The first-ever Fun Fun Fun Fest is this Friday, December 1st, at Waterloo Park. Over two dozen great acts are on the bill, including Spoon, Peaches, The Black Angels, Prefuse 73, and DJ Mel. Tickets are $20, and can be purchased online.

Octopus Project perform on the Indie stage at 3:30pm. -- The Editors

What's your favorite thing about playing festivals? (Or do you prefer not
to play them?)

Festivals are rad! We very much prefer to play them! (Rather than not play them.) Any time you get tons of people together in the outdoors for a specific event there's an energy that's really exciting...as a band it's pretty fun to get to be a part of that.

What's your favorite festival memory?

Launching stuffed animals into the (astoundingly large) crowd at Coachella was pretty amazing...all those parking lot catapult tests really paid off.

You've toured all over the place--what's the best food you've ever had on
tour, or in your opinion, the best restaurant in the USA?

The Tour Food highlight for us is usually the Tomato Head in Knoxville, TN...there's a sandwich there called the Kepner Melt that will explode your brain. I can't go into details now or I'll start weeping. It's a beautiful thing.

What's your favorite city to play in (other than Austin, of course)? What is it about that city that turns you on?

Knoxville is pretty damn rad for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the Kepner Melt - folks are just ready to get down. Shows there (at the Pilot Light) are always 100% off the chain. It really feels like some force of nature that we're just lucky to have landed in the middle of.

What album(s) is currently on strong rotation in the tour van?

Michael Andrews' soundtrack to the film Me and You and Everyone We Know gets a lot of play. Dreamy!

When you're not Octopus Projecting, what's your favorite thing to do in Austin?

Ride bikes. Preferably in pursuit of adventure.

Your live show is crazy-go-nuts (and we love it!). Please explain to us how you're able to pull all of it together. The live drums, the guitars, the loops, the manufactured beats, the theremin, balloons??

We sit around saying "Oh! You know what would be awesome?" and then we see how much of that we remember and then see how much of that is realistic and then do as much of that as we can before show time. If we approached it from the big picture it'd probably be intimidating, but as a series of details the shows are really fun to put on! So the trick is focusing on one thing at a time, but ending up with a lot of things.

What's the all-time best live show you've ever seen?

Melt-Banana. Lordy. The guitarist was wearing a shirt that said "I'm From Fucking Outer Space", and that about sums it up. The most intense thing I've ever seen on a stage.

Very Close 2nds: Blonde Redhead, Deerhoof, Sweep the Leg Johnny, Dismemberment Plan, Daft Punk.

How did the collaboration work with Black Moth Super Rainbow (The House of Apples and Eyeballs) work? Who wrote what and how did it come together?

We became friends over the internet after being introduced to their label, Graveface, and things just kind of rolled from there...each band posted a bunch of half-finished demos for the other to download and mess with and we traded those back and forth for a while, adding and altering, until everybody was happy. A couple songs made it onto the record without the other band's input but for the most part we each had a hand in shaping all the songs. If you're familiar with both bands (and I highly recommend getting familiar with Black Moth for those who aren't yet) you can recognize elements of each of us in the tunes, but I'm really excited about the way each band's sound pushed the other into new territory.

Most importantly, migas or breakfast tacos?

The answer is clear: Migas tacos!

And since you're from here, where do you get the best migas or breakfast tacos here in Austin?

El Chilito. Oh yes. El Chilito.