Chauchat: Select-Fire Of the Thinking Man

In Thomas Mann's classic novel The Magic Mountain, the hero, Hans Castorp, observes the mysterious Madame Chauchat, a fellow patient in a swiss sanatorium, only from afar. Over time, a strange understanding develops between the watcher and the watched; when at last the two finally speak, it is the conversation of people who have known each other for years. Tyler Whitney was well aware of the implications behind this idealistic relationship when he borrowed the name Chauchat (pronounced “show-shah”) for his Lancaster, Pennsylvania band.

"I was interested in the relationship between sickness and love, as well as the idea that you could really come to know someone without ever having interacted with them," Whitney says. "It was an attempt to reverse the common songwriting process, which typically reproduces Hans' tactics of watching a woman from across the room, making her into a pure abstraction or idealization." Of course, he adds, the name Chauchat is also shared by a notoriously dangerous machine gun used during World War I. "Soldiers were afraid to use it because it would backfire and explode in their faces. So it kind of reversed what we commonly expect from a gun; instead of shooting the enemy, it shot its shooter." Read More - August 8, 2007, Brenda Paro, Crawdaddy