elephant 6 holiday surprise (chicago)

Just to be clear, this post refers to various recordings from the Elephant Six Holiday Surprise concert which took place in Chicago, IL                                                  all photos by Andy Resek
at the Bottom Lounge on 10/21/2008.

Apparently, there is a plethora of recordings popping up from this show (which is, of course, never a bad thing). You know what, I don't feel like writing a real entry about this right now, so here's the rub...

NPR has posted a very listenable soundboard recording of this show which you can read about/listen to here. Now for the caveats... 1) Both the streaming version and the podcast are encoded @ 128 kbps in joint stereo. If you intend to download this recording directly from NPR's website, I recommend the podcast version because the streaming version clips pretty badly. 2) For some reason, the NPR recording lacks three tracks. Not only that, they happen to be three of the most outstanding tracks in a night full of outstanding tracks. As if the lack of The Music Tapes' "The Minister of Longitude" and "The Television Tells Us" weren't bad enough, they didn't include Jeff and Julian's performance of "Engine" either. At first I thought it had something to do with the fact that it was an un-mic'ed performance, but "The Fool" was played under identical conditions, and it appears on the recording. 3) Being a soundboard recording, this one sounds a little bit sterile at times.

These things said, the NPR recording probably provides the most consistently enjoyable listening experience out of the three recordings I've heard from this show. It does not, however, serve to recreate the LIVE experience as well as either of the two audience recordings. Only one of the audience recordings is currently available online (because I'm lazy), and it can be found at any of the following:
                                                            dimeadozen.org
                                                       thetradersden.org
                                                the-zomb.com
Thanks to "mrscorpio81" on E6 townhall for recording and posting this, his lovely, audience recording.

As most of you probably already know, I made what I consider to be a really good audience recording as well, and I promise I'll get that posted by week's end. PROMISE.

That however, is not why we are here today. As a courtesy to everybody on E6 townhall, who apparently loathe both bittorrent and lossless music of any kind, I took the liberty of tracking out the NPR recording (with no additional loss of quality [that means no re-encoding]), as well as filling in the gaps with my own recordings of "The Minister of Longitude," "The Television Tells Us," and "Engine." All of this in craptastic 128kbps joint stereo. I do apologize if there are any noticeable hiccups between tracks, but one cannot directly edit the waveform of an .mp3 without re-encoding it, so there's really no recourse for the man who otherwise tirelessly smoothes over blemishes in his audio projects.

Anyway, I'll post the link in the Comments section as soon as it finishes uploading, and I'll post my recording A.S.A.P.

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England!

Edit: Jeff Mangum (written for search engine indexing purposes).