I know elephant 6 on tumblr is kinda dead but i wanted to talk about this, major organ and the adding machine is a really cool album that also has a really cool short film however even cooler is the bonus features of the short films dvd.
in this collection is a lot of interesting elephant 6 live videos and archival footage including apples in stereo cutting their first vinyl pressing, some cool live nmh, dixie blood moustaches short film oh hi, and major organ doing what a wonderful world live (i didnt even know they played live until i saw the dvd)
ive found only a couple of these features online that i will link here as well as the short film but i do recommend if you are able to get the album and dvd on bandcamp (like i did) or directly from orange twin and if you havent scoured the orange twin site i recommend it has a bunch of E6 stuff people dont talk about like jeffs field recordings
LINKS IVE FOUND FOR E6 AT THE MOVIES
Major Organ and the Adding Machine film
Circulatory System "Should a Cloud Replace a Compass?"
A Hawk and A Hacksaw Live 2002 snippet (discogs listed this as 2004 i havent checked this one up with the dvd)
Dixie Blood Moustache "Oh, Hi! movie"
Music Tapes "For the Planet Pluto" (this one was officially uploaded to youtube :P)
NMH "Songs Against Sex" & "Ghost" live at the knitting factory (julians bass looks so cool in these)
of Montreal "When You Come Around (Everything Disappears)" live on a public broadcast show called Spy Girls from Athens GA
i am unable to rip things off my dvd for i do not have a computer but if anyone else has the dvd or finds anymore links please let me know and share them discogs has a pretty good list of everything on the dvd.
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There are plenty of amazing stories of found albums - albums that were recorded, never released, and then discovered years later. Count Sibylle Baier's "Colour Green" among them.
Baier recorded "Colour Green" in the early 70s after putting the kids to bed. When she was done, the reel-to-reel tapes sat in her closet in Germany and then the United States (where the family moved). Her son (Robby Baier - a music producer in his own right) put the songs to CD and gave a copy to J. Mascis (I guess he was at the birthday party where Robby was giving away the CDs). Mascis sent the CD to the label Orange Twin (owned by Andrew Rieger of Elf Power, Athens, Georgia) and here we are.
"Colour Green" sits nicely next to Vashti Bunyan, Leonard Cohen and Nico.
Since it's foundation, A38 Ship hosted performances of underground legends and also mainstream – aka pop-rock, indie and electronic – superstars; in many cases, for the first time in Hungary.
Acts like M83, Crystal Castles, Warpaint and Zola Jesus hit the famous stage on the Danube, and after 10pm, DJ-s like Ben Klock, DJ Marky and Blawan stood behind the decks to take the night to the next level.
A38 Vibes collects the most memorable moments of the ship's own concert-footage archive, from The Boxer Rebellion's hymnic indie rock anthems to the funky moves of !!!'s Nic Offer. A38 Vibes – the soundtrack for your best night outs
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Elf Power at Cine, Athens, Georgia, April 7, 2023 | SM Piotrowski
Our first actual “post”-pandemic big social event was attending the premiere of the Elephant 6 Recording Co. documentary last month. I didn’t bring my good camera because I was fully expecting us to bolt after the movie -- we are both introverts, knew it was going to be an ~emotional~ experience, and Everyone Was Going to Be There! But then (probably thx in part to liquid courage) we ended up staying for a couple Elf Power songs afterward, and once the music started it only took a few seconds for me to feel absolutely overwhelmed by the need to be photographing! I LOVE THAT FEELING. It’s been a while!!! Here are a couple smartphone pictures to preserve the moment (featuring my local concert photographer archnemesis (/s) who gets to be up front and all up in my composition with the nice camera)
It’s hard to overstate just how significant Elephant Six became in the late 1990s and early aughts, as Neutral Milk Hotel’s raw, jangling poetry and Olivia Tremor Control’s lo-fi pop symphonies redefined what could be done with very little equipment in the service of art. Later, Apples in Stereo staked out the twee, adorable corner (“If You Want to Wear a Hat”) of the Southern bedroom pop universe, and Miles Kurosky’s Beulah found its sexiest drawl. Somewhere in the mix, Elf Power made deftly wistful, folk-poppy tunes, surreal but personal, fanciful but grounded in recognizable human experience. All of those bands but one have been defunct for ages, and you don’t hear much about Elephant Six anymore (though earlier this year Adam Clair published a well-regarded history on the movement, titled Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery). Still, Elf Power’s Andrew Rieger continues to soldier on, recording to date 14 albums, all while running the Orange Twin label with Elf Power bandmate Laura Carter.
Artificial Countrysides, recorded during the pandemic, is a graceful, thoughtful, utterly modest triumph, wrapping its twisty modal melodies in layers of fuzz and convening a junk shop orchestra of synths, drums, keyboards and, occasionally, harpsichord to fill out their fragile contours. Like all good pop, the songs have an emotional ambiguity. They seem to cavort, as gay as a carnival, while also remaining a little sad. They are second cousins to Robert Pollard’s distortion-crusted tunes, but softer, more pensive, swirling with organ and keyboard and a bit less blasted through by power chords.Â
As the album title suggests, these songs take as their subject matter the convergence of natural and manufactured environments. Elf Power records from amidst an expansive natural preserve known as the Orange Twin Conservation Community, but they are close enough to Athens’ suburban sprawl to observe in the title track, landscapes “that never rot and don’t decay, growing faster all the time, spreading further every day.”Â
Yet Rieger’s real preoccupation is not with the damage to the land, but the dislocation it brings to human beings. The first three songs all reference barriers—mental, spiritual, who knows—that his narrators can’t cross. “Clean Clothes” considers the exposure that living digitally brings (“the world outside discovering every place that you hide”). “Undigested Parts” pokes at consciousness and its shifting, morphing impermanence. But all of these tunes describe a moment when transcendence is close but ultimately unreachable. In “Undigested Parts” the verse goes, “Distant life inside the bubble, filtered out, run through the funnel, never solved the mystery, plagued for all eternity.”Â
It's possible I’m reading in these existential considerations. Rieger’s lyrics suggest, rather than spell out, whatever it is he’s talking about. And yet, there’s a sense of immanence in these cuts, as if the soft trash underfoot, the complicated rush of eating before work, the insidiousness of online life is always about to fall away, for something real and spiritual to emerge. The clean grace of the melodies evokes lucid certainty, the jangling arrangements slick them over with the noise of life. “Constantly touching from the flower to the roots, no separating from the ever-binding glue,” sings Rieger in “Constantly Touching,” an image of gnostic one-ness trapped in the slacker ramble of his tune.Â
And that, after all, is very much in line with the Elephant Six aesthetic, where rough production and giddy folk rock made the deepest questions of human life sound like a party. Elf Power’s 14th album is fanciful, surreal, buoyant, but engaged in a philosopher’s dialogue.
