TUE., MAY 22, 2007
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A User's Guide to the Elephant 6 Recording Company
by Jesse Jarnow
Perhaps the Elephant 6 Recording Company really began with the arrival of Will Cullen Hart in Athens, Georgia, in 1991. Returning from a waitering gig in the Virgin Islands, Hart was trying to get home to Ruston, Louisiana, and — as they say — he missed. It would be another few years before Hart and his buddies actually settled there. Before that, it was just sunshine daydreams — a made-up record label stocked with noise-loving high school punks pretending to be the Beatles. In Athens, it was time for real labels, it was time to actually be the Beatles. Or some joyous DIY mutation, anyway.
The bands — first Will Hart and Bill Doss' Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel, and (in Colorado) Robert Schneider's Apples in Stereo — lost nothing in the transition. The fruits of the fractalized Elephant 6 family tree communicate the joy of making music: an identifiable clatter of fuzz bass, Beach Boys harmonies, all-hands-on-deck productions, and avant-drone underpinnings. The resultant catalogue — at least 35 albums spread over 10 labels on eMusic, depending on your count — is both daunting and wondrous.
"We believe in four-tracks, and beautiful sounds & ideas, and most of all we believe in SONGS," read the cover the Winter 1994 Elephant 6 catalogue, published (and presumably penned) by the enthusiastic Schneider, who'd migrated to Denver and fathered a whole different scene around his Pet Sounds Studios. Hart's logo would follow the bands as they signed with different labels. It also began to appear on the albums of other bands Schneider befriended, including Beulah and Dressy Bessy. But the real furnace remained Athens, with its potluck dinners and communal houses.
As the Olivias' singles and EPs inched towards conceptual glory, the first masterpiece of Elephant 6 East was undoubtedly their Music from the Unrealized Film Script: DUSK AT CUBIST CASTLE (Flydaddy, 1996) — "2 L.P.'s" as they noted in the hand-lettered liners. Hart and Doss were joined by John Fernandes (another Rustonite) on violin and clarinet, and Eric Harris on drums and toy pianos. The album's Fab tributes and sprawling suites also featured the now-omnipresent E6 Orchestra (Mangum on "chanter pipe" and "space bubbles," among other things), a companion ambient disc to be played quadrophonically with the original (the out-of-print Explanation II: Instrumental Themes and Dream Sequences), and an invitation for listeners to submit "cassette taped details describing your favorite, most interesting dreams (real or otherwise)."
The same year, Mangum issued On Avery Island (Merge, 1996), Neutral Milk Hotel's first non-cassette full-length that, not coincidentally, was also his first of consistent quality. Recorded with Schneider in Colorado, the two matched explosive horns and bass detonations to Mangum's overemotive vocals. So began the flowering.
Foremost remains Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Merge, 1998), where the songwriter's open-hearted surrealism sat on a saturated soundbed of Sousaphones and singing saws. The album belonged as much to the band that had coagulated around Mangum: Scott Spillane (another Ruston boy) on horns, Julian Koster (leader of the Music Tapes) on banjo and saw, and gale-force teenage drummer Jeremy Barnes. All (and many more besides) contributed to the Olivias' second full-length, Black Foliage: Animation Music, Vol. 1 (Flydaddy, 1999). Like its predecessor, it imagined the Beatles sailing the seas beyond Pepperland.
There was Elf Power, too, led by songwriter Andrew Reiger and multi-instrumentalist (and Mangum's longtime girlfriend) Laura Carter. On The Winter Is Coming (Sugar Free, 2000) every arrangement sounded like a human pyramid equivalent of the Wall of Sound covering the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties." Side-projects, spin-offs and upstarts abounded, of course, including Eric Harris's anonymous mechanique Frosted Ambassador (Kindercore, 1999), the uncredited collaborative collage Major Organ and the Adding Machine (Orange Twin, 2001), and the brash autumnal pop of Scott Spillane and John D'Azzo's Gerbils, whose Battle of Electricity (Orange Twin, 2001) was the last to feature the Elephant 6 logo.
By then, Mangum had retired Neutral Milk Hotel, reevaluating his life after the sudden cult success of Aeroplane. The Olivia Tremor Control splintered, as well. Even so, there was plenty of music to be made and had. Mangum released Orange Twin Field Recordings, Volume One (Orange Twin, 2001), a droning dream-edit of music recorded at a Bulgarian festival, as well as Live at Jittery Joe's (Orange Twin, 2001) on Laura Carter's new label, founded to fund the construction of a sustainable community outside Athens. Hart, Fernandes and OTC keyboardist Peter Erchick regrouped (with Mangum on drums) as the Circulatory System, founding Cloud Recordings to issue their self-titled debut, even more labyrinthine and beautiful than Hart's Olivia Tremor Control productions. Doss repurposed his Revolver-influenced Sunshine Fix alter ego into a full band.
Kevin Barnes, whose Of Montreal project constituted a particularly precious nook of the Elephant 6 universe during its heyday, made an even odder progression. Shedding E6's everybody-and-his-roommate bedroom symphonies, Barnes moved to Oslo and fired up the drum machines for bitchin' post-Prince auteur-pop workshops on The Sunlandic Twins (Polyvinyl, 2005) and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer (Polyvinyl, 2007). Other E6 alums have found compelling voices, too. Jeremy Barnes has transmogrified his Jacques Thollot-influenced Hawk and a Hacksaw concrété into his own Eastern European-influenced settings (Darkness At Noon, Leaf, 2005) while Circulatory System members Heather McIntosh and Hannah Jones have issued spare folk as the Instruments (Cast a Half Shadow, Orange Twin, 2006) and Martian pop as the New Sound of Numbers, respectively (Liberty Seeds, Cloud, 2006).
Cloud Recordings promises more CD-Rs (to follow-up on Hart's Silver, 2001, a recording of passing trucks made by a tape recorder buried in his yard), and Orange Twin continues to thrive, the collective's spirit continues, trampling the lines between play and reality, inspiring landlocked weirdos everywhere, and never forgetting: a peculiar noise called Elephant 6.
PLAYLIST
01. "Opening" - Olivia Tremor Control
02. "A Peculiar Noise Called Train Director" - Olivia Tremor Control
03. "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" - Neutral Milk Hotel
04. "Meteoroid From The Sun Strikes A Dead Weirdo" - The Gerbils
05. "Sound's Around You" - The Sunshine Fix
06. "Frosted Ambassador #6" - Frosted Ambassador
07. "Madam Truffle" - Major Organ and the Adding Machine
08. "Waves of Bark and Light" - The Circulatory System
09. "Good Things Are Coming" - New Sound of Numbers
10. "God Bless the Ottoman Empire" - A Hawk and a Hacksaw
11. "Walking With the Beggar Boys" - Elf Power
12. "Suffer for Fashion" - Of Montreal
13. "When the Stars Shine" - The Instruments
The bands — first Will Hart and Bill Doss' Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel, and (in Colorado) Robert Schneider's Apples in Stereo — lost nothing in the transition. The fruits of the fractalized Elephant 6 family tree communicate the joy of making music: an identifiable clatter of fuzz bass, Beach Boys harmonies, all-hands-on-deck productions, and avant-drone underpinnings. The resultant catalogue — at least 35 albums spread over 10 labels on eMusic, depending on your count — is both daunting and wondrous.
"We believe in four-tracks, and beautiful sounds & ideas, and most of all we believe in SONGS," read the cover the Winter 1994 Elephant 6 catalogue, published (and presumably penned) by the enthusiastic Schneider, who'd migrated to Denver and fathered a whole different scene around his Pet Sounds Studios. Hart's logo would follow the bands as they signed with different labels. It also began to appear on the albums of other bands Schneider befriended, including Beulah and Dressy Bessy. But the real furnace remained Athens, with its potluck dinners and communal houses.
As the Olivias' singles and EPs inched towards conceptual glory, the first masterpiece of Elephant 6 East was undoubtedly their Music from the Unrealized Film Script: DUSK AT CUBIST CASTLE (Flydaddy, 1996) — "2 L.P.'s" as they noted in the hand-lettered liners. Hart and Doss were joined by John Fernandes (another Rustonite) on violin and clarinet, and Eric Harris on drums and toy pianos. The album's Fab tributes and sprawling suites also featured the now-omnipresent E6 Orchestra (Mangum on "chanter pipe" and "space bubbles," among other things), a companion ambient disc to be played quadrophonically with the original (the out-of-print Explanation II: Instrumental Themes and Dream Sequences), and an invitation for listeners to submit "cassette taped details describing your favorite, most interesting dreams (real or otherwise)."
The same year, Mangum issued On Avery Island (Merge, 1996), Neutral Milk Hotel's first non-cassette full-length that, not coincidentally, was also his first of consistent quality. Recorded with Schneider in Colorado, the two matched explosive horns and bass detonations to Mangum's overemotive vocals. So began the flowering.
Foremost remains Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Merge, 1998), where the songwriter's open-hearted surrealism sat on a saturated soundbed of Sousaphones and singing saws. The album belonged as much to the band that had coagulated around Mangum: Scott Spillane (another Ruston boy) on horns, Julian Koster (leader of the Music Tapes) on banjo and saw, and gale-force teenage drummer Jeremy Barnes. All (and many more besides) contributed to the Olivias' second full-length, Black Foliage: Animation Music, Vol. 1 (Flydaddy, 1999). Like its predecessor, it imagined the Beatles sailing the seas beyond Pepperland.
There was Elf Power, too, led by songwriter Andrew Reiger and multi-instrumentalist (and Mangum's longtime girlfriend) Laura Carter. On The Winter Is Coming (Sugar Free, 2000) every arrangement sounded like a human pyramid equivalent of the Wall of Sound covering the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties." Side-projects, spin-offs and upstarts abounded, of course, including Eric Harris's anonymous mechanique Frosted Ambassador (Kindercore, 1999), the uncredited collaborative collage Major Organ and the Adding Machine (Orange Twin, 2001), and the brash autumnal pop of Scott Spillane and John D'Azzo's Gerbils, whose Battle of Electricity (Orange Twin, 2001) was the last to feature the Elephant 6 logo.
By then, Mangum had retired Neutral Milk Hotel, reevaluating his life after the sudden cult success of Aeroplane. The Olivia Tremor Control splintered, as well. Even so, there was plenty of music to be made and had. Mangum released Orange Twin Field Recordings, Volume One (Orange Twin, 2001), a droning dream-edit of music recorded at a Bulgarian festival, as well as Live at Jittery Joe's (Orange Twin, 2001) on Laura Carter's new label, founded to fund the construction of a sustainable community outside Athens. Hart, Fernandes and OTC keyboardist Peter Erchick regrouped (with Mangum on drums) as the Circulatory System, founding Cloud Recordings to issue their self-titled debut, even more labyrinthine and beautiful than Hart's Olivia Tremor Control productions. Doss repurposed his Revolver-influenced Sunshine Fix alter ego into a full band.
Kevin Barnes, whose Of Montreal project constituted a particularly precious nook of the Elephant 6 universe during its heyday, made an even odder progression. Shedding E6's everybody-and-his-roommate bedroom symphonies, Barnes moved to Oslo and fired up the drum machines for bitchin' post-Prince auteur-pop workshops on The Sunlandic Twins (Polyvinyl, 2005) and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer (Polyvinyl, 2007). Other E6 alums have found compelling voices, too. Jeremy Barnes has transmogrified his Jacques Thollot-influenced Hawk and a Hacksaw concrété into his own Eastern European-influenced settings (Darkness At Noon, Leaf, 2005) while Circulatory System members Heather McIntosh and Hannah Jones have issued spare folk as the Instruments (Cast a Half Shadow, Orange Twin, 2006) and Martian pop as the New Sound of Numbers, respectively (Liberty Seeds, Cloud, 2006).
Cloud Recordings promises more CD-Rs (to follow-up on Hart's Silver, 2001, a recording of passing trucks made by a tape recorder buried in his yard), and Orange Twin continues to thrive, the collective's spirit continues, trampling the lines between play and reality, inspiring landlocked weirdos everywhere, and never forgetting: a peculiar noise called Elephant 6.
PLAYLIST
01. "Opening" - Olivia Tremor Control
02. "A Peculiar Noise Called Train Director" - Olivia Tremor Control
03. "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" - Neutral Milk Hotel
04. "Meteoroid From The Sun Strikes A Dead Weirdo" - The Gerbils
05. "Sound's Around You" - The Sunshine Fix
06. "Frosted Ambassador #6" - Frosted Ambassador
07. "Madam Truffle" - Major Organ and the Adding Machine
08. "Waves of Bark and Light" - The Circulatory System
09. "Good Things Are Coming" - New Sound of Numbers
10. "God Bless the Ottoman Empire" - A Hawk and a Hacksaw
11. "Walking With the Beggar Boys" - Elf Power
12. "Suffer for Fashion" - Of Montreal
13. "When the Stars Shine" - The Instruments
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