The Music Tapes
Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes

LA RECENSIONE

The apotheosis of the musical saw: when the musical saw is the bow saw, and when its spectral, ethereal sound plays loud like Hendrix's Stratocaster. When an auxiliary instrument of the auxiliary becomes the unlikely protagonist of an invented orchestra, playing invented music on mostly invented instruments. That is, when the good old traditional banjo, slightly out of tune and agro-pastoral, becomes a relief for Eustace, his trumpets, and everything.

The apotheosis of the musical saw: when the sonic masturbation of the man-artist – that music so palpably intimate, urgent, instinctive, melancholic in its being steeped in solitude – finds its channel to become art. Far beyond the intimacy of home recordings from some graduated and established artist who dreams and loves his privacy laid bare by a throng of fetishists. Far beyond intimacy from Ciceronian letters. We're talking about true intimacy and true musical masturbation, not glossy musical pornography.

The channel is a privileged one for quirky serial rapists of the seven notes, bucolic poets with suffering song and eccentric outfits, impromptu vegan freaks disengaged and individualistic: the Elephant 6 collective.

The brain is Julian Koster's, and the hand of the misdeed too, and Koster was a founding member of Chocolate USA, as well as a minor architect of those Elephantine wonders – a sublime variant of the basest elephantiasis – under the name Neutral Milk Hotel, in the capacity of bassist, banjoist, and (pardon) bow saw player, that is the introductory ghost of Two Headed Boy Pt. 2 and the specter of Anna all around In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

The musical spirit of Julian Koster is in the Music Tapes, in the cassettes of songs and tales that, as a sixteen-year-old, he loved to record for his friends. Today, his friends are artists of Elephant 6: imagine Jeff Mangum in front of the old tape player, nodding along to that little story or this lullaby or to the tune of that odd fanfare warm from Portastudio or any retro multitrack Koster might have used. Imagine the same of those at Merge, who have well-opened minds and ears too, and a keen eye: Arcade Fire, for instance.

For clouds and tornadoes are these nine years of cassettes. Little stories and compositions for saw, electric organ, banjo, ping pong ball, metronome, bells, flugelhorns, various contraptions: out-of-tune Pet Sounds and the psychedelia of Smiley Smile for those who love Santa Claus and the reindeer of I Wanna Be Your Dog from the Stooges, and various Pork Chop, De Anza Jig, and Hail Santa from Primus, inconceivable audio quality, folk as A Silver Mt. Zion are folk, presumably unaware nods to Daniel Johnston. Pure lo-fi saws from the heart of Elephant 6. Two thousand eight.