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Article about Elephant 6 collective (with a big part regarding the Music Tapes) in Flagpole, 31 March 1999, by John Britt and Melissa Link.

transcript:

ELEPHANT 6: THE MUSE GROWS UP THAT LOOSE GROUP OF TREEHOUSE POP FANTASTICS IS MATURING. ITS CIRCLE IS WIDENING. AND ITS NEW MUSIC IS PRIMED TO INVADE THE ORCHESTRA PIT, THE PROPS CLOSET, AND THE FAR REACHES GF OUTER SPACE. It started as a bedroom daydream, but the dream leaked out into the waking world. Now it’s spreading. The musical collective Elephant 6 — that sprawling, somewhat amorphous umbrella group of young pop bands, the one whose imprimatur ensures a taste of sweet aural psychedelia, the one in all the national magazines, the one that has made Athens, Georgia, its de facto headquarters — was once just a name for the four-track fantasies of four kids messing around in Ruston, Louisianna.

Back in the early 1980s, Rustonians Will Hart, Bill Doss, Robert Schneider and Jeff Mangum invented Elephant 6 as a fictitious label for the tapes they made for each other. The product wasn't necessarily intended to merge with the real wor|d — few imaginative children actually grow up to be cowboys or astronauts — but eventually the four friends amassed enough good material to warrant public consumption. They started getting serious. Schneider moved to Denver and formed the core of The Apples In Stereo. In Athens, Mangum established Neutral Milk Hotel, while Doss and Hart eventually formed The Olivia Tremor Control.

Over the last four or five years these three bands, the heart of Elephant 6, have recorded albums that have drawn worldwide critical acclaim. At the same time, Elephant 6 has expanded to include a difficult-to-count array of friends and compatriots who share in one way or another the original Ruston vision — to put out, as early E6 propaganda put it, “innovative, quality pop music” that hews to a prescribed set of values. “We believe in four-tracks, and beautiful sounds and ideas,” the old motto went. “And most of all we believe in SONGS.”

This spring sees the release of CDs from four Athens-based Elephant 6 groups: the sophomore effort from The Olivia Tremor Control, as well as new albums from Elf Power, Of Montreal, and, in a few weeks, the performance project Music Tapes. This new wave of music shows major strides forward in E6’s thematic, conceptual and sonic evolution, yet much of it remains true to the original vision.

With real record deals, these bands have been able to flesh out the limited lo-fi palette of the first E6 recordings: four-track operating methods are now augmented with digital 16-tracks and studio mixing, and while some of the inspiration still comes from home, much recording now takes place in professional studios. This new freedom has allowed these bands to explore a wider range of composition and arrangement while still remaining true to their aesthetic roots. And while the music style broadens, the E6 gestalt continues to expand beyond music itself: though there's always been a multimedia component to the collective, a group like Julian Koster’s Music Tapes is pushing beyond notebook artwork and into the far teaches of experimental theater.

THE SKY IS A HARPSICHORD CARVAS

As these boundaries expand, the shambling experimental ensemble The Olivia Tremor Control remains at the center of the chaotic Elephant 6 enterprise. The band’s debut album, Dusk at Cubist Castle, toyed with both classically structured pop songs and experimental ambient noise, with fairly distinct lines drawn between order and chaos. The Olivias decided to mesh both halves of their creative instincts into one seamless whole on their latest release, Black Foliage: Animation Music, a 70-minute pop freakout that recalls everything from The Beach Boys to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Black Foliage is unmistakably in step with everything OTC worked towards years ago. The tweaked out, psychedelic pattern shifts — from melodically grounded pop classics to cacophonous clusters of sounds — harken back to Doss, Hart, and bassist John Fernandes’ early days DJ-ing at the Louisiana Tech college radio station. There, according to Fernandes, the friends would cue up sound-effects albums and play them simultaneously with the records in the station's rotation, then step out to listen to the results on someone else's radio.

“Our idea on the new album was to weave patterns and ask the question ‘What is a pop song?” explains Doss. “We wanted to go beyond things like verse/chorus/verse and do things like bridge/bridge/bridge/bridge/verse/verse/verse, then into some sound excursion or the chorus or a barbershop quartet.”

Looking at some of The Olivia Tremor Control's more blatant influences — most notably the Beatles and the Beach Boys — it’s obvious that the band sees no fault in perfect pop. And in the memorable melodies of Foliage’s “Hideaway” and “A New Day,” it is readily apparent that the band can deliver such goods.

The goal then, it seems, is to create new atmospheres and environments for that music to inhabit. Black Foliage sometimes sounds like a pop record playing through a street-comer boom box while the sounds of the street invade and intermingle. With its nonstop flow of sonic and thematic concepts, Foliage tends to lend itself towards individual visual interpretation, individual fantasy. “Every time I listen to that album, it’s like a series of dreams,” describes Raleigh Hatfield, a peripheral member of a number of Elephant 6 related bands. “But with each listen, it evokes a completely different series of images.”

Hart agrees, citing the album’s subtitle as an important clue to the music within. “All the sounds in there to us are animation. I see pictures for everything in it, and so will our audience, hopefully.”

NEAT LITTLE DOMESTIC LIFE

Whereas The Olivia Tremor Control attempt to create an ambiguous aural fantasy world on Black Foliage, comrades Of Montreal have fashioned a far more specific world on their new album, The Gay Parade. The material on the telease steps away from songwriter Kevin Bames’ earlier, more personal work, and dives headfirst into a purely imaginary environment. The Gay Parade is a pageant of whimsical characters: “The Autobiographical Grandpa,” “The Miniature Philosopher,” and “A Man’s Life Flashing Before His Eyes While He and His Wife Drive Off a Cliff Into the Ocean.”

And while the album‘s concept — especially its Yellow Submarine-cum-grade school cover depicting every single character in the record — seems to express a calculated naiveté, Of Montreal's members insist that there are layers of conceptual complexities beneath the surface.

“It’s much smarter than a children’s book,” contends drummer Derek Almstead. “It's like The Canterbury Tales; it's whimsical, smart, deep and funny. It’s not cutesy-poo.”

“In no way do I want to compare us to Brian Wilson,” adds keyboardist and bassist Dottie Alexander, “but someone could say the same thing about Smile. On the surface it may seem that Brian Wilson is singing about nothing, but if you look deeper into the songs. you find many complex layers, musically.”

Songwriter Barnes’ Tin Pan Alley influences often give The Gay Parade a pre-rock vibe: it feels like it could've been written by someone raised in the age of radio melodramas, rather than a mop-topped guy living some 40-plus years after the birth of rock and roll. At the same time, Barnes’ character sketches — though often steeped in fantasy — owe much to mid-“60s British rock songwriters like the Kinks’ Ray Davies, who was known for penning bourgeois studies like “David Watts.”

“There definitely is a pervasive Kinks influence in everything we do,” agrees Alexander. “It's a slice of life look at this world we have created.”

That world is rendered in fantastic pastels and neons thanks to the CD's highly inventive arrangements — a major sonic step forward for both £6 and indie pop in general. The album is filled with waved-out guitar lines, crystalline piano notes, five-part harmonies, and a variety of novel instrumentation. Nineteen people are credited in the liner notes with everything from penny whistle to “woo-wooing while jumping on the furnace.”

Of Montreal plan to take their characters out of fantasyland and on the road — literally. Kevin Barnes’ brother, David, the group's chief visual artist, is working on a stage representation of the cover art he designed and created.

“There's not much room in our van for even a large suitcase, so the visual aspect will have to be limited,” Almstead says. “But we'll have a backdrop similar to the album cover, and perhaps some cardboard cutouts of the characters on stage with us.”

A DREAM REIFIED

Elf Power's A Dream in Sound is, without a doubt, the most mature offering from the latest batch of Elephant 6 albums. Combining the sonic experimentation of The Olivia Tremor Control with the fantastical storytelling of The Gay Parade, A Dream in Sound is a brief, yet powerful, collection of songs. In a way, it’s that perfect 40-minute pop album that Black Foliage dumps an extra 30 minutes of insanity upon. At once timeless and immediate, it’s Elf Power's most fully realized work, and a major improvement upon the band’s previous outing, When the Red King Comes.

“Our last album was recorded over a six month period,” explains chief songwriter Andrew Rieger. “A Dream in Sound was recorded in two weeks, and I think that had a big effect on the final product.”

The album continues down the path Elf Power has been taking since their first EP, Vainly Clutching at Phantom Limbs. While not as blatantly conceptual as the fantasy novel-like Red King, A Dream in Sound still focuses lyrically on otherworldly characters and confused wishes to live as other life forms. Rieger seems to have permanently turned his back on material such as Vainly Clutching's “Circular Malevolence.” That song was an angry acoustic account of an ego-tripping, status climbing acquaintance: “You can write it all down and just send it in your precious letter/Tell me of all the people you know and which ones you think you like better/You self-righteous motherfucker/You think I give a shit what you had for supper?” Such work has given way to more imaginative and surreal numbers with titles like “Simon (The Bird with the Candy Bar Head).”

“I always kind of regretted the mean-spiritedness of that song,” Rieger says of “Circular Malevolence.” “I wouldn't want to write those kind of hateful songs anymore.”

But don’t those kinds of personal experiences fuel powerful songwriting? “Well, yeah, sure,” Rieger says. “But I think you can do that in more productive ways. You don’t have to be mean about it.”

STATIC, THE TV, IS A KIND OF FRIEND

Flash to the 40 Watt Club: multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster is on stage with his band Music Tapes, sporting headgear he calls “The Mechanized Organ-Playing Helmet.” The helmet has a hand protruding from it, and the hand plays a faux keyboard. Koster stands amid a working seven-foot metronome, a wooden box sprouting a pair of mechanical clapping hands and an animated television set named “Static”.

Static, the television, will sing half of the songs tonight. Koster — augmented by the likes of Elf Power's Laura Carter and Neutral Milk/Gerbils member Scott Spillane — will buoyantly strum a banjo while the blissed-out, pixilated Static disseminates propaganda about the alien race of TV sets who control our world.

The audience at this Music Tapes performance is a cozy mix of friends, fellow musicians, and curious onlookers. Most stand in contemplative awe, while a few people cuddle the stage, clapping and convulsing ecclesiastical joy. This unique stage show is the ultimate in Elephant 6 fantasia: the line between reality and artifice is sufficiently blurred to give the appearance that even if the human performers left the stage, the mechanical ones would continue the show.

Koster’s former outfit, Chocolate USA — which featured Doss, Olivias drummer Eric Harris and others — bowed out of its acclaimed, albeit brief, limelight with a Bar/None CD Smoke Machine — more or less a rock opera about a cow. Music Tapes take Koster’s peculiar vision — not only of music and performance, but of the human condition as well — to rather head-scratching new levels.

“To me it’s like I look at human history: the Tin Man is as real to me as Abraham Lincoln,” Koster says, possibly describing the impetus behind Music Tapes. “The truth is that what I know of the Tin Man, even though he came out of someone's imagination — and Abraham Lincoln really lived — doesn’t make a difference, because I have vivid pictures of both and in the end what I know now of Abraham Lincoln probably came out of somebody's imagination as well.”

Music Tapes’ debut CD is due out soon, and though you'd think that this is a band best experienced live. Koster’s E6 compatriots say the cordings stand on their own. “Julian's stuck in a Dr. Seuss movie,” says the Olivia's Hart. “That's going to be my favorite record when it comes out. I wish I could write more Dr. Seussy stuff like that.”

“Julian is incredible,” John Fernandes adds. “He's a great home recorder. He takes account of the nuances of low fidelity and uses the disadvantages to his advantage. He's been using an old wire recorder and ribbon microphone just like what was used in old radio plays, and he gets a really genuine 78 rpm type sound.”

Koster says Music Tapes were born 10 years ago, when the musician was in his mid-teens. It began as a way to spend time with his friends, as he wasn't able to be with them as often as he would have liked.

“I kind of had to stay in the house a lot,” Koster says. “I started making tapes almost to make little worlds. Whatever I could imagine, I tried to make a sort of little place that I could visit whenever I was making it and then I'd be able to give the tapes to my friends when I saw them at school and they could visit that place. So the time that they spent there was kind of like common time spent together.”

As Koster grew up, Music Tapes became a sort of revenge project against the world, in the way that creativity became the means subtly to upend the powers that be. Julian fully lives up to Rieger's idea that anger can best be focused into positive, creative energy.

“In youth, it’s about being powerless or dependent on those around you,” Koster says. “You feel unable to take control of your world, and all of a sudden you kind of go over this divide and you realize that you are powerful, that you do have power. You begin to take control of your own existence — you can leave a bad thing and you can begin to create things.”

So Koster invented his own world, a deviant musical amalgam of Pee Wee's Playhouse and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fantasy is farther out than anything previously in the minds of the Elephant 6 collective. It’s one thing to be in a pretend band; it’s another to be in a band with pretend bandmates, especially at the age of 26. When Koster says of his talking TV, “Static the Television is a band member, and a kind of a friend in a lot of ways,” - it is seemingly without a trace of irony.

That overriding Elephant 6 impulse — to create indie rock that’s irony-free — is offering one way out of the rut the genre has found itself in over the last few years. Like it or not, it’s difficult to deny that it’s an escape hatch that works. “A lot of people who think that this music is childish or cute are coming from this whole school of distorted, ‘80s indie rock,” Of Montreal's Derek Almstead says. “And we're not coming from that point at all. We're coming from somewhere else.”

John Britt Staff writer Melissa Link also contributed to story

#articles #1999 #Elephant 6 #the Music Tapes #Of Montreal #Olivia Tremor Control #Elf Power #Julian Koster #John Fernandes #Bill Doss #Derek Almstead #Dottie Alexander #Kevin Barnes #David Barnes #Andrew Rieger

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