January 5th – Von Hemmling: La Guerre Est Meurtre & 99 from 1999-2000 are released on Royal Rhino Flying Records.
January 19th – Folklore: The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman. From the Optical Atlas review: “The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman…was peddled at shows for a while before finally getting an official release earlier this year on Athens’ Bumblebear Records. Co-credited to singer/songwriter Jimmy Hughes (also a guitarist for Elf Power) and, er, folklore researcher James P. Hughes, Jr., the album initiates listeners to the conflicting strands of information regarding H.W. Beaverman, supposedly a phantom haunting Lake Bonaparte in northern New York state. As the folklorist Hughes states in the liner notes, ‘It was a late summer night when the legend was presented to me by one bewildered young boy who swore he had seen H.W. Beaverman’s ghost cross the bay, just as his older brother and a friend were playing with a handmade Ouija board down by the water… So I became obsessed with this character, and each person I met had a new take on the legend, or the man, as I started to question more and more the difference between the two; or if a man like this could even exist outside the realm of rumors.’ The album itself, then, presents itself as a collection of excerpts from eyewitness accounts and interviews with purported Beaverman experts. The song titles follow this form: ‘The Kid,’ ‘The Father,’ ‘The Bartender,’ ‘The Vet,’ etc. Appropriately, though ingeniously, he’s assembled for his cast a number of different vocalists from other Athens bands. Singing on this first Folklore album are Andrew Rieger (Elf Power), Jon Croxton (Wee Turtles), Amy Dykes (I am the World Trade Center), Bren Mead (Masters of the Hemisphere), Heather McIntosh (The Instruments), Scott Spillane (The Gerbils), Ian Rickert (Bugs Eat Books), and Hughes himself. Miraculously, it doesn’t sound like a compilation album, although each singer manages to flavor his or her track with a unique style; neither does it feel weighed down with concept album aspirations. The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman is united by Hughes’ surprising strength as both a songwriter and as a storyteller. And while ‘The Kid’ might sound a little like an Elf Power track, and ‘The Ghost’ might sound like something by The Instruments, when played as an album the consistent voice that rises from the material is Hughes’. Much of the material here is exceptional, in particular the stirring ‘H.W. Beaverman’ (with Spillane’s voice rising like a troll from under a bridge), the rocking ‘The Kid,’ and the breezy, beautiful ‘The Vet.’”
February 1st – Midget and Hairs: Midget and Hairs.
February 8-15th – Casper & the Cookies tour Japan.
February 12th – Pitchfork runs an appreciation of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in honor of its 10th anniversary, with contributions by of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes and members of No Age, Caribou, The Evangelicals, Saturday Looks Good to Me, and others.
February 23rd – The second AUX Festival is held in Athens, featuring Dixie Blood Moustache, Lorkakar, Howling Jelly (Andrew Rieger and Mark Tissenbaum), Eyes and Arms of Smoke (members of Von Hemmling, Ulysses, and Hair Police), and The Flash Card Orchestra. This last performance is described by Chris Yetter as: “Bill Doss conducted a group of 15-20 people including Andrew Rieger, Pete Erchick, B.P. Helium, Eric Harris, John Fernandes, Heather McIntosh, Davey Wrathgaber, David Specht, and a bunch of Dark Meat folks. Other people in the room at the time who might have been on stage include Derek Almstead, Scott Spillane, Dottie Alexander, and Jamey Huggins… The idea was Bill would show a flashcard to the band and they would act out whatever the flashcard said. There were different sections of the band, so they would start and stop at different times. For example, one of the flashcards said something along the lines of insects buzzing in the springtime and everyone would act that out for 30 seconds or so.”
February 23rd – The New Scientist includes an article on Robert Schneider’s Non-Pythagorean musical scale. “One of the stars of last year’s meeting of the Mathematical Association of America was Robert Schneider, lead guitarist of the indie band The Apples in Stereo. Delegates listened enthralled as he played a track from the group’s latest album, New Magnetic Wonder. From the very first notes the music sounds strange and almost eerie, a bit like a record played backwards. Its ethereal quality stems partly from Schneider’s use of tone generators in place of conventional musical instruments. There is also a deeper reason why the music sounds strange: it uses an unusual musical scale in which the intervals between the notes are based on logarithms. Nevertheless, the more you listen to it, the more pleasing it becomes. ‘When we experience mathematical functions with our ears, we call it sound,’ says Schneider. ‘When the math is particularly elegant and well ordered, we call it music.’”
February 26th – The Apples in Stereo albums Fun Trick Noisemaker, Her Wallpaper Reverie, and The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone are reissued.
March 7th – Yeti #5 features artwork by Jeff Mangum, and a compilation CD which includes four selections from Jeff’s collection of rare 78’s. A Hawk and a Hacksaw also appear on the comp.
March 7-16th – SXSW 2008 includes Elf Power, Dark Meat, and Icy Demons, as well as List Christee (Kevin Barnes).
March 25th – Elf Power: In a Cave. Jesse Jarnow, for The Village Voice:
Athens, Georgia’s Elf Power are a long-exploited energy concern, burning steadily for nearly 15 years with vaguely mystical and mostly reliable post-D&D indie folk. Fronting an ever-shifting Elephant 6 cast, songwriter Andrew Rieger and multi-instrumentalist Laura Carter have lately struggled to articulate that nearly perpetual motion (save the f’n supreme title track to 2004’s Walking With the Beggar Boys). In a Cave, though, is the sound of mild reawakening, aided by unsung Olivia Tremor Control hero Eric Harris, former of Montreal multitasker Derek Almstead, and Instruments leader Heather McIntosh. Harris is felt especially, as co-author on four of the album’s weirdest and most engaging cuts, including opener ‘Owl Cut (White Flowers in the Sky),’ wherein Rieger’s strums are set atop a fractalized beat, and ‘Window to Mars,’ a warbling psychedelic bauble. Elsewhere, the music isn’t as quizzical, but the band is always elegant in their dispensing of tasty T.Rex lixx (’The New Mythology’), fuzz bass (’Spiral Stairs’), and mellow garage stomps (’Fried Out’). Even on ‘Softly Through the Void,’ where Rieger (not uncommonly) roams familiar turf, the band is right there with supportive organs, distant strums, and a stunningly subtle cowbell to repopulate the space with fauna. Though the band had mostly jettisoned dense E6 collaborations beginning with 2002’s stripped Creatures, this one is something of an affirmation of the bells-and-whistles-within-worlds recordings of yore. The more empowered Elves turning the sprockets, the merrier.
Elf Power~New Mythology/Paralyzed from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.
March 28th – Entertainment Weekly includes In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in its list of 25 essential indie rock albums of the past 25 years.
March 31st – Miles Kurosky, interviewed in It’s Hard to Find a Friend, announces his solo album is almost finished. On the time spent after Beulah’s breakup, he says: “I’ve written some songs for commercials and a couple of indie films. I also did a soundtrack for a cartoon. Fortunately, I never had to get a ‘real’ job, and God willing I never will. However, for a couple years I didn’t do much at all, I was always at Kaiser rehabbing my shoulder with my physical therapist…or seeing some urologist, nephrologist or gastroenterologist about my innards. Basically I spent a lot of time at the doctor getting poked with needles.”
April — the compilation Build Your Army with Potatoes features contributions from, among others, The Instruments, Calvin, Don’t Jump!, Vince Mole & His Calcium Orchestra, Ideal Free Distribution, Von Hemmling, The Diminisher, Great Lakes, Folklore, Laminated Cat, The Visitations, The Sixth Great Lake, Seamonster, and The Lilys covering a Von Hemmling song.
April—the Tomatoes & Radiowire project is completed, a series of music videos from different independent filmmakers interpreting each of the songs from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The results are posted online at tomatoes-radiowire.com.
April 1st – The Apples in Stereo: Electronic Projects for Musicians.
April 12th – Heather McIntosh plays with Gnarls Barkley on Saturday Night Live.
April 18th – Rebecca Cole posts on the Minders website that “there will not be any more Minders records or performances.”
April 24th – NPR’s All Songs Considered makes a point of playing one of the new Circulatory System tracks which has debuted on the band’s MySpace page, the first original music from the band since 2001. In the same broadcast, Elf Power’s In a Cave is called “their best CD of the decade.”
April 26th – Robert Schneider performs for children at the FreeKY Festival in Lexington as Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine. You Ain’t No Picasso: “Well, WRFL’s FreeKY Festival has come and gone with many absolutely insane memories attached. My day started with a healthy dose of kids’ music, first of which was by Robert Schneider’s other other other side project Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine. And as much as the kids enjoyed songs about gravity, lost puppy dogs and clocks, the biggest hit of the set was — you guessed it — the bubble machine. Seeing a dozen kids jumping up and down in a bubble-induced frenzy for half an hour reminded me of the line from Knocked Up: ‘I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.’ Me too, man. Me too.”
May 5th – Beulah’s Miles Kurosky debuts his MySpace page, posting a brand new song.
May 6th – The Music Tapes return with a new video, “The Minister of Longitude,” featuring the Giant Metronome; they also announce a new album and an appearance at the coming summer’s Athens Popfest.
May 11th – of Montreal plays All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Nana Grizol – Voices Echo Down the Hall
May 13th – Nana Grizol: Love It Love It. NPR: “It’d be easy to dismiss the Athens, Ga., band Nana Grizol as yet another twee college rock group from a town that churns out cutesy artists with yawn-inducing regularity. But from the opening bars of the first track, ‘Circles ‘Round the Moon,’ with its frolicking guitars and sing-along melody, it’s clear that Nana Grizol exudes earnest and irresistible charm.” Three Imaginary Girls: “Nana Grizol bring together all my favorite parts of Pavement, Bright Eyes, Okkervil River and Neutral Milk Hotel. Like their forefathers, they cling and clang on their guitars and trumpets in a most haphazardly beautiful, heartfelt way. But, it’s lines like ‘my front porch is my paradise’ and ‘city lights feel so awful / it should be unlawful to live where you can’t see the stars’ that warm my cockles and convince me to leave the comfort of my interiors to go frolic at the pond with my closest friends.”
May 13th – The Instruments: Dark Småland.
June 10th – Kevin Barnes writes on the of Montreal MySpace blog, “I’ve finished the new album. I’ve been working on it for over a year…I am very happy with it. I worry that some people are going to misunderstand it.”
June 20th – The Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru opens, featuring a cameo by Robert Schneider. Roger Ebert writes, “Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents.” In Athens, Folklore performs the entire Kinks album Village Green Preservation Society live.
June 30th – Robert Schneider posts on the Minders forum, “I spoke to Martyn recently, and he said it is absolutely NOT the case that the Minders have broken up– but he confirmed that Rebecca did leave the band, events surrounding which were responsible for the post quoted above, saying they broke up (Martyn did not approve that post, however). Martyn (who started the Minders with me, as a recording project for the two of us for the first Minders single on Elephant 6 Records, but quickly fleshed it out into a live band with Rebecca Cole, Jeff Almond, and Mark Wilhite, by the time their second single came out) said he still plans on recording and performing songs under the name The Minders.”
July 1st – Miles Kurosky posts a Beulah remix of Yoko Ono’s “Let Me Count the Ways,” originally intended for Ono’s Yes, I’m a Witch, on his MySpace page.
July 2th – The Boston Phoenix, surveying bands from all 50 states, declares The Apples in Stereo the greatest band to ever emerge from Denver, Colorado.
July 8th – In an interview with synthesis.net, John Fernandes reveals that Will Hart has multiple sclerosis.
July 15th – Icy Demons: Miami Ice.
July 18-20th – Appearing at the Pitchfork Festival this year: The Apples in Stereo, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Icy Demons.
August 2nd – Hi Hi Hi, a Paul McCartney covers band featuring B.P. Helium (of Montreal) and Jason NeSmith (Casper & the Cookies), performs at the Team Clermont Summer Camp.
August 4th – The Apples in Stereo perform on The Colbert Report.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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August 12-16th – At the Athens Popfest, The Music Tapes perform, followed by a “bell game” conducted with blindfolds in a park. Robert Schneider, W. Cullen Hart, and Bill Doss (with Pete Erchick and Charlie Johnston) reform the early Elephant 6 project Fat Planet for a live performance (Olivia Tremor Control, Marbles and Apples in Stereo songs are performed). Also performing: Circulatory System, Elf Power, Thee American Revolution, Casper & the Cookies, Nana Grizol, Great Lakes, Laminated Cat, Supercluster, Dark Meat, and more.
Fat Planet from Daniella Maria on Vimeo.
August 19th – The Music Tapes: Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes. Pitchfork:
The word ‘timeless’ is bandied about carelessly in music writing, often incorrectly as an indication that something is more than a fad. But Music Tapes For Clouds and Tornadoes, the long-time-coming sophomore album by Julian Koster’s Music Tapes project, is the rare case of a record that literally sounds timeless, or not of a specific era. With liberal use of banjo coupled with the tones of the singing saw and the intimacy of a lo-fi or field recording, Music Tapes comes across like a sweeping summation of the history of 20th century American white-boy music, from the sounds of Appalachia or the Grand Ole Opry to MGM movie musicals and K Records do-it-yourself twee. You’d be forgiven if the band name The Music Tapes doesn’t ring a bell. They released their only other record, First Imaginary Symphony For Nomad, nine years ago– ages ago in these accelerated culture days. The group revolves around Koster, one of Jeff Mangum’s partners-in-crime from Neutral Milk Hotel, and a collective of Elephant 6-related musicians (of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s Jeremy Barnes, Olivia Tremor Control’s John Fernandes and Eric Harris, NMH’s Scott Spillane, among others) who lend a hand fleshing out his psych-folk fantasias and laying them to tape. Few records encourage listeners to identify recording equipment– who, save engineers and musicians, cares what kind of microphone was used?– but The Music Tapes use the scratchy textures of vintage equipment as a key component of their sound. The fuzzy crackle of Koster’s cadre of toys– from the record lathe (think ProTools for the phonograph age) and Depression-era wire recorders to a handheld tape recorder– is as much a part of creating Music Tapes‘ aural character as the instruments played. And the combination of such unusual equipment with such surprisingly accessible melodies creates a pleasingly disorienting sense of déjà vu. Album opener ‘Saw Ping Pong and Orchestra’ starts with a rhythmic sputter and haunting singing saw that sounds like the soundtrack to a black-and-white B movie, but then, with the addition of weeping, waltzing strings, blossoms into a score for a 1940s melodrama. Willfully and wistfully cinematic, ‘Freeing Song By Reindeer’ sets Koster’s plaintive, reedy voice against cabaret accordions, like he’s an E6 Edith Piaf, for a psychedelic take on a Parisian-café sequence. ‘Tornado Longing for Freedom’ builds an off-kilter campfire song on a stop-start banjo line and ghostly background drone, like an acid-fried ‘Rainbow Connection’. And closing track ‘In an Ice Palace’ features the jingle-bell percussion, groovy Magnus organ, and jazzy rhythms of the mod 60s. Listeners will also be reminded of Koster’s tenure in Neutral Milk Hotel. ‘The Minister of Longitude’, the album’s most anthemic track, bursts with the kind of tinny-yet-rousing folk and ramshackle horn orchestrations of ‘Holland, 1945′, and ‘Song for Oceans Falling’ is the sort of crackling, aching ballad that would have been both shambolic and heartfelt enough for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Don’t get hung up on such weirdness, though. Sure, Koster and his cast of collaborators use lyrical abstraction and experimental recording techniques, but the melodies at the heart of each song are welcoming and familiar. And even the unusual way they’ve been gussied up only adds to their poignancy. These 15 tracks were certainly worth the almost-decade-long wait.
September – of Montreal is featured in SPIN and Under the Radar.
September 5th – Astra Taylor’s documentary Examined Life premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film’s score is by Heather McIntosh with contributions from Korena Pang (Jeff Mangum) and Eric Harris.
September 12th – of Montreal’s latest record, Skeletal Lamping, is previewed in listening parties held in select U.S. cities, but Seattle’s is unique in that it’s a laser light show at the Laser Dome.
September 12-November 21st – Elf Power tours with Vic Chesnutt.
September 16th – Dressy Bessy: HOLLERandSTOMP. Slant disapproves: “Dressy Bessy has always walked a fine line between their sugar-smacks brand of ’60s pop and a lo-fi aesthetic that threatens to blunt the impact of their ingratiating hooks. On their fifth album, Holler and Stomp, the band finally lands on the wrong side of that line as a result of a deliberate choice to push their sound in a direction that is ill-fitting with their strengths. Even on their glorious debut, 1999’s Pink Hearts Yellow Moons, and 2005’s Electrified, frontwoman Tammy Ealom’s vocals had a tendency to land just a bit flat of the sunny, major-key melodies that gave those albums such charm. For Holler and Stomp, the band has incorporated some minor-key arrangements and diminishing chord progressions that pull focus from what would otherwise be standout hooks on songs like opener ‘Automatic’ and ‘Ease Me Down.’ That Ealom is still noticeably flat throughout the record, combined with the lack of affect that typically characterizes her deliveries, only plays into the album’s dissonance. While there are still a handful of highlights—’Shoot, I Love You’ is as fun as anything the band has recorded, while ‘In Your Headphones’” practically begs to be used in an iPod commercial—the whole of Holler & Stomp has a frankly unappealing sound.” Pitchfork is much harsher expressing their disappointment. But PopMatters mitigates: “Ealom sings purposely off-key, and there is a discordant quality running throughout ‘Ease Me Down’, one of this record’s gems. Trying their hand at no wave, this song is breaking ground for Dressy Bessy, proving that they truly are a multi-faceted group… It has to be noted that, judging from the album artwork this time round, perhaps they’ve been indulging a bit too much lately… Luckily, the overindulgence has not hurt the band’s sound, and I dare say, may have improved it.”
October – Folklore: Carpenter’s Falls & Ham1: The Underground Stream.
October 7th – Julian Koster: The Singing Saw at Christmastime: “The Singing Saws are a shy and mischievous group. They don’t share their stories and traditions with many human beings, but lucky for us, Julian Koster is a trusted friend of the saws. Julian and his friend Nesey Gallons were allowed to record the saws as they sang their holiday favorites including ‘Frosty the Snowman,’ ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town,’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful.’” The album features a photo of Scott Spillane as Santa Claus.
October 7-25th – The Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour. In the AV Club, Julian Koster explained the genesis for this tour: “It was kind of crazy. To be honest, it started as a dream, literally. I woke up one morning in bed and suddenly realized that not only did we have to do this, but I should call everyone right away. So I found the telephone and started calling everybody and got everybody instantly, which was pretty far out, because all of us are pretty impossibly hard to get in touch with. But everyone was so happy. I hadn’t even talked to some folks for so long. It was a really wonderful morning. From the minute of having the idea that we should do this thing, an hour later, I had talked to so many of my old friends, and everything was aglow.” Each night began with an introduction by Eric Harris and a screening of the short film Major Organ and the Adding Machine (shot in Athens over many years, featuring many familiar faces and the music from the 2001 album). The evening’s performances would only be interrupted by an intermission, a randomly-selected filmstrip created by musician and erstwhile Music Tapes illustrator Brian Dewan. Playing during the concert: Major Organ and the Adding Machine (everyone wearing masks while performing “His Mister’s Pet Whistles”), The Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System, The Music Tapes, Elf Power, Scott Spillane, Nana Grizol, Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t, and The 63 Crayons. At the October 11th show, Jeff Mangum joins The Olivia Tremor Control for “The Opera House” and “I Have Been Floated,” as well as Elf Power for “The Arrow Flies Close.” Beginning with the Pittsburgh show, he informally joins the tour, and performs the show’s encore, the Neutral Milk Hotel song “Engine” (while standing with a guitar amidst the audience). Starting in Chicago, Robert Schneider also joins the tour, and performs some Apples in Stereo material. At the same show, Jeremy Barnes is present in the audience, but no full Neutral Milk Hotel reunion takes place. [Personal aside: Jeff tells me he's an Optical Atlas fan! End personal aside.] NPR broadcasts the Chicago performance, minus “Engine” and some of the Music Tapes songs (at the request of Jeff and Julian). NPR reports:
It was a magical and historic night for indie-rock. For the first time in more than a decade, the founding members of the widely adored and influential Elephant 6 Collective, including Robert Schneider (The Apples in Stereo) and the famously reclusive Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), took the stage together for a sprawling live performance. The group, which featured 15 artists from 10 different bands, served up more than three hours of joyous, psych-tinged singalongs under the glow of the rainbow-colored lights at Chicago’s Bottom Lounge on Oct. 21, 2008. The Elephant 6 Collective ‘is definitely back,’ tour organizer Julian Koster (Neutral Milk Hotel, The Music Tapes) said after the show. ‘Somehow, everything’s happening for us now. I don’t know why we were ever interrupted, and why all this is happening now. But we’re all just so happy. It just seems like a fact now. [Elephant 6] is back.’ After forming in the early ’90s and releasing a number of acclaimed albums, The Elephant 6 Collective — a large family of likeminded bands — eventually dissolved, as members moved on to other projects or went on indefinite hiatus. Though loose configurations of the group have given a handful of one-off performances since, most recently in 2005, the current tour marks a new beginning. ‘It feels like it did in 1996,’ Will Cullen Hart (The Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System) said, referring to the collective’s most exciting and productive period. The Chicago performance began with a short film by Joey Foreman and Eric Harris called Major Organ and the Adding Machine. A silent movie scored by the E6 Orchestra, it’s a strange tale about two children who find metallic hats in a forest, put them on and disappear (with an audible ‘pop’) to another dimension, where they help a giant baker gather ingredients for a magical pie. As the film ended, a group of E6 artists — the first of many different configurations — took the stage, wearing paper-cut animal masks, to open with the Major Organ and the Adding Machine song ‘His Mister’s Whistles.’ Throughout the night, the E6 members shifted lineups and rotated through one another’s songs, including some of the most popular cuts from The Gerbils, The Apples in Stereo, Nana Grizol, The Music Tapes, The Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System and Elf Power. It was an epic and exhaustive set aimed at sating the wide-eyed fans who’d been waiting for years to see the group perform. Before the concert, the rumor mill was spinning wildly about a possible performance by Neutral Milk Hotel and the band’s gifted but elusive frontman, Jeff Mangum. Mangum stepped onstage briefly during previous shows in New York and Pittsburgh as part of the current tour, and he popped up again in Chicago, first during a mostly a cappella group-singalong version of the Olivia Tremor Control song ‘I Have Been Floated.’ Mangum’s appearances onstage were few and brief, and he mostly stuck to helping out on other members’ songs. But he closed the night with a version of the Neutral Milk Hotel song ‘Engine.’ After getting the audience to sing, ‘We will live forever and you know it’s true’ (from the Circulatory System song ‘Forever’), repeating the line over and over, Mangum stepped out into the audience with his guitar. As he sang and played, with Koster accompanying him on saw, Mangum was barely audible and impossible to see. But just knowing he was there seemed enough to cast a blissful glow over the audience. Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes attended the Chicago concert, but did not perform. It was the first time all four original members of the band had gathered together for a show since their tour for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ended in 1998. Though some in the audience pleaded for the band to do something from the album, Mangum exited quietly after ‘Engine,’ leaving hopes for a Neutral Milk Hotel reunion hanging in the air. ‘We’ve been spending some really nice time together,’ Koster said of his former Neutral Milk Hotel bandmates. ‘I don’t think any of us knows what’s going to happen. But we never did, and that’s probably the best indication that something really nice might happen. We’re all awfully excited to see each other, and we’re all excited to make things together. So who knows what can happen?’
October 10th – At the Roseland Ballroom in New York City, of Montreal gives one of its most notorious performances (which is saying something). Blasphemous iconography; Wild West skits; a mock suicide by hanging; Kevin, wearing only golden briefs, riding a white horse onto the stage while singing “St. Exquisite’s Confessions”; and a coffin filled with gallons of shaving cream create a unique experience akin to the art-as-weapon approach of the Surrealist or Panic movements, or maybe a 70’s Ken Russell film. Kevin O’Donnell in the Village Voice: “Barnes got nearly naked and rode around the stage on a white stallion. He’d also hoped to shave his head and eyebrows and cover his entire body in red paint, but at the last minute, he opted to go just with the paint. ‘It takes a really long time for your hair to grow back,’ Barnes says. ‘I chickened out.’ Fittingly enough, Prince happened to be performing an intimate show on the rooftop of the Gansevoort Hotel that same night. So after his own gig, Barnes tagged along as the plus-one of MGMT frontman Andrew VanWyngarden. (The longtime friends are collaborating on a side project dubbed Blikk Fang.) Barnes has long been a fan of Prince; he compares Skeletal Lamping to ‘Sign ‘O the Times, Lovesexy, and The Black Album all together.’ So to see his idol live for the first time in such an intimate setting was an absolute blast. ‘There’s a Prince song called “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” that I think is definitely one of the best pop songs ever written,’ Barnes raves. ‘I feel like that one song has inspired so many other songs for me.’ While it’s not like Prince and Barnes are pals, it’s certainly something Barnes hopes for. ‘If Prince contacted me and told me he liked my music,’ he says, ‘it would just mean the world to me.’”
October 13th – Ideal Free Distribution: Then We Were Older.
October 14th – The Visitations: The Conundrum Tree.
October 16th – of Montreal is profiled in Rolling Stone.
October 21st – of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping is released not just as a CD and a double LP, but also as a digital download with your choice of: a paper lantern, a button set, wall decals, a tote bag, a tee-shirt, a sticker set, and a die-cut poster. Pitchfork: “If there’s any lingering suspicion that alter ego Georgie Fruit was merely an offhand whimsy by Kevin Barnes– just tongue-in-cheek self-mystification– Skeletal Lamping will clear things up. Last year’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was so rich with cathartic pop goodness it’s easy to forget Barnes supposedly morphed into a middle-aged African-American transsexual midway through the album. And he hasn’t yet changed back. Longtime fans still hoping for a return to The Gay Parade or Cherry Peel days of innocence may want to stop reading, because Skeletal Lamping roofies Hissing Fauna’s back half to live out Barnes’, er, Georgie’s sexual fantasies. However, the story with Skeletal Lamping isn’t Barnes’ role playing, but its relentlessly schizophrenic composition. Although broken into 15 tracks, the album seems like nearly an hour of song fragments. The pop hooks are still there, but like the similarly kaleidoscopic material of the Fiery Furnaces or even Girl Talk, Skeletal Lamping can be utterly exhausting, even at its most fun-loving.” Rolling Stone: “Transformations come easily to the of Montreal frontman: Over the past 11 years, he’s seamlessly morphed from low-fi indie rocker to quirky prog-pop star, and now on Skeletal Lamping he’s a glam-funk warrior, drenched in the sounds and sexuality of Prince, Freddie Mercury and Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. …A soulful romp through psychedelic melodies and sprawling noise-scapes, Skeletal is also a whimsical, Girl Talk-style pastiche, with 15 tracks that consist of a multitude of song fragments. The nine-part ‘Beware Our Nubile Miscreants’ opens with peaceful strings before jolting into a tuneless vamp, then snapping into an echo-soaked wail. And Barnes’ lyrics are just as seductively schizophrenic: ‘I want to … make you paranoid and say the sweetest things,’ he sings on ‘Gallery Piece.’ And somewhere in the glorious friction between these contradictions, he’s in ecstasy.”
October 23rd – of Montreal’s children’s song “Brush Brush Brush” is featured on Yo Gabba Gabba.
Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, & the Amorphous Strums – And How
October 28th – Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, & the Amorphous Strums: Dark Developments. Vic Chesnutt, interviewed in The Village Voice, on working with Elf Power: “They’re icons here, you know. Much more a part of the scene than I have been since 1990…Well, you know, Andrew [Rieger] approached me a long time ago and said, ‘Why don’t we do some music playing together?’ He knew that I was a fan of his music since his first album, since his first [Vainly Clutching at] Phantom Limbs thing came out. And I’ve known Laura Carter since she was a little kid. So I go way back with a lot of them, you know. And I really love Elf Power a lot. They’re a good band and he’s a great songwriter.”
November 11th – Pitchfork’s new book The Pitchfork 500 lists the 500 greatest songs of the last three decades, including Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland 1945” and The Olivia Tremor Control’s “Hideaway.”
November 13th – Kevin Barnes gives a lengthy interview to Paste Magazine. He also explains how he has come to embrace more contemporary sounds:
All of it was just my perception of what the rules were; there was no manifesto we all had to sign or anything like that, but there was a spirit of that time, and I started to go this other direction. I had these weird hang-ups that maybe I created myself—this idea that nothing had any value unless it was recorded on an analog tape machine. I couldn’t stand any contemporary bands—I never listened to any of them, really, except for the Elephant 6 bands. I was living in a self-imposed fascist state. I had all these rules about what was good and what was bad, and I was really critical of other bands, and just really stupid. And I know it sounds clichéd, but I can’t help but think that [getting away from that mindset] was influenced by 9/11. After 9/11, it was a universal thing in the United States where everyone felt like they need to connect with other people more. It really influenced me in that way. [Suddenly], I wanted to listen to and support contemporary bands. I wanted to feel a part of my time, my generation, and not be so obsessed with ’60s music, and music made by dead people. I’d always loved dance music, but it was kind of taboo to use a drum machine in the Elephant 6 world. Obviously studio trickery was encouraged, but you probably shouldn’t do anything you couldn’t pull off live. Somehow it felt like disco or electro-pop or attitude music wasn’t that cool. [There were] just all these really weird rules I thought existed and that probably don’t exist at all. I started getting into electronic pop music and really wanted to make this weird disco hybrid—you know, pulling from all these different influences. I started getting turned on to ’70s Afrobeat and soul and dub and Jamaican music, and I got all these Soul Jazz and Trojan reissues, and rediscovered my love for Prince and Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield, and that’s what brought me to where I am now. I don’t listen to The Kinks anymore—I still like that stuff, but I’d never really think to put on a Kinks record.
November 11-December 15th – Julian Koster and his singing saw “Badger” embark on a house-to-house Christmas caroling tour through the U.S. Those wishing to invite Julian into their home would need to contact the Caroling Ambassador via email or letter (written messages given preference); on the day Julian was in town, they would receive a call or text message with more specific details. Elephant 6 fans would gather at select homes in a city, wait for his arrival (accompanied by his dog and a friend), and hear a half-dozen or so Christmas tunes (as well as a Music Tapes song or two) and a short story before he disappeared into the night. Julian tells Flagpole, “’To me, loving records and loving making records has always occurred in your own life, in your own room, in the context of your own things…I just always thought it would be so wonderful if there could just be a knock at the door and this little elf from the records I love could come visit me and come carol for me in the world that my love for the music lives in, rather than having to go into a bar somewhere, into this completely foreign reality where my love doesn’t live… Nobody lives in a rock club. Even the employees who spend their days and nights in a rock club, the moments where they can listen to a record and get lost in it probably exist mostly outside of that rock club.”
December 2nd – The Apples in Stereo: Stephen, Stephen 7”/DVD
December 7th – Athens Banner-Herald: “The Orange Twin Conservation Community, a pedestrian and ecological-friendly housing development in Northeast Clarke County, recently protected 101 acres of forest under a conservation easement with the Oconee River Land Trust. Orange Twin comprises two clustered villages that border the forest land and will house up to 100 people once completed. The community also will include organic gardens and pastures, as well as a barn and outdoor amphitheater. The easement area, which encompasses almost 75 percent of the Orange Twin community, protects two creeks that flow into Sandy Creek, and a forest of poplar, beech, oak, maple and pine trees. The community intends to keep the land in its natural state to provide opportunities for walking, nature observation, and a small area for progressive agriculture… The Orange Twin group will name the conservation area the John Ryan Seawright Forest in memory of one of the group’s early members.”
December 11th – Von Hemmling: You (Being My Body Whole) cassette
December 16th – of Montreal: Cause We Were Virgins to Your Kisses 7”/DVD
December 18th – of Montreal appears on The Late Show with David Letterman.
December 21st – Kingsauce: Chanukah Blues
December 25th – Julian Koster performs on NPR’s World Cafe.
