon and the Milwaukee-based Bees, they e-mailed music files to each other instead of using a courier. And, by sending countless sequences of ones and zeros through space and time, they collectively created the foundation for a project called Volcano Choir.

"There was no plan whatsoever for these sketches I put together; just a total experiment," says project supervisor Chris Rosenau. He and his fellow Bees would work on these skeletal pieces just for fun without knowing what they would do with them, until around 2007 when Vernon came on board.

"When we had time, we'd send instrumental ideas to Justin, and he'd experiment vocally with them," says Rosenau. "At the same time, he'd send vocal ideas to us, and we'd experiment with instrumentation for them."

Rosenau recalls that during the time period when many of these songs were first being assembled, Vernon was also working on the group of songs that would eventually form Bon Iver's 'For Emma, Forever Ago,' which became something of an underground hit last year. "He would post mixes of that record and see what we thought," says Rosenau. "We thought it was pretty freaking good."

Expect people to have the same reaction when 'Unmap' drops on September 22.