Julian Koster – Jingle Bells
Julian Koster is the ringleader of the half-human, half-machine imagination-fueled group called The Music Tapes. Over a decade ago he was an integral member of Neutral Milk Hotel and today he still embodies the undying spirit of the Elephant 6 collective. But all of this is just a subsidiary of an increasingly rare and purist attitude towards the making and sharing of music. He spends more time on the road than in any permanent home, a necessary evil to fulfill his creative addiction. Julian is an alchemist of illusion and invention, drawing from his wide palette of instrumentation to invite listeners to his sonic habitat, foreign but warming.
In recent years, Julian established a tradition of embarking on a caroling tour around Christmastime. He, along with a revolving cast of characters, will visit homes that are willing to play host to this unconventional group of carolers. Julian took time to talk to me amidst his initial travels for this year’s edition of the caroling route.
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I’m glad we were able to get in touch.
Yeah, sorry I missed the call before.
No, that’s okay. I assume you must be busy with the tight schedule of this tour.
Oh it’s fine. We’re just driving and I’m lying down in the back, so it’s okay.
Where are you coming from and going to right now?
Yesterday we were in Athens, actually, which is a stop on the tour. We left from New York, but Robbie still lives there and I lived there many times, so it’s kind of like a home base. We were only there for the day but we’re now on the way to Raleigh in North Carolina. And at the moment we’re somewhere in South Carolina at a truck stop. Everybody wants to pee so… [laughs]
Does Athens still have the same kind of feel these days?
Yeah, last night was wonderful because we did our caroling a little bit earlier than usual and went to see Supercluster play at this little tiny place. It’s a band that includes Vanessa, who used to sing for Pylon and is a wonderful soul. A lot of our friends are in the band… John Fernandes from Olivia, Bryan B.P. from Of Montreal, and a bunch of our friends basically… They just make this beautiful, joyous noise. So it was a really nice Athens night because we got to go do our thing with all those nice, warm Christmas parties and then have a really loud, joyous, noisy conclusion watching our friends.
So you got to play in front of friends and then watch friends.
Exactly, exactly. It was a good Athens night.
Is this the second or third installment of the caroling tour?
It’s actually, depending on how you want to look at it, the fourth or the fifth. The first couple of years were like half-imaginary, half-real. The whole thing was almost like something I’d imagined and very much wanted to do–this and a few other things like it–when I was living on this island in Maine and wasn’t touring. It’s something I imagined would feel really wonderful and would be more of what I wanted to do.
The first year I did it was just in Maine and Boston and it was really tiny. It was just sort of like very obliquely announced on this drawing on this random spot on the internet. So it was teeny by comparison to how it became once Merge got involved. The first time it was kind of a big-scale thing was after Merge put out this new fall record and they were helping spread the word. And they have ever since, every year, and so it’s just gotten bigger and bigger. And then I started being able to bring people with me which has been really lovely. We’ve also done some of the other ideas which are kindred, like a lullaby tour where we also go to many houses a night.
Um, but that was a very complete answer. You probably weren’t expecting such a long one. [laughs]
Is the full Music Tapes lineup taking part in this tour? Was Static able to make the trip or is he just not in the holiday spirit?
Well Static and the Metronome don’t usually come on this trip because they’re sort of the stars of the big stage version of the show…
They probably needed some rest then.
Yeah. And there are a lot of characters and personalities, both living and soulful machines, that are part of The Music Tapes. There are certain ones that tend to come out more in the lullabies and caroling that don’t really get to do the big stages, so those guys get to come out this time of year more.
And who would that be?
Well, to not give away too much: there’s some performing mice, there’s a singing snowman, there’s the mechanized organ-playing tower… that’s actually one of the things that crosses over from the big stage version of The Music Tapes to the caroling, lullaby version. That’s this tower that plays organs… it’s sort of like this automaton with some magnetic electronics going on inside of it. And that guy is here. Let’s see, what else? Well, I don’t want to give away too much!
When you were younger did you take part in caroling or similar Christmas activities?
You know, I never really got to but my house was caroled a few times over the years. I loved it and it always captured my imagination. I loved imagining it; I loved sending my imagination along with it. I loved the fact that it was a line, almost like something that was traveling and moving through my neighborhood, going from house to house. That it had been many places before our house–before it knocked on the door of our house–and that it would be many places. So it was almost as if it had been going on forever and that it would go on forever.
So in that way it’s more than just a group of people singing…
Oh yeah! I mean, think about it… suddenly there’s a knock at your door and there’s a group of people with candles singing songs. Music is almost like a visitation of a kind of spirit if it’s going nicely and here the spirit of music is manifested. There’s a knock at your door and there’s something so unexpected: people singing and bringing this spirit, and then off they go, off to some other house. You can lay in bed at night after they’ve gone and you feel like they’re out there somewhere, knocking on another door. And it kind of keeps you company, the warmth of that passage, of that thing through the night. It just kind of warms the soul, you know?
And many years later this had an impact on your decision to take on a caroling tour?
Yeah. When I was living on the island [in Maine] and wasn’t traveling at all and I was sort of being lost in my own world, I imagining the idea. There are lots of different traditions of this–of these characters traveling around mysteriously and visiting with all these things, all these spirits, passing through people’s lives. Traveling musicians going from village to village, or storytellers, or mummers… You know, all of these traditions all over the world, all these different ways people have shared music and stories and games and festivities. That sort of beautiful, mysterious passage always seemed like one of the nicest ways you could have an adventure and share the spirit of the things that have been sent to you through your imagination.
In an interview I read a few years back, you were asked where you were living. You didn’t seem to have a very solid answer. Has that since changed?
Well, I’m definitely moving around, but I’m kind of living on the Hudson River in farm country just north of Manhattan. I’m renting a house but I’ve barely been there yet! I just started paying rent on it and it’s almost more than I can afford. I’m a little terrified. But it’s just for a little while so hopefully I don’t get evicted. [laughs]
The fact that you’ve barely been there means you’ve been busy though.
Yeah, and I don’t have to pay for heat!
But won’t Static get cold?
[laughs] He can take it… I’ve got it set on 52.
How did your involvement in the preservation of the Paragon Carousel come about?
Well, I love it, first of all. I know it and developed a relationship with it because I actually lived in Nantasket for a while. I lived there for almost a year when I was traveling around a lot and we weren’t touring. The carousel is mechanically handled, in terms of the restoration of the machines and the horses and the band organ, by this fellow named James. He at first kind of comes across as this crusty sailor or something, but is an incredibly generous and terrific person. He was always very kind to us… He would let us come in when the carousel was closed and let us play with the band organ or show us something he’s working on.
When I first went to Nantasket, I took my grandmother who lives in Cambridge and the carousel was closed, but he saw us peeking through the windows at it and opened it up. I was actually just looking for a friend of mine who I thought was in Nantasket at the time, working for the carousel. But he saw that we were interested and said, “I bet ya wanna ride the carousel, don’t ya?” in this slightly gnarled, threatening voice. And I was kind of like, “Uhh, sure!” So we went in and my grandmother got on the chariot–she hadn’t ridden a carousel since she was a little girl. And he started it up, turned up all of the lights, and he even rang the big ship bell at the start of the ride as if there were crowds there. It was really wonderful and I think it speaks a lot for the spirit of that building. It’s a pretty special place.
So, to make a long story short, when that grant thing was going on it just seemed like an actual opportunity to maybe, in some very small way, try and help a little bit. And it was. I think people make a lot of it… it was just a teeny drop in the bucket, but it felt wonderful to have some small way to put into action the affection that we have for that place.
So I guess I should ask an obligatory Neutral Milk question. You played a couple of songs with Jeff [Mangum] at a few shows on his recent tour. How did it feel to perform those songs again after all these years?
Well, it felt the same, really. We’ve been blessed in a lot of cases with really wonderful audiences that are very affectionate. So there’s that feeling… there’s just a really warm, good feeling. And we’re happy because it’s a lot of fun to play together… you know, it’s a ball! Did that answer the question? [laughs]
Did you feel that these venues and environments were a lot different than the places you played back then, though?
I think the people in the audience define the environment more than the physical confines of it. The couple of shows that I played with Jeff just felt like a great audience, a really terrific audience. And it didn’t feel like, “Oh, this is a fancier space.” The truth is that neither of the spaces that I played in with Jeff were really all that much different than places we might have played back then anyway. I mean, I know he is doing shows in opera houses and stuff like that… that’ll be super cool. I just think that a great audience is a great audience and it’s always a blessing and a privilege to be in front of one. I think that’s about what I felt and I’m pretty sure that’s about how he probably must feel. I mean, we haven’t talked about that specifically but… [laughs]
Is there anything you can tell us about the future of your own work with The Music Tapes beyond the caroling tour?
We’re going to do a bunch more shows this year. And there’s a couple of new records that are really close to being done… We’ll probably put them out one at a time. I’ve already driven the Merge staff crazy because I keep thinking it’s going to be done and then we end up going off on tour before it can get finished, so it ends up not getting done. But hopefully one of them will come out early next year, or just next year period. I mean there’s so much happening right now, there’s so much coming up and there’s so much that’s going to happen, that I hardly know where to start! But it’s a good time that way, it’s a really super productive busy time.
I’m excited about the new record because we haven’t gotten to share much new music since the last record came out. We did put out an EP called Purim’s Shadows that exists in the imaginary digital realm, which we’ve never done before. We just wanted to put something out because it was just taking so long to finish the record. And so the record should be out, yeah, early next year. I’m going to try to get home after Christmas and work really hard to finish it and turn it in. They have some really awesome and exciting artwork ideas for it at Merge, or things they’re willing to do, which is really cool. They’ve always been really wonderful. We did our first album which was a pop-up and they’re being super cool right now about wanting to do something really neat [for the next album], so that’s also very exciting.
So if the album doesn’t come out for a while, I’ll hope that doesn’t mean you got evicted.
Oh yeah, me too!
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Just minutes after the end of our conversation, I realized I had forgotten one crucial question.
