Try and find a world where there's no parents just daughters and sons

...We offer the best of luck and our sincere hopes that you will conclude this record still if full possession of your life.

Anyone that I've talked to about music/songwriting knows that one day I hope to create a bona fide noise band album, akin to The Music Tapes 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad. To me it seems like such a challenge, but I'm guessing a lot of people might disagree with me. That's not music. And now for my overly dramatic response:

I admit that I don't put on a noise album as background music at a party, and honestly I don't really put a noise album on that much at all. It's tough to listen to, it's not something that you put on to kick back and have a beer to after work. It takes some effort, there's so many things to listen to in the recordings, it doesn't instantly give off a feeling or emtotion that is easily recognized by the listener, and worst of all you can't sing or dance to it.

As Julian Koster (Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, Chocolate USA), the majority shareholder of The Music Tapes, says, "Because The Music Tapes were more 'places' than recordings to me, they didn't have to follow the same rules and structures as the records I bought in stores. They could be as detailed as I wanted to make them. They could form stories, or landscapes of a world I imagined to be better than our own, for me and my friends to visit."

And that's what happens. Instead of listening to an album while sitting at my desk, I am listening to the din of a world that I am in, there's no music. Kickballs, vacuum cleaners, kazoos, and a perpetual lo-fi hiss become the neighbors upstairs, the helicopters landing on the roof of the hospital, and the drone of an oscillating fan.

Here are some mp3s that more closely resemble records that you buy in the stores than some of the other tracks on The First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad, the only officially released LP which was put out by Merge in 1999. Elephant 6 released two rare 7" Music Tapes records and Julian self-released a 7", The American Phoam Rubber Co. Symphony Orchestra Proudly Presents the 2nd Silly Putty Symphony for Edison Wax Cylander, but good luck trying to find any of them.

I have recently discovered that you can download the First Imaginary Symphony in it's entirity here.


mp3: The Music Tapes - Song for the Death of Parents

mp3: The Music Tapes - All Tomorrow's Parties (Velvet Underground cover)

mp3: The Music Tapes - A Warning! (1:32)



* the picture used is of Julian Koster and a 7 foot metronome, a staple member of the live Music Tapes