Ask three core members of the three core bands who make up the Elephant 6 Recording Company about their recording collective, and you'll get three different responses.
Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider: "We believe in homespun devices, in ingenious ways of coming up with stuff, and in writing songs that communicate with people. We want to make classic records that can stand up out of their time and that people of all ages can listen to."
The Olivia Tremor Control's Will Hart: "It's just similar ideals about music [as a] tangible thing; belief that it can take you somewhere and it's not just fluff"
Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum: "We're just all friends...it's just sort of is."
That Elephant 6 lacks a congruent manifesto somehow makes sense. The "artistic collective" approach is a relatively foreign concept to pop music, bringing to mind the visual-arts movements of pretentious Europeans rather than college-radio aficionados from Ruston, Louisiana. What's more, the collective aspect is a bit less formal than press reports make out-even the E6 participants themselves give conflicting answers as to what peripheral acts are included on the roster.
But they all concur on this: Elephant 6 was formally conceived in 1992, when Robert Schneider, Will Cullen Hart, Bill Doss, Jeff Mangum, Hilarie Sidney, and Jim McIntyre decided to pursue a musical project that transcended traditional band or geographic barriers. The project's true conception extends back to tiny Ruston, where Schneider, Mangum, and Hart had been close friends since childhood; Schneider and the somewhat older Doss become musical collaborators in high school, as did Mangum and Hart.
Schneider has since relocated to Denver where he launched the Apples with Sidney and McIntyre; Doss and Hart joined forces with the Olivia Tremor Control; Neutral Milk Hotel guy Mangum hopped around the country with a four-track and a guitar. What began as a record label morphed into something larger, until anything artistically produced by the six conspirators falls under the Elephant 6 umbrella.
This loose collective approach allows the six to have their cake and eat it, as the musicians are liberated to chase similar themes down different alleys: the Apples shoot for the heart, the summer, and tight perfection; the Olivias shoot for the subconscious, the spring, and loose dreaminess; Neutral Milk Hotel shoot for the soul, the fall, and an emotional feast. Each band released an endearing full-length debut in the past couple of years, recorded at various home studios with Apple Robert Schneider's techincal aid and cameos from the other bands. Each album represents the next logical step for DIY recording, borrowing the methods so slothfully employed by Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, but striving for something sonically grander if just as autonomous. Perhaps the answering machine at the Apples' studio best sums up the juxtaposition of lofty goals vs. crude means: "You've reached Pet Sounds Recording Studios and also Jim's house..."
The article then proceeds with sections discussing both the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control individually. A third section, about Neutral Milk Hotel, follows.
Neutral Milk Hotel
Schneider spoke about 240 words per minute during our conversation, becoming the first person I've interviewed who I eventually had to hang up on (with deadline rapidly approaching and no more tape).
Jeff Mangum, his best friend since second grade, logged 120 words per minute and became the first person I've interviewed to prematurely hang up on me (allegedly due to a one-year-old's interference). "People always think they woke me up," he's forced to explain seconds into the interview, after the Olivias relinquish the Georgia-based telephone.
"Your singing has a really lethargic vibe," I offer.
"Cool"
"That's a good thing, then?"
"Well, if it's good to you, ya know," he responds in the first of several answers that seem swiped from a Palace interview, minus the smugness ("I'm sorry," Mangum says more than once, "I'm not trying to be difficult").
His polite reticence fits the bill: where the techie Apples expound on production and the arty Olivias on surrealism, Neutral Milk Hotel songs just sort of gush out naturally. Bedroom-recording extracurricularly from his usual band activities for over a decade, the 26-year old Mangum has honed an artful flaux-slackerdom. Much like the cool student who feigns langour yet consistently sets the curve, Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island, despite its beauty, carries that I-dont't-give-a-shit attitude. It's an amazing trick to lay down untouchable melodies and evocative lyrics over a carefully planted background, and still manage to sound listless-a trick that cuts straight to the heart of every college kid in a faded Superchunk T-shirt.
And it can be attributed in part to the fact that with On Avery Island Mangum doesn't have to try: he's free to sit back and play boy genius while Schneider sweats the production details. Although the Neutral Milk Hotel entity is essentially Mangum's one-man project, for his first full-length the peripatetic songwriter stopped by his friend's Denver bedroom for four months, in a recording arrangement similar to the Cardinal duo's. Mangum sings, drums, and plays guitar; Schneider handles the four-track and takes care of horns and organs-a role that's been almost completely overlookd in reviews of the album.
"It was Jeff's concept but I was the person who had to work it out," says Schneider. "The reason he asked me to do it was just that he wanted to do something more enticing than anything he'd done before, but at the same time he wanted to retain the same spirit" as in his previous self-recorded work.
So as Mangum's spat-out phrases tend to carry the songs, Schneider's garnishes help him realize NMH's vintage aura, an element rarely aimed for by mid-90s one-man bands. "I'm not as influenced by the '60s as people think," Mangum explains in a sober voice that seems to take coffee breaks between words. "My retro is a 1930s and '40s influence. I'm more interested in big band and swing and Thomas Edison and the olden times. I think the '60s are cool but I don't care to relive them. At the same time, I make pop music and a lot of pop music began in that period. But I don't think I'm emulating '60s heroes. I'm not into that."
Although Mangum has probably been compared to every white folk and rock hero who recorded between 1965 and 1973, his albums is far more inclusive, being at times both timeless and timely. Aside from the predominant "fuzz-folk," On Avery Island's inhabitants include grinding '90s guitars, budget Casio samples, prominent horns, and a drone send-off consuming a quarter of the recording. "That took us two or three times longer than anything else on the album," Schneider says of the little-noted "Pree-sisters Swallowing A Donkey's Eye." The producer goes on to elaborate extensively on this brush with experimentation, which replicates monk chants by toying with a skipping banjo loop, a Denver neighbor's gamelan orchestra, and tape-speed manipulation that renders previously inaudible octaves audible. Generally skeptical of such experimentation, here Schneider realized the spirit of "what the 1950s composers were going after-trying to make these sounds mesh in an organized way .
"I want to make things sound novel and kind of odd, to project the sounds we conceive. One common denominator in Elephant 6 is that we're very much focused on songs, but at the same time we're all involved in different ways with experimenting. My experimentation's much more tehnical. If you ask Jeff [about "Pree-sisters"] it would be a totally different explanation."
"What does your album's conclusion mean?" I asked Jeff, who currently seems more concerned with entertaining the one-year-old crawling around Hart's house than with the umpteenth interviewer asking pretentious questions about his record's place in rock. "It's supposed to be sort of going off into-oh god! The baby just smashed its head against the wall!"
The article concludes with a section about Elephant 6 as a whole.