#endless endless

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.

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.

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.

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.