Though best known as a member of the Elephant 6 collective that spawned such groups of Neutral Milk Hotel and Of Montreal, Julian Koster should be playing large ballrooms with his group the Music Tapes, responsible for last year's phenomenal Music Tapes For Clouds and Tornadoes.
A Music Tapes show is more a happening than a concert. Koster is known to bring gigantic metronomes and singing televisions along for the ride. He also breaks down the wall between the performer and the audience, playing singing saw in the middle of the crowd or taking a break from the show to play a game.
Though our interview was conducted via email, I did get to speak with Koster at the show. If anything, he came across as a genuine performer and someone who really does believe in magic. I am honored to present the Spectrum Culture interview with Julian Koster.
Hi, Julian. Thanks for taking the time for this interview. I can't wait to see your show in a few weeks. How's everything going?
Hi. Thanks! It's been wonderful so far. It's like a strange and funny dream traveling around with these friends, with Brian Dewan, a nice adventure.
What can you tell us about this upcoming tour?
It's something we quite looked forward to. It seemed funny that that was what our immediate reality was going to turn into. This sort of trip. It has been such a long time since I'd last really been on one. The show we did at the festival this summer and then New York, and the Holiday Surprise reminded me how much i love what can happen on stages too.
In previous shows, audiences have been entertained by devices such as The 7 Foot Tall Metronome, Orbiting Human Circus Tapdancing Machine and The Clapping Hands Machine. Can we expect things like that this time around?
Oh yes, the Metranome and Static have both come (although Static has a bit of a cold). It seems like depending on the trip different members of the mechanical sort will come. It's a lot to ask of them, to come on these journeys, but none of them want to be left home.
Announcing a proper tour this way seems to be a little out of character for you. Aren't your fans more accustomed to your "secret" shows, the ones where you post clues on your website?
Yes, it's exciting. It funny because when you don't play in places such as this, playing them becomes so exotic. So much more an adventure. Music venues are so strange!
Experimentation, pushing music and art to its limits, seems to be very important to you.....
Well, to me if something is an experiment, it's only because something is in the process of coming into being that hasn't existed before, it's something being born. Something that you care about or love, that you feel the need to have exist. I imagine some part of this birthing process COULD be looked at as experimentation, but every new thing that comes to exist, changes the boundaries of that preceded it's birth, because it's existence was impossible until the very moment it came to be born.
Nine years passed between your first album (First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad) and Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes. That's a very long time for fans to wait. Yet, your new album has been receiving lots of acclaim and has been quite successful. Why do you think people are still interested in your work after such a long silence? I know some of these songs appeared in other places years ago.
It's wonderful that people care the way they do, it's wonderful for the songs and things to have friends out there in the world to play with. I've never felt like time was terribly important when it came to imaginary things. It sort of feels like Imaginary stuff comes from forever, and is still mostly there, even when it HAS a body here. But i am realizing now how important it is to give life to imaginary things continuously, and not shelter and hide them away for long periods of time. In this universe, years are not to be wasted.
Let's talk about the method you used to record the album. You used a lot of old equipment. Can you explain it to our readers?
Well, I love the sound of recordings themselves, from the birth of recorded sound forward. The turn of the last century's recordings, the recordings of the '30s, the '60s...the sound of the recording seems like an instrument to me. An expressive instrument.
Tell me about the people who collaborated on this album. I know you worked with Kevin Barnes and Laura Carter. How did they help out?
Keven and Nina came over and sang, their voices ended up being chopped up into these washy drones. I had originally asked them and Scott (Spillane) to sing a part that had come to me in a dream about sleeping night car pull men. Laura played all sorts of things, she's always been a part of the Music Tapes....Robby Cucchiaro has of course been the biggest part of the Music Tapes since its coming out into the world, the sound of his Euphonium his working and making of contraptions.
There is something very innocent about the new album, an invitation for us to step into another reality. Yet, there seems to be no irony at all in this childlike wonder of lullabies and building exquisite machines. How and why is fantasy important to you and how does it inform your art?
Thank you, that's very kind. Well, it's more like life strikes me as more imaginary than real anyway, and it's the imaginary that makes the most sense, and the physical that seems the most like a miracle, the most impossible.
The packaging of the CD comes with a make-your-own pop up CD stand. At what level were you involved in the creation of the accompanying art?
Oh, well the circular pop ups were something I just started making, and I sent Merge their copy in one. Maggie Fost at Merge thought of a way to share it with everybody. The pop up that was reproduced is the one I had made for them. Robby and I made the cover together, the musicians posing there are descendants of mine from Romania, a family orchestra. The photograph is taken from the front porch of my grandmas old house.
You once said, "Magic, the way we find things beautiful, the light behind eyes, kindness, and how we want to serve and protect the things we care about -- these things seem like the real foundation of the world to me." What are the things that you care about? What things would you define as magic?
Well I feel there's a glow that lives inside everything and every moment that sometimes we get to see and to know. We see it when we love people and things, when we are grateful. As for me, I love music, I love the ocean, I love my friends, rowboats, amusement parks, Elephant 6. There's no room to even begin, but all of these things are made of magic. What is magic? The sense of wonder and delight caused by that which we witness transcending physicality; expressing something well beyond it's boundaries..........It's life. It's love.
Let's talk about the origins of your art. Was there a direct influence for you, was your current work something you intended all along? Did you have any sudden inspiration or epiphanies?
Inspiration and epiphanies always are sudden for me. But stuff tends to grow, when things are going nicely for me, sort of the way children do, you have to nurture them, and you may have ideas of your own, but they grow all by themselves. Parenting really is the closest thing i can imagine to the process.
This will be my one Elephant 6 related question. In the indie music world, people imagine you guys as this tight knit community of artists that live in sort of a vacuum like around the time the collective came into being. Obviously, bands like Of Montreal have changed. Neutral Milk Hotel is defunct. What is the collective like today versus its origins?
As for Neutral Milk Hotel, I would never think it defunct. It lives in the hearts of every kid out there who loves it as truly as it did in our days and weeks. Whether there will be more to its physical form or not, there's never HAD to be, because all this time it's had physical form enough to travel all over the world and touch peoples lives and make lots of friends. What more form could it need? As for Elephant 6, well, I am really most qualified to speak for myself rather than the whole collective. But yes, I most certainly do live in a sort of a vacuum, but though nothing's changed, it's not got to do with a period of time. As I experience it, everything that's real about making things has to do with a certain timelessness. Something that time really has very little to do with. Those things don't die and they don't change in as much as they are change itself. To me, they are the feeling of the unwritten future and the feeling of what it might express. It's our innocence, and it's inescapable. The world will never have done with it. Nor will it have done with joy, faith, belief, childhood or even fun. So maybe that's all Elephant 6 has ever been to me... I can't imagine anyplace else I'd ever want to bring music and ideas into the world from. But then there's a billion names for it, and the world will always need a billion more. To me, Elephant 6 is just one of them.
Will we have to wait nine years for another album from you?
It feels strange and somewhat miraculous to say that there is to be a brand new album of Music Tapes songs and stuff recorded Athens this summer, and it will be turned in by the summer's close. The truth is there's several albums worth of music waiting to take form, and all of it's been waiting a long time for it's chance. I'm very excited.
Finally, what music have you heard and what films have you seen lately that have scored responses from you?
There are these two kids on the island I'd been living on in Maine. They both grew up on the island, and one of them has only ever been to Vermont. They make recordings in their bedroom. They are really lovely and very pure and unaffected by anything. They call it Alaska Loves You (unless they've changed it) but it's the nicest new music I've had the honor of meeting in long time. As for movies, most of the living filmmakers I love are making films for children. Nick Park. Hayao Miyazaki. Mohsen Makhmalbaf can make some wonderful grownup things I love : (A Moment Of Innocence, is one), Apichatpong Weerasethakul seems pretty neat.......but really my favorite movies by far far far are things like Ninotchka by Ernst Lubitsch and Akira Kurosawa's films made with Takeshi Shimura and Mifune and the gang.
Thanks so much!
Thanks! It was nice meeting you!
by David Harris
[Photos: Ezra Matteo]