‘They realised that doing this together was more fun than doing it alone’ … the massed ranks of Elephant 6. “Jeff’s focused on visual art now, which he may share with the public in the future,” says Bangs of the scene’s Salinger-esque reluctant figurehead. He later re-formed the band for a handful of tours, before putting them back on hiatus in 2015. Mangum had a breakdown, split up Neutral Milk Hotel and spent much of the next decade in seclusion. “Once his greatness was recognised, needy people started knocking at his door, saying he was the only person who understood their trauma,” says Bangs, who was Mangum’s friend and housemate during the era. Receiving modest acclaim on release, Aeroplane’s unforgettable carnival-folk sound and surreal, emotional power soon built an impassioned cult following. We’re going to make a classic record.’”Īnd they did. “He was my roommate, and every morning I’d nudge him gently and say: ‘Wake up. “All I wanted was for Jeff to be happy and have a magical record,” Schneider says. At Pet Sounds, Schneider arranged the songs for an idiosyncratic orchestra of singing saws, trombones, accordions and distorted bass. It is a dreamlike suite of fuzzed-up folk, Appalachian mountain song and horn-driven laments tracing a narrative inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the second album by Neutral Milk Hotel, fused Mangum’s avant-garde impulses with droning folk songs that Bangs describes as possessing “an Astral Weeks-esque internal turmoil”. “It helped me hear other dimensions in the music.”īut it was Mangum who would record Elephant 6’s signature opus – with a little help from his friends, of course.
“I took LSD quite a lot, around 200 times,” says Hart. An ambitious 75-minute epic featuring contributions from Schneider, Mangum and Kostner, it featured a fearless blend of experimental recordings and wonky pop expressing the scene’s sincere love for psychedelic music and the psychedelic experience itself. The Olivia Tremor Control’s 1996 debut album Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle was the first Elephant 6 release to win mainstream notice. “They realised that doing this together was more fun than doing it alone.”
“Their songs grew richer and more colourful, the more people were involved,” says Bangs. The scene – which also included the Minders, Of Montreal, Julian Koster’s the Music Tapes, Elf Power and many more – was utopian in ambition: they collaborated, supported each other’s endeavours and threw potluck dinners to ensure none of them went hungry. This energy magnetised like-minded local artists, film-makers, zine-writers and musicians who all operated under the moniker Elephant 6, an imaginary record label the original quartet had scrawled on the cassettes they would send each other. He adds: “Our plan was to humiliate the corporate rock industry.” (The friends continued to play in each other’s groups, however.) Over in Denver, Colorado, Schneider set up his Pet Sounds Studio in an abandoned building and formed the Apples In Stereo, to make music he wanted to sound “like Heroes & Villains by the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Pavement and Black Sabbath”. “I’d record him turning on a blender, revving a lawnmower, switching taps on and off.” Doss, more interested in melody and formal experimentalists such as Terry Riley, soon left with Hart to form the Olivia Tremor Control, while Mangum started Neutral Milk Hotel. “Jeff and I really loved noise,” says Hart. Mangum, Hart and Doss formed Synthetic Flying Machine, an early vehicle for their riot of seemingly divergent influences.
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A college town full of affordable, huge old houses offering perfect accommodation for bands, the city “was a safe place if you were an outsider, or a weirdo, or queer, or a musician”, says Lance Bangs, an Athens-resident film-maker who had directed videos for REM and Sonic Youth, and became a key archivist of the snowballing Elephant 6 collective. In 1992, Mangum, Hart and Doss relocated to Athens, Georgia. “I’m a nerd, I love that stuff,” he says grinning. “I had no doubt I could make music of Beatles quality on a domestic tape-recorder,” adds Schneider, who sketched out complex formulae to maximise the potential of the primitive technology. I had no doubt I could make music of Beatles quality on a domestic tape-recorder Robert Schneider “The Beatles had made Sgt Peppers with just four tracks, and that blew our minds,” says Hart.
The scene’s ringleaders – Jeff Mangum, Schneider, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss – met in junior high school in Ruston, Louisiana, and began swapping music they had made on their four-track tape-recorders.
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