Riffs, Rants & Rumors: Olivia Tremor Control's Elephant 6 Revival
posted in: Features • Music News • Rock
These days, the Apples in Stereo, Of Montreal and Jeff Neutral Milk Hotel Mangum, when regarded out of context, seem to have little in common beyond their status as indie-rock cult heroes. But a decade and a half ago, they were sonic and spiritual kin as part of the Elephant 6 collective. The Apples in Stereo’s debut, the 1993 EP Tidal Wave, was the first release from the E6 camp, which was founded by Mangum along with members of the Apples and Olivia Tremor Control. At various points, E6 HQ has been located in Denver, CO, Ruston, LA, and Athens, GA, but from the beginning it was an offbeat cabal of underground artists besotted with ˜60s psych-pop, filtering it through their own eccentric sensibilities in classic DIY fashion.
Flagship band Olivia Tremor Control disbanded in 1999, but they popped up again at 2005’s All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival, and now they’re set to make a full-fledged comeback, reminding the world of the E6 heyday’s glory in the process. OTC co-founder Bill Doss recalls that the band began under the name Flying Machine, which he swiftly changed to Synthetic Flying Machine upon discovering that the former was the name of James Taylor‘s pre-stardom band. Of course somebody in the ˜60s had a band called the Flying Machine, he says wryly. Doss started the band Mangum and Will Cullen Hart, with Eric Harris and John Fernandes joining in 1995, after Mangum’s departure. Jeff decided to focus on doing Neutral Milk Hotel stuff, recalls Fernandes, so I joined to play bass. Eventually I started playing other things like violin and clarinet in the band as well.
The name Elephant 6 itself was a random abstraction from Hart, but in retrospect, Doss remarks, It sounds psychedelic”The Elephant 6 Recording Company” it sounds like Big Brother & The Holding Co. or something like that. According to Fernandes, the E6 ethos was about using what you’ve got to make the most elaborate and interesting records possible. And the aforementioned artists soon had company in the collective, in the form of Elf Power, Beulah, Ladybug Transistor, Dressy Bessy and others. “Eventually, when people started signing to different record labels, says Fernandes, we still put the Elephant 6 logo on our releases to signify that there was this collective that we were coming from with all these other bands.
Olivia Tremor Control’s first full-length release, 1996’s Dusk At Cubist Castle, craftily combined lo-fi psychedelic pop gems and off-the-wall avant-garde experimentation, maintaining a lissome, lighthearted feel throughout. Besides soaking up the influence of the psychedelic ˜60s, Fernandes remembers, we started getting more into musique concrete by [avant-garde composers] Luc Ferrari and Pierre Henry. He recalls that other early inspirations came from world music, gamelan music, dub, all over the place, that’s why our records may seem kind of varied, because we listen to so many different types of things. Hart and Doss were the band’s songsmiths, and Doss confirms that each brought his own strengths to the table. I think Will does lean a little heavier towards [experimentation], he assesses. We’ve got a side project called the Black Swan Network that’s all musique concrete, and that’s mainly Will. I don’t really sit at home and do tape cut-ups that often, but Will does it all the time. I probably tend to lean towards the pop stuff a little bit more. That being said, he can write a pop song better than I can.
But in 1999, after releasing their second album, Black Foliage, and coming off a tour as the opening act for Stereolab, Olivia Tremor Control disbanded. Though it wasn’t diagnosed at the time, Hart was beginning to feel the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and he wanted to slow things down. Doss objected, and a rift split the group in two, with Hart forming Circulatory System and Doss starting the Sunshine Fix. Subsequently, Doss began working as an auxiliary member of Apples in Stereo, but he was eventually drawn back to his old friend’s side. He and Hart settled their differences and began working on home recordings again. It was awesome because we didn’t have any recording schedules, says Doss, we didn’t have any tours¦we just got to hang out and almost start again. Soon, the rest of the band got involved as well. I’d even been having the guys come over to the house on Sunday afternoons, Doss recalls, we’d just get together and play music. We realized ˜Man this is fun, we should be doing this again.'”
By 2005, they were match-fit once more, and accepted an invitation to play All Tomorrow’s Parties, which they’re set to do yet again this December. But more exciting for old Olivia fans is the fact that the band will be on a full-fledged tour throughout September, which will be followed by a deluxe vinyl reissue of both OTC albums, and”hopefully sometime in 2012”a new Olivia Tremor Control album. We’re just working on stuff right now, Doss says. We know we’re gonna make a record. We’re not sure exactly how we’re gonna facilitate it. And there’s a wealth of extra goodies in store for those who buy the reissues as well. Fernandes says, We wanted to have extra stuff to give away with the records that wasn’t on the original releases, so we put together a compilation of about three hours of bonus material between the two records¦things that are out of print, import singles, some tracks that were left off the records because of time constraints, some live tracks, and stuff like that. When you buy the records you get the download codes so that you can download all this extra material.
Fans who catch the band on tour can expect to hear plenty of the old tunes along with a tantalizing taste of things to come. For this tour we’ve learned about twenty-seven songs, says Fernandes, so we’re gonna vary it up from night to night, because we have a lot to choose from, from the early singles to the Dusk double album, there’s lots of stuff to play, and we’re gonna try to add some new things too.
A new single, The Game You Play Is In Your Mind, is already available as an MP3. But hardcore fans of the ever-unconventional, perennially absurdist OTC should find some of the aforementioned bonus tracks from the reissues equally intriguing, like the fifteen-minute Black Swan Network (with Capillary Radar) and its companion piece, Black Swan Radar (with Enveloping Bicycle Folds).” We put out two records that were supposed to be played together, explains Doss of the cuts, the b-sides for Opera House. In England they wanted us to put out different b-sides with different versions. Will had these two electronic pieces that we were gonna mix to quad at some point, and we said ˜Why don’t we just put these as the b-sides, and then if people do want to buy the other one, they can play them at the same time and get this sort of faux-Quadraphonic effect. And of course, not too long after that, Flaming Lips come out with Zaireeka, which is four records to be played together. They’re always topping us!