Austin’s Octopus Project pose with Austin’s infamous giant yeti. Sadly, the yeti won’t be touring

The Octopus Project is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, studio recordings of their quirky, mostly-instrumental pop are tightly woven tapestries of electronic and organic elements, with very few ragged edges. On the other, those who’ve had the pleasure of catching their live performances describe a barely-controlled chaos where the desire to engage the audience trumps all. Over the past few years, the band's ever-growing popularity has allowed them to explore both the chaos of the live show and the control of the studio, releasing albums to wide acclaim while bringing their notoriously high-energy show to some of the world's premiere indie music festivals. Their rise to prominence has generated some memorable war stories.

“Last year, we went on tour with [indie rapper] Aesop Rock, and we became really good friends,” says founding member Josh Lambert. “The last show was in Burlington, Vermont, and for some reason we all decided to do a jam on stage at the end of his set. So we left our instruments up there while they were playing, and at the very end the DJ laid down a beat and everyone went up together and did their own thing. I don’t think it was very good, but it was really fun. All of us put our own thing into whatever it ended up being. It was a total blast.”

Collaborative medleys, constant switching of instruments, different masks for different songs — the list of performative quirks goes on and on. It remains altogether perplexing that in spite of all this, the band continues to churn out rigidly produced studio recordings. According to Lambert, the key to maintaining this delicate balance is adhering to a subdued, individual-oriented songwriting process.

“Normally, one of us will come up with a bunch of ideas and give CDs to everybody else,” Lambert explains. “Then another one of us will work on those songs and bring [the rest of the band] in. There’s a lot of passing things back and forth. We’ve written a few songs all together in one room, but we don’t really like jamming very much. It always ends up sounding like Stereolab, which is fun, but it doesn’t always turn out to be the most interesting stuff.”

This collegiate work ethic betrays the origins of the Project, which started in 1999 as a collaboration between Lambert and two of his Austin, Texas film-school classmates. From the outside looking in, the home of South by Southwest and Austin City Limits is the sort of place where musicians constantly weave in and out of each other’s lives, complementing each other’s talents and influencing each other’s work. According to Lambert, while the city is a fantastic place to call home, it doesn’t really factor into the way his band makes music.

“When we started out, we were in our own little vacuum,” he says. “We were in college and we didn’t know many people in the music scene. So we’ve always had this individualist approach, and I think that would be the same no matter where we lived.” Nevertheless, the musician is eager to acknowledge that Austin provides a perfect backdrop for the Octopus Project. “Everybody here is looking out for each other and trying to help each other, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for someone in another band to suggest something that ends up sounding really great when we work it in.”

Amalgamating a vast assortment of quirky musical angles and techniques, the members of the Project create a veneer of disorder that barely conceals the well-ordered mechanics of the underlying creative engine. Perhaps the most definitive element of their aural arsenal is the haunting theremin, an arcane electronic instrument with a temperamental nature that frequently seems to be on the verge of chaos.

“There’s always the sense that things are about to fall apart, especially with the theremin and probably in general with our band,” says Lambert. “But to me, that kind of makes it more fun, because our audiences never know exactly what they’re going to get. It’s always a bit of a surprise.”