#endless endless

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.

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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.

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[...] Julian did not immediately fall into a musical career. For one thing, his dad was very hands-off. Fearing that he’d be the sort of parent who forced his kid to practice incessantly, he overcompensated by not even teaching his son how to play guitar.

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