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. Now returning to Athens, Georgia, after living on an island off of
Maine, Koster is helming a big tour of Elephant 6 characters past and present:
musicians from epochal indie-rock bands like Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples
In Stereo, Elf Power, and many more. The concerts will function something like
variety-show affairs, 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 himself). The A.V.
Club
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.
The A.V. Club: You're back in Athens for the
first time in a few years. How would 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. There has to be
this tension, like when you feel it's impossible, but it has to happen.
AVC: How would you describe the feeling that
you have right now that is different or new that you haven't felt in the past?
What's special about this time?
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
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 momentum that is literally like a wave. And it's uncontrollable as a wave,
but you can get up on top of it. 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.
AVC: When you say "hiding out," do you mean
from the attention that greeted Neutral Milk Hotel in the band's prime?
JK: I feel like that was the most engaged with the
outside world that I ever was maybe since childhood. But in childhood, you're
so enwrapped in your own imagination that you're protected, like when you
become a creature independently trying to go out and wrestle with the physical
world. You are more engaged in the world than you've ever been, and I
definitely was. But you can never really comprehend fully what is going on, and
you shouldn't. That's not your job. But definitely a person's job is to learn
and believe in things, and act on that. The things that make everything
beautiful are infinite and eternal, but that stuff can't visit this universe
without being something that has to be born and die and live these different
lives, in a way.
AVC: Would you say that "hiding out" impulse was
shared within parts of the Elephant 6 movement? Some of the bands have been
touring and recording ever since, but others seem to have taken some downtime
to reevaluate.
JK: I agree. I think that something's tucked away
inside of it. I have to carefully point out that I'm answering that question
from my own experience, because plenty of people have been very busy the whole
time and have done marvelous things. But as I have experienced it, something
did tuck inside of itself and transform and feel a bit like it had to hide
away. It always felt like extraordinary things might happen, or could happen
and were going to happen. There was a tension at a certain point of "How do
these things that we feel might happen actually happen?"
AVC: How is it different now?
JK: What's happening right now feels so right to me. I
mean the way that every day has felt, and all of us being together, and the way
that things feel possible right now. It's an extraordinary feeling to have in
your gut.
AVC: How did you approach everybody with the
idea for this big communal tour?
JK: It was kind of crazy. To be honest, it started as
a dream, literally. I woke up one morning in bed and suddenly realized that not
only did we have to do this, but I should call everyone right away. So I found
the telephone and started calling everybody and got everybody instantly, which
was pretty far out, because all of us are pretty impossibly hard to get in
touch with. But everyone was so happy. 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.
AVC: What did you ask them to do, exactly?
JK: Well, we had done these shows roughly around the
holidays twice in Athens in the '90s. Everyone brought foodæthe whole crowd. 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 25 people, like a massive orchestra.
So there's a precedent for this. Eric Harris and Joey Foreman had been making a Major Organ And The Adding Machine movie, which is amazing. It's being described as
a short film, but it's actually about 40 minutes. So in a way, we have this
variety-show structure where we're going to be able to do suites or individual
songs. It won't be full band sets as much as it'll be, we can all pair up in
different ways and do special versions of things.
AVC: Is Jeff Mangum involved in any way?
JK: There's nothing planned. Nobody really knows. It
seems like every time you say anything about Neutral Milk Hotel, it can be such
a big deal. It makes me paranoid, makes me measure every word I say. But the
truth is just that no one really knows what's going on with anything, in some
ways. We're just riding something nice.
AVC: To you personally, is there any degree to
which Neutral Milk Hotel still exists as a functioning entity?
JK: To me, it's all the physical world outside me.
It's an independent thing in some ways. We're a bit married. But it's something
that I love and believe in. I love Neutral Milk Hotel. I think people tend to…
Sometimes it's really easy to get worked up and see everything as being finite
or static. "This is this," or "This isn't that." To me, it's a bunch of
adventures, a feeling. And it's a bunch of stuff that we lived. It's a
wonderful thing. When I think about Jeremy [Barnes] and Jeff [Mangum] and Scott
[Spillane], I'm thinking about them and all the possible things we might be
able to do together. I'm not thinking about any band names or any specific
courses of action until that comes of its own accord.
AVC: How are you guys going to all get around
on this tour? It's an ungainly group.
JK: It'll be a joyful chaos. We'll be a caravan. The
most responsible of us, which is absolutely not me, will travel with the
equipment and make sure it gets there on time. We were not the most "together"
thing in the world, but that was part of what made it possible to be expressive
of other things, you know?
AVC: Will you bring Static and the Metronome on
tour with you?
JK: Yes, and not just 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. I had no idea they would care.
AVC: 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 really special to me, because my grandpa helped me
with it when he was dying. It was a way for us to be together in a way where we
were working and distracted. What he was experiencing physically, it pulled him
out of it. He was becoming more and more of a child, and so we were able to be
together in a way that was just… I don't know if there are words for it, but it
was something that was really special to me. 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.