When the lights dimmed and the house music faded at the beginning of the performance Saturday night at the , all eyes turned, as per usual, to the stage. But they were misdirected. The band wasn’t about to emerge from their backstage dressing room as one would normally expect, but was instead strategically placed among the crowd, blending in for the most part, until they began to raise their voices together repeating the refrain, “You’re going on a trip, your brain is not quite fit” over and over as they marched toward the stage.
The surprising entrance set the tone for the evening; a spontaneous, rollicking journey through the music of the Athens-based Elephant Six collective, a group that boasts alumni from the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor control, as well as a laundry-list of lesser-known groups, one-offs, and experimental projects mostly sharing the same revolving-door membership.
The current “Orchestra” consists of a hodgepodge of members from over a dozen different bands, most of whom spent the majority of the show constantly shuffling across the stage and through crowd, switching instruments, telling stories, leading some audience-participation-snowball-throwing-game and generally creating a psychedelic ruckus.
No two songs featured the same personnel on the same instruments, and at points one could leave for a trip to the bar and return to what seemed like an entirely different show. Musically, the evening was less like a traditional concert than a window into to some crazed basement jam session. An E6er such as Neutral Milk Hotel’s Julian Koster, the Olivia Tremor Control’s Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, or the Music Tape’s Scott Spillane might be seen switching from sousaphone to bowed banjo to flugelhorn to guitar, oftentimes in the space of one song. For the most part, the group stuck to songs bearing E6’s trademark sound: a psych-damaged take on ‘60s garage rock and Beach-Boys-esque harmonies filtered through the band’s avant-garde kaleidoscope, along with many digressions into more pastoral takes on members’ solo work, bowed singing saw solos, brass-heavy dirges and moments of pure ear-splitting noise.
The Orchestra displayed its tightest, most traditionally competent playing on tracks by the Olivia Tremor Control and its related projects such as “I Have Been Floated,” “Hideaway” and the current tour’s namesake, “Holiday Surprise.” At other times, reflecting the unpredictability of this group’s revolving door set up, the music was sloppy, under-rehearsed and barely arranged as musicians seemed to come and go as they pleased. However, this served to enhance the feeling that, more than a just a concert, this show was a rare opportunity to observe an extended family of friends engaged in raw, unfiltered musical and artistic expression.
After nearly three hours, the evening concluded much the way it had began, with the band leaving the stage and re-entering the crowd to lead them in a group singalong of the Sun Ra tune “Enlightenment.” As Koster and another E6er beat out a vaguely tribal beat on a single floor tom, the rest of the Orchestra stood in a circle, clapping and singing along with the audience. After several rousing choruses, the band filtered out the venue’s back door like some sort of acid-damaged marching band.
The concert was over for us, the audience, but in what was perhaps the nightap most profound moment, the band kept on singing and playing, continuing right along with the song as if they were still on stage, the sound filling the sidewalks up and down Larimer Street as the crowd dispersed into the night. It was apparent for all to hear that even though we had been invited to join their party for a moment, Elephant Six is a collective in the truest sense of the word; making music and art together, wholly for themselves, and they’ll be doing it for a long time, whether or not anybody happens to be listening.
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Jonathan S. Gang is a Denver-based writer, musician and general adventurer.
Joe McCabe is a Denver photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb. Check out his .
