Back around 1990, in the small city of Monroe, Louisiana, the Clay Bears were entertaining the crowd at Enoch’s bar with a drone1piece when, ten minutes into the performance, they were forced off the stage by the venue’s owner.
“But it was only one note!” protested the band’s leader.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a very good note,” the owner replied.
The leader was Jeff Mangum, and the Clay Bears were one of the many outfits in which he unleashed his particular creativity before going on to front Neutral Milk Hotel. These shifting lineups were made up of friends who shared that fiercely free, chaotic, and unpredictable vision of music, all grouped around the Elephant 6 Recording Company collective—Elephant 6—the name Jeff, Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, and Will Cullen Hart gave to the home recordings they were making in the 1980s.
The four grew up together in Ruston, Louisiana, but in the early ’90s the bipedal elephant planted one foot in Athens, Georgia—where most of them moved—and the other in Denver, Colorado, where Robert set up his recording space, Pet Sounds Studio, becoming a kind of Phil Spector/Brian Wilson figure for the collective.
On Avery Island (1996)
With the United Kingdom focused inward on the rise of Britpop and young American alternative fans still shaken by the grunge explosion and the fading embers of turn-of-the-decade alternative rock, Jeff recorded his first album at Robert’s studio, without a stable lineup but always surrounded by friends.
The record opens with the lo-fi surf-pop of “Song Against Sex”, a preview of the vanguard that would lift Animal Collective a decade later. Folk on steroids backing Jeff’s plaintive voice, shifting between campfire guitar melodies and almost childlike textures, alongside noisy oddities like “Marching Theme”, which sounds as if your turntable needle had landed on a vacuum cleaner. The eccentricity extends to the lyrics, with singular tales of strange sex, impossible characters, and multi-angled stories. A gale trapped inside a glass jar.
In The Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
After the moderate success of the previous record, Jeff returned to Robert’s studio, joined by the musicians—friends—who had backed him on the On Avery Island tour, to record its follow-up, an album that doubled down on their commitment to sounding beautifully ramshackle.
Feeding that aura of nerd genius, Jeff’s songs remained as tousled as on the debut, like that friend who is brilliant and always seems absent-minded. Toy pianos bring the distorted apotheoses back down to earth. The songs fracture and reassemble, wrapped in psychedelic brightness and a near-punk energy, as in “King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2&3”.
Immediately after comes his masterpiece, the sublimation of his approach in the album’s title track, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. A perfectly formed pop song draped in a primitive mantle, lit by unusual instruments—unusual elsewhere, standard in his case—like a singing saw or a tuba. On this record there are no guitar solos; there are tuba solos. The songs follow one another without pause, like an opera recorded in the back room of a circus, everything heightened by circus or funereal fanfares as required. In the lyrics, there is once again room for eccentric characters and even love letters to Anne Frank, as in “Holland, 1945” (“After reading her diary, I cried for two straight days”).
On the album’s tour, shows started hours late, singers hurled themselves onto the drum kit: the chaos of the songs spilled onto the stage and everything flowed freely in an anarchic but courteous atmosphere. The audience, aware it was witnessing a historic moment, could recognize a band in its finest and sweetest hour, perhaps at its peak, with a personality unlikely to be repeated.
After the tour, silence. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as both masterpiece and epitaph. Circus or funereal fanfares, depending on the occasion.
Jeff stepped away from the spotlight without drama, without grand statements or rehab clinics. He simply left the stage and carried on, absorbed in his own vision of music.
The band’s legacy, indelible to this day, can be traced from the early 2000s onward. Early Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Beirut, or Fanfarlo are difficult to imagine without NMH and the collective. Year after year, it remains one of the best-selling alternative vinyl records of the 1990s.
And since the hiatus, only a brief interruption of the silence between 2013 and 2015 to settle accounts with the growing cult around them. The second coming of Jesus Christ.
Elephant 6
In the collective’s family tree, countless offshoots took the form of bands, many of them made up of the same members swapping roles and instruments. A selection:
The Olivia Tremor Control – Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle. The debut by Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss’s band. An imaginary soundtrack for a non-existent film, a masterpiece split between finely crafted pop and ’60s psychedelia, and outright experimentation. Seventy-three minutes, 27 songs, ten of them titled “Green Typewriters.”
The Apples in Stereo – Tone Soul Evolution. The sun of the Elephant 6 solar system, as his peers referred to him, Robert Schneider reached his peak on his second record. Jangle guitars in the wake of The Byrds and melodies as radiant as the early Beatles.
Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. Andrew Barnes’s personal project hit its summit with this eclectic album where synth-pop, psychedelia, and funk converge on the dance floor.
Elf Power – A Dream in Sound. Unjustly underrated, they embody pure ’90s indie rock, clean melodies wrapped in distortion.
CODA: There is music that sounds from the street
All of them shared a passion for music, and the only way they knew how to enjoy it was on their own terms and surrounded by friends. Who wouldn’t want to be part of Elephant 6?
- Minimalist experimental music in which a note or sound is sustained in time. ↩︎