Sunday, September 21, 2008

One of those Elephant 6 guys

Spoke on the phone yesterday with Julian Koster, lead guy from The Music Tapes and spearhead of the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour, which heads to The Space on Oct. 15. This is the tour at which about 15 people from the Elephant 6 Collective -- current and former members of Elf Power, The Gerbils, The Music Tapes, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and others -- play each others' songs in ensembles of varying size. Julian spoke about, amongst other things, the difficulty he had in getting work done when he tried to reconcile the things he valued and wanted to express with the limitations of the physical world itself. "I think I was being hard on physicality," he said. "I couldn't quite understand it. You go through the day and things have this glow. You want every physical act to have that. You want it to not be physical. Everything real is actually not physical. It's liking. It's love. It's happiness. It's wonder. It's care. What do you love? Do you love this cadaver? Can you make me a machine that is love?... The body is. And it's just enough to radiate that glow."

More on that soon. The New Haven Advocate has agreed to run my preview of that show in October.

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