ELEPHANT 6 HOLIDAY SURPRISE TOUR at Lee’s Palace (529 Bloor West), Friday (March 18). $13.50. HS, RT, SS, TM. See listing.
Since the late 80s, when four friends in Denver – Robert Schneider, Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart – created a label for the home recordings they made for each other, the Elephant 6 Recording Company has become legendary.
The friends formed the bands Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Olivia Tremor Control respectively, the nucleus of an American independent music scene that hit its peak in the late 90s and continues to thrive today.
“[Elephant 6] has been around for so long that we’ve built up a catalogue and a history, so there’s definitely an interest in that,” says Elf Power‘s Andrew Rieger over the phone from his hotel room in Boise, Idaho. “There are a lot of young people coming out who were too young when, say, Olivia Tremor Control were touring. But there are a lot of old fans as well, so it’s a good mix.”
Rieger, Julian Koster from Neutral Milk Hotel and the Music Tapes, and the Olivia Tremor Control’s Doss and Hart are among the crew touring as the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise, an idea conceived around Christmas 2008. Despite it being mid-March, the tour’s name conjures the festive season, and so do the tour’s contents.
“We’re playing songs from eight or nine different bands and songwriters,” Rieger says. “And we’re incorporating films and games.”
Games?
“We have this 12-foot gigantic snowman, and we play an audience participation game where you help the snowman guide a snowball across the venue to puncture a moon. If the snowman can do it, the audience member who helped gets to pick any song by anybody ever, no matter if we know it or have ever heard it.
“We give ourselves a couple of minutes to get the song together, and if we’re unfamiliar with it – like the other day someone picked a Justin Timberlake song none of us had ever heard – we just make something up.”
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