There's a popular story that Robert [Schneider] had asked Jeff [Mangum] to start playing ["Oh Comely"] just to set the levels on his recording rig, then Jeff played the song all the way through on the first try, and Robert was so blown away by the take that he couldn't keep from barking "Holy shit!" at the end of it. It's not clear how spontaneous the performance was or how much it surprised Robert, but the outburst wasn't Robert's.
SCOTT SPILLANE: It was because I finally hit the notes on the horn line. […] At least I think it was me. I'm 99.9 percent sure that it was. This is a small detail or whatever, and I can't even say the horn parts are that complicated, but I didn't want to do any punches during the recordings, because the timbre of the horn changes every time I play it. Once you start, that's where it is. If it's real brassy one time and it's not the next time you play it, then you can't really fix it in the mix. So when I got that, I was like, "Yeah! I did the whole thing at once!" I was very excitable at the time.
Adam Clair, Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery
About NMH on tour
(from 'Endless Endless' by Adam Clair, 2022)
transcript:
Jeremy Barnes: I remember arriving in a city and checking the local free paper to see where we were playing that night. The road atlas was always ripped. Someone’s foot has been rubbing on it for eight hours and it’s a muddy mess. Scott is yelling, “Where do I turn? Was it back there?” Jeff is fiddling with the tape player, ignoring him. Julian is lost in his notebook. I’m not sure why, but time didn’t exist in its normal way from 1996 to 1998. Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t usually rush to the club for sound checks. We never discussed load-ins or what time to leave in the morning. We were very free. If we wanted to stop in a grassy field and play baseball, we would. If a town looked cool, we would stop and go to bookstores and record shops. By eleven a.m., Julian had probably spent his per diem on sweets. Scott had spent his on iced tea and cigarettes. I would save mine and buy records.
If sites like Pitchfork offer coolness as aspirational, Spotify suggests users are already cool enough. Spotify doesn’t have to prove it is a tastemaker you should follow. Instead, it flatters: Your taste is already great, and here’s some tracks to show how tasteful your listening data has already proved you are. In Spotify, taste requires no effort, no cultural capital, no imaginative synthesis or rationale. It becomes simply empirical, latent in the data and waiting to be extracted by Spotify’s algorithmic analysis.
About NMH's crazy stage energy
(from 'Endless Endless' by Adam Clair, 2022)
transcript:
Julian Koster: It always felt miraculous that no one was ever hurt, because someone ought to have been. It’s a fucking miracle. I always felt like it was going to end with someone getting run through with a cymbal stand. That was specifically the thing I was waiting for. Like one of those French swords. Because there was no concept of anything when that was happening. It was very joyful. It was also because you can barely contain the excitement and the feeling of what’s happening. So it’s nice to be able to give some sort of physical vent to all of that at the end of the show, to feel kind of bloody and crazy.
About NMH's concerts
(from 'Endless Endless' by Adam Clair, 2022)
transcript:
Julian Koster: Whenever you’re on a tour, you reach the point of comfort to where you can just improvise or just completely be unconscious of what you’re doing. But it took us a while, because every song, I’ve got to put the accordion down really fast, unplug it, plug in this, grab this, and Scott’s got to do this, and there were all these switcheroos constantly in every Elephant 6 show from the beginning. Insane switcheroos and lots of instruments and things to plug in. We really wanted to keep the wave of energy moving. You didn’t want to let it die by making everyone wait ten minutes for you to get ready for the next song. So you’d finish a song and you’d feel like a gymnast or something. I’m sure it came across as wildly unprofessional, but what we were achieving was pretty remarkable. Just nobody was noticing. They’d just go, “Man, that was out of tune.” They wouldn’t understand what it could have been, which was just a massive trainwreck from the beginning.
About creation of 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
(from 'Endless Endless' by Adam Clair, 2022)
transcript:
Julian had started recording the Music Tapes’ first record when he was still living in New York, but he put it on hold when he got involved with Neutral Milk Hotel. When Neutral Milk finished touring in the fall of 1998, Julian refocused his efforts on his Music Tapes project and released 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad in July 1999.
Robbie Cucchiaro: The music was always around me, so we would have our philosophical whatevers about it. It’s definitely born of Julian. We were together for six years, in an intimate relationship. That changed around 2001 or 2002. When we were living together in New York is when the Music Tapes were born, in our apartment on Charles Street. I think I was part of that birth, because a lot of the subject material of the first album is inspired by what we lived through and what we were able to talk about from living through that. We were trying to understand our growing up through that album. There’s a lot of parallels in that for both of us.
Killing some time in Europe together after an Olivia Tremor Control tour had ended and before a Neutral Milk Hotel tour began, Julian and Robbie stayed in England with a friend. While there, they made time to master 1st Imaginary Symphony at Abbey Road Studios in London. They pulled an all-nighter before their appointment, sequencing the album in a frenzy. As a sign of goodwill in the hope of signing the band, Sub Pop Records paid for the mastering session without hearing a second of it.
Robbie Cucchiaro: That was just the strength of what was going on around us.
The Music Tapes ended up signing with Merge to release the album. Julian approached the first Music Tapes album with the same sense of exploration characteristic of everything else he’d done to that point. Recording gear included a wire recorder from the 1940s and an Edison wax cylinder from the nineteenth century, lending 1st Imaginary Symphony a weathered, fragile quality. Even on a brand-new CD, it sounds like one more spin could tatter it, but the layers of experiments—in production, structure, instrumentation—overlap to keep it from coming apart. It’s an album that wants badly for you to love it but has no fear about offering something you might hate.
(fragments from 'Endless Endless' by Adam Clair, 2022)
transcript:
One of the zanier things that grew out of this period was Major Organ and the Adding Machine. The entity produced one self-titled album, though it’s not entirely clear who that self is. It was created with no intention to release the album to the public, though that happened long after it was finished. The album is also not the most highly regarded in the E6 catalog. It’s easily one of the weirdest, though, and given how it came together, it serves as a remarkable document of the time period and community, like some kind of Dadaist Polaroid. The stream of unselfconscious is evidence that even without commercial ambitions of any kind, folks were still doing their thing, trying to entertain themselves and one another.
The project began a cover of “What a Wonderful World” that Julian, Jeff, and Jill Carnes recorded together for a Kindercore compilation of Christmas music released in 1997. The Louis Armstrong original is a song most people have heard so many times that it’s basically white noise, but the Elephant 6 rendition has its own feel. Of the trio’s contributions to the song, Jill’s vocal melody hews closest to the familiar, but her creaky timbre weaves in and out of Julian’s ethereal saw like a frog clambering through a thicket of swaying cattails. Jeff’s verse in the middle is modulated just to the point of peculiarity, and a haunting tape loop from his homemade sound effects library undergirds the entirety of the two-minute track.
Julian submitted the track under the name Major Organ and the Adding Machine and then lent the name to the project that emerged next, a bunch of songs that came together via an exquisite corpse–style sharing of tape. No one seems able to recall the exact origins, but it basically came about like this: one person would compose the beginnings of a song and put it to tape—maybe a fractured, looping guitar riff or a surreal lyric—and pass it off to someone else, who would then add sound effects or some percussive toy piano and pass it to someone else, who might add a bass line or instead decide to cut the whole thing up and rearrange it. Each person would add bits and pieces and then pass it to the next person, until a song was ready to collapse under its own weight. The tapes were passed around for years, each song swelling into maximalist oblivion as much from divination as from intentional composition, without anyone guiding the process or even keeping track of it. Eventually, there was an album’s worth of material.
[...]
Griffin Rodriguez: When we did the recordings for Major Organ, it was just like any other day. “We’re going over to Julian’s to do some recording. Julian has a track for you to play on. Bring your bass.” It was always very impromptu and in the same spirit as all the other records. They would just invite you over and you’d play an overdub.
John Fernandes: Everyone kind of inspired each other. On the Major Organ project, everyone would kind of bring in things, and someone would say, “Hey, I’ve got a bass line for that.” We’ve never really talked about it. I’m not even sure if we’re supposed to be talking about how “we” did it.
Kevin Barnes: In the best way, it was a collaborative project. Everybody seemed to be contributing equally and making everything better. It was never getting worse because somebody laid some stupid tracks on it. It was like, “Whoa, this song is so much cooler now, and it was already cool.” I wrote that song “Madam Truffle.” I don’t remember who got it, but they sped it up really fast, and there’s this extra cool stuff Eric added.
Julian Koster: But we weren’t doing it to put it out. That was the thing. It entertained us to no end. It made us all laugh when we listened to it. It was just so funny and weird and fun. We all loved the Boredoms and Faust and Stockhausen.
[...]
Most of the recording happened in 1998 or thereabouts, and the album was released to the public in 2001. The finished product is every bit as eclectic and bizarre as anything else in the Elephant 6 catalog, and even more opaque. [...] Absolutely nothing had to be distilled into something accessible, because no one expected it to have an audience that wasn’t in on the joke. No one expected it to have an audience at all, beyond the people who made it. If the spirit of their weekly potlucks could be transposed into a record, it would be Major Organ and the Adding Machine.
