“I sort of woke up one morning and was like ‘The Holiday Surprise.The Holiday Surprise travels’,” the soft-spoken Koster says via phone from Athens, Ga., of his epiphany earlier this year to create a traveling circus of the collective’s bands.
Koster, whose experimental pop project The Music Tapes just released its first album since 2002, Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes, has been living on a remote island off the coast of Maine for years. But before that, he lived in Athens, surrounded by a thriving—and some say incestuous—music community filled with fellow E6 members, whose bands were offshoots of two of the original E6 groups, Neutral Milk Hotel (of which Koster was a member) and Olivia Tremor Control.
“The origin of all this was a show that happened in Athens, probably in 1999 or 2000. It was around the holiday time, actually, although the title ‘Holiday Surprise’ doesn’t refer to any literal holiday. It just so happened that it was in December,” Koster says of the gathering of a number of E6 musicians in an abandoned church.
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