Elephant 6's variety show over the sea
A talk about the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour
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As a member of the fabled indie-rock band Neutral Milk Hotel and the mastermind behind The Music Tapes, Julian Koster has played a pivotal role in the Elephant 6 Recording Company collective from the beginning. From Athens, Ga., Koster is helming a big tour of various Elephant 6 characters: musicians from bands like Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples In Stereo, Elf Power, and many more. Tuesday's stop at the Bottom Lounge will function something like a variety show, with special appearances by Koster's friends and Music Tapes bandmates Static (a television programmed to "sing" along onstage) and the Seven Foot Tall Metronome (a rhythm-machine he built with wood). Decider recently spoke with Koster about the state of Elephant 6, his thoughts on Neutral Milk Hotel, and what it means to exist inside of every day.
Decider: You're back in Athens for the first time in a while. How do you describe the atmosphere there?
Julian Koster: It's very special, very extraordinary. There's just so much energy, and everybody's got it. And it feels like we're moving forward now. It feels exactly how things felt at a certain point, but in the sense that the next step can finally come. It's made me think of, in a weird way, when I was little I got kind of crazy about caterpillars. Sometimes everything has to change before whatever is supposed to happen can actually happen, because everything that gets created "new" is an absolute impossibility until the moment it actually exists.
D: How is the feeling different than it was when Elephant 6 started garnering attention in the late '90s?
JK: For me, the last several years have been about really small things: existing inside of every day, loving the place you live, loving the ocean, being able to imagine things and being able to get lost inside your own imagination. For me, to be completely honest, it was about hiding away from as much of the real world as I could. The thing about what's happening now is there's an incredible strength and magic that can only come from when a certain group of people come together inside all of their minds and imaginations and beliefs and love for everything. There's this crazy strength and this crazy momentum that is literally like a wave. When you have that strength, you no longer need to look at something and go, "That's impossible," because you're aware that you are riding a wave that has this incalculable, incomprehensible power.
D: What was everybody's reaction when you broached the idea of a big group tour?
JK: It was kind of crazy. It started as a dream, literally. I woke up one morning and suddenly realized that not only did we have to do this, but I should call everyone right away. I hadn't even talked to some folks for so long. It was a really wonderful morning. From the minute of having the idea that we should do this thing, an hour later I had talked to so many of my old friends and everything was aglow.
D: What did you ask them all to do when you first floated the idea?
JK: We had done these shows twice in Athens in the '90s. Everyone brought food. It was a massive potluck, and everyone was just hanging out and telling stories. We all played each other's songs, holiday songs, special songs. We did a huge orchestra version of a couple things with like 25 people, like a massive orchestra. So in a way we have this variety-show structure where we're going to be able to do suites or individual songs.
D: Will Static and the Metronome tour with you?
JK: Yes, and not just but because we wouldn't want to leave them out. They're band members and friends to me. It was funny—when we were first talking to everyone about the idea, everybody was like, "Is the Metronome going to come? Is Static going to come?" Everybody: the booking people, the agent, the clubs, the promoters.
D: Have you worked on new projects along those lines?
JK: There are new band members in production. It's a really big ordeal, as things like that tend to be. They require the work of real machinists who are not getting paid what they normally get paid when they're busy making aeroplanes! [Laughs.] One of them is something that's really special to me because my grandpa helped me with it when he was dying. It was a way for us to really be together in a way where we were working and distracted. What he was experiencing physically, it kind of pulled him out of it. So a lot of the original blueprints came out of that process. It's called the Tap Dancing Machine. It has two legs suspended on machine works. The works are where the knee joints would be, legs and feet that tap-dance on a platform. You can even make them kick a drum.
