ELEPHANT MICAH - Plays The Songs Of Bible Birds

"Finally available on vinyl. Packaged in a lovely three-color, screen-printed heavy stock tri-fold art paper cover, with heavy stock offset printed lyric insert. Limited edition of 500 copies. We'll let Joe himself shed a little light here: 'touring the East Coast in 2003, someone asked, 'you're from Indiana - have you ever heard of the Bible Bird man?' I hadn't, so I did some research. His video had already been stolen from the library at Earlham College, but I stole it back and returned it. I began to imagine what the musical equivalent of his evangelical bird act might sound like. I wrote a song about the Bird Man, thinking of releasing it as a 're-issue' of a central Indiana country-gospel group that had never existed - the Bible Birds. Then I thought maybe I would do an Elephant Micah album of covers originally written by this (non-existent) Bible Birds band. In the end of course the concept kind of dissipated and it just became an Elephant Micah album. I recruited Beth Remis from Static Films (and more recently Pillars And Tongues) to help arrange/sing harmonies for the songs, and generally bring them up to pseudo-gospel snuff. We played the songs around the upper midwest once with Ben Racher on a portable pump organ and Jason Henn on upright bass. All of us got together in Indianapolis in 2006 and recorded this. I drove everyone crazy with my insistence on weird recording methods. I think i was kind of trying to approximate the timbres of the hymn sing broadcast on Salem, Indiana's WSLM. Who knows? I was critical of the results and didn't finalize them for several years. Here it is finally, a kind of 'prequel' companion to the Hindu Windmills (Time-Lag 035) album.' -- Joe O'Connell 2010. So there you have it. An overlooked chapter from this wonderful artist finally seeing the light of day, and a perfect companion piece to the highly praised Hindu Windmills album. Both albums are clearly united by their warm, lo-fi intimacy, sparse production, and stunning song-craft. Strikingly simple & beautiful stuff."