Elephant 6

Cape Town, South Africa, 1977. The scorching sun of the southern hemisphere blazes down on the land, where the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean melt into the warm embrace of the Indian Ocean, and amid the tumult of waves crashing against one another, a joyous dance of white foam rises up into the clear sky, toward the crystalline blue of a timeless summer.

Little Robert Schneider is only six years old when, together with his parents, he leaves his native Cape Town to cross the vast, mysterious and deep blue expanse that stretches away to the west. The destination of this journey, which to his child's eyes seems never-ending, is the (certainly less scorching) American South. The Schneider family settles for good in Louisiana, land of great plantations and evocative bayous, and it's here, in the "Pelican State," where tradition blazes with colour and music spins like a glittering, tireless pinwheel, that this story begins.

Ruston, Louisiana, 1979. It's Robert's first day of school when a boy walks up to him carrying a wiffleball bat and asks if he wants to play. Robert is afraid the other boy means to hit him with the bat, so despite being reassured that's not the plan, he turns and runs off. The other boy chases him across the whole playground, twirling the bat menacingly over his head in mock threat. And so, through this rollicking game of cops and robbers, the first key encounter in the history of the Elephant Collective takes place: the meeting of two of the four founders of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, Robert Schneider and Jeff Mangum.

The third historic protagonist of the Collective, Will Cullen Hart, comes onto the scene a little later. He meets Jeff Mangum at Will's school, where Jeff turns up asking to join the football team, since his own school doesn't have one. Robert and Will get to know each other some time after that, when all three boys attend their first ever concert, a Cheap Trick show at Louisiana Tech University, managing to squeeze into a prime spot right in front of the stage. At one point the band's guitarist, Rick Nielsen, tosses a pick out into the crowd, and it lands right at the feet of Robert and Will, making the night even more unforgettable.

The years that follow are marked by their first clumsy attempts at songwriting, a period of music lessons, stints in local bands, and swapped home-made cassette tapes, in which the search for their own individual voice becomes tangled up with the constant need to bounce ideas off their friends.

Will and Jeff, trying to ape punk without really having a clear idea of what defined the genre beyond the rawness of its lyrics, often end up simply filling their cassette tapes with "Fuck Your Mom!" and other similar bursts of adolescent rage screamed into the microphone.

In this early experimental phase, while Will and Jeff vent their feelings in a very spontaneous but equally muddled way, without taking themselves too seriously, Robert - who has already stood out for his skill on guitar - starts showing signs of a more concrete artistic creativity, writing well-structured songs that are nonetheless still rather rough around the edges.

It's during this period of home-made cassettes that the idea of founding a record label starts to take shape among the boys. The initial spark for the name of the fledgling label, at that point still just a project in embryo, comes from Will Hart, who proposes the name "Elephant 6" as if in a sudden flash of inspiration. The label's definitive name, however, should be considered the first true product of collaboration among the Collective's members, since it's Robert who completes the phrase into "Elephant 6 Recording Company," adding a touch of extra polish to Will's original suggestion. Will is also the one who designs the label's logo, and so it's on the home-made cassettes - handed out mostly to friends (or sold to the odd buyer at shows) - that what will later become the official symbol of the Collective's record label begins to circulate.

The fourth founding member of Elephant 6 is something of an outsider, since he doesn't live in Ruston but in the neighbouring town of Dubach. His name is Bill Doss, and he comes into contact with Robert Schneider back in high school, when Robert, on the hunt for musicians to start a band, finds an ad placed by Bill in a music shop, listing among his favourite artists Van Halen, a band Robert adores. As it turns out, Robert later discovers that Van Halen is just an old flame of Bill's, but the two boys share a passion for the Beatles and new wave, and that's enough: Bill joins Robert's band, Fat Planet - first as singer, then as bassist - a group essentially inspired by the pastel-hued sounds of the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, who stay active for a few years.

During this same period, Will and Jeff are busy with their own punk-inspired experiments. Their first band is a "white noise band" called Maggot, which Jeff himself will later describe as "the most disgusting band that ever existed."

The four boys from Louisiana only begin building a solid foundation of musical knowledge once they venture out of sleepy Ruston, where there's next to no stimulus in that direction (the nearest record store is sixty miles away…): during their high school years, they come into contact with the underground rock scene thanks to sporadic trips to Louisiana Tech University, where they try to carve out a niche for themselves as DJs on the campus radio station, spending hours poring over the records that pass through their hands. This is how the four future founders of the Elephant 6 Collective refine their tastes: The Zombies, Small Faces, Syd Barrett, Scratch Acid, and Tall Dwarfs are just some of the names that start circulating enthusiastically in their conversations. Greater firsthand involvement with the music scene also allows the boys to build up a network of contacts they can draw on to plan their own shows, so that whenever an interesting band passes through Ruston, they can team up with friends to put together opening acts, testing themselves on a much bigger stage.

Cut off from any commercial context, Robert, Will, Jeff and Bill let themselves be carried along by the flow of sounds pouring out of their minds, supporting and influencing one another and thus shaping the music that their small but fervent circle of friends begins to create. These years of experimentation and learning, accompanied by an intense exchange of home-made cassette tapes, represent a foundational phase in their shared musical education.

At the end of the '80s, Will and Jeff start up an experimental pop project, Cranberry Lifecycle. Robert Schneider, among the first to hear their tapes, is captivated by his two friends' new compositions: "The Cranberry Lifecycle recordings were amazing, and they genuinely inspired my own recordings from that period too. That's some of the best stuff to ever, EVER come out of the Elephant 6 Collective, marked by a free and spontaneous lo-fi perfection, both captivating and surreal."

After finishing high school, Will Hart leaves Ruston and, following a stretch spent travelling around the United States, moves together with his friend Jeff Mangum to Athens, Georgia, where Bill Doss will later join them too. The two musicians' lively, inspired songwriting activity becomes intertwined with everyday life, to the point that the house Will and Jeff share doubles as a rehearsal/recording space, where the pair spend almost every day, armed with a small drum kit and a couple of guitars, backed by Will's invaluable 4-track recorder. Their live baptism comes with the renaming of Cranberry Lifecycle to The Syntetic Flying Machine, which nonetheless amounts to little more than a change of image, since the style stays just as unchanged as the line-up, still basically made up of Will Hart on guitars and Jeff Mangum on drums, occasionally joined by Bill Doss.

When Bill leaves Ruston for good to settle permanently with Will and Jeff in Athens, he's quickly drawn into the mantra-like creative spiral, effectively becoming a permanent member of the group, both as bassist and songwriter: this is how the first line-up of Olivia Tremor Control officially comes together.

In truth, this original line-up of the band led by Will Hart won't last long, since after the release of "California Demise", Olivia Tremor Control's first EP, Jeff Mangum leaves Athens to travel around the United States, eventually settling back in Denver to devote himself to the musical project he'd started back in high school, alongside Cranberry Lifecycle. Out of that project, and its original moniker (Milk Studios), Neutral Milk Hotel will be born.

In parallel with the events unfolding in Athens, Robert Schneider leaves Ruston and, after a series of moves, arrives in Denver in 1991, where he enrolls at the University of Colorado in nearby Boulder. Shortly after arriving in the city, Robert answers an ad looking for a bassist, and starts playing in a local band. Things don't seem to work out too well, though, and Robert and the band's guitarist, Chris Parfitt, who share several musical passions (Beach Boys and Pavement chief among them), decide to start a project of their own.

Around the same time, on a bus from Denver to Boulder, Robert meets Jim McIntyre, also a student at the University of Colorado. Their shared love of the Beach Boys is the spark that ignites the conversation, steering it into musical territory and immediately sparking a rapport between the two. Jim plays bass and has a roommate named Hilarie Sidney who dabbles on drums; both have been playing together since middle school in a band called Von Hemmling. Not long after the encounter on the bus, both Jim and Hilarie are brought into Robert and Chris's new musical project, The Apples, which will only complete its name as The Apples In Stereo in 1995. "The original idea," Jim recalls, "was to create a kind of eccentric lo-fi pop band, with a sound buried under fuzz and noise. For my money, the best Apples recordings are the ones cut straight onto the boombox in the rehearsal room: rough as hell but as intense as anything else out there."

The release of The Apples' first EP, "Tidal Wave", in June 1993, is the founding event that officially marks the birth of the "Elephant 6 Recording Company". So, after "Elephant 6" had for a long time been nothing more than a name used by four Louisiana kids stamping the E6 logo on home-made cassettes containing their earliest musical experiments, years later the long-awaited record label finally comes to life, allowing Robert, Will, Jeff and Bill's dream to become a concrete reality.

"Tidal Wave" is recorded multitrack on a 4-track by Robert Schneider in 1993. Eight hundred copies of Schneider's band's debut 7" are then pressed: five hundred on green vinyl and three hundred on black vinyl. And it's only the beginning.

"Will did most of the artwork," Robert recalls. "We put together the catalogues, we duplicated the tapes. At first it was just a tiny cassette label, and pretty soon we simply couldn't keep up with demand anymore. After sending out the first fifty tapes, we started falling behind. We weren't trying to reach some level of acceptance or success. All we were trying to do was give the world something good, and to hell with the rest." A genuine enthusiasm drives the members of Elephant 6 in this operation of "music spreading for the world's sake". The Collective's founders, in fact, are convinced they can move beyond the confines of a hedonistic view of music, thereby distancing themselves from the Wildean spiral of art for art's sake, and proposing instead a eudaimonic model of music, understood as an (auxiliary) means for achieving both individual and collective wellbeing. Jeff Mangum explains: "When we started this Elephant 6 project we had a strongly utopian vision, one that led us to believe we could overcome any difficulty through music. Music wasn't there purely as entertainment: we were trying to be agents of some kind of change. We wanted to transform our own lives and the lives of those who listened to our songs."

It's clear from the outset, then, how the meaning of the name Elephant 6 would go on to evolve, representing for its four founding members, right from the start, much more than a label — and indeed the role of record label would always remain fairly marginal, partly for financial reasons, especially when compared with the ethical and communal significance the Collective takes on from its earliest days: Elephant 6 is above all a kind of creed guiding the artistic path of the Collective's members, a set of ideals that touch on the musical sphere but largely extend into everyday life too, shaping both artistic choices and life choices alike.

Those involved in the Elephant 6 project are united by a very strong spirit of cooperation, in the most "hippie" sense of the term, in which everyone shares their ideas and projects with one another: in light of this spirit, extended to both music and everyday life, it becomes understandable that some members of the Collective chose to move into a commune, the Orange Twin Community in Athens, where many of them still live today. Moreover, from a more strictly musical standpoint, they're united by a similar approach to art, understood as a shared conception of its purposes and a preference for the same means, all within an otherwise varied range of ways to express their potential.

Taking a cue from the Surrealists, in Elephant 6's early days a kind of collective manifesto is also drawn up, declaring its aims and founding principles. This manifesto of intent that the Collective sets out to uphold, however, turns out to be anything but rigid, boiling down in practice to just a handful of fixed points, represented by those very same convictions that had animated the four Ruston boys raised on a diet of cassette tapes. In the '90s Robert Schneider declared: "We believe in the use of home recording equipment, in ingenious ways of putting things together, and in writing songs that communicate with people. We want to make classic records that manage to outlive their own time and that can be accessible to people of all ages." Many years later, on the cover of a 2004 catalogue, one can similarly read: "We believe in the 4-track, in beautiful sounds & ideas, but more than anything else we believe in SONGS."

Fundamentally, then, the Collective's programmatic manifesto boils down to an overwhelming passion for lo-fi recordings, an obsessive attention to detail and unusual quirks (from the use of exotic or eccentric instruments like sitar, sarangi, handsaw, zanzithophone and so on, to a tendency toward more or less extreme experimentalism) and the expression of pop music that is as communicative, intense and accessible as possible, expressive and close to the audience it's aimed at: in other words, as the name of its main reference genre suggests, "popular". Naturally, the result doesn't always live up to expectations — indeed, in more than one case the Collective's music comes across as extremely elaborate and far from immediate, especially when the psychedelic experimentalism gets pushed further. Still, the winking Beach Boys-esque sounds and the hazy, Beatles-tinged melodies, two distinct traits running through much of the Collective's work, manage to win over a broad range of listeners.

In 1994 the Elephant 6 Recording Company released its second work, the debut 7" by The Olivia Tremor Control, "California Demise". Afterwards, as already mentioned, Jeff decided to return to Denver, where his Neutral Milk Hotel came to life, before later relocating to Athens.

From this point on, the Collective's story becomes even more intricate, due to the progressive arrival of numerous new recruits, both individual musicians and bands. This fervent movement, which has accompanied the Collective's history since its unofficial beginnings, is marked by a dense flourishing of cross-collaborations between members of the various bands, both live and in the studio, which exponentially complicates a family tree that was already fairly tangled to begin with.

The dual geographic base of the founding members of the Elephant 6 Recording Company (Athens and Denver) during the label's most active years means that the bands involved in the Elephant 6 project are mostly based in one area or the other, to the point that, for simplicity's sake, the Collective's bands can be grouped into two categories: E6 East (bands active in Athens, home to both The Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel) and E6 West (bands orbiting Denver, home to The Apples In Stereo).

E6 East, based in Georgia, is the category with the greatest cross-contamination between bands: it's very common for the same musicians to play in different bands at the same time, even just as "guests" in the studio or on stage. Besides The Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel, this category also includes The Sunshine Fix and The Always Red Society (the respective solo projects of Bill Doss and Will Hart), Black Swan Network (The Olivia Tremor Control's experimental side project), Circulatory System (another Olivia Tremor Control offshoot), Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't (the solo project of Pete Erchick, keyboardist of The Olivia Tremor Control), Chocolate U.S.A. and The Music Tapes (respectively the debut band and main project of Julian Koster, bassist of the early Neutral Milk Hotel), The Gerbils (featuring some Neutral Milk Hotel members), Elf Power (which includes friends of various Collective members), and deliberately mysterious, enigmatic projects such as Major Organ And The Adding Machine, Frosted Ambassador, Dixie Blood Moustache and Clay Bears.

E6 West, based in Colorado, besides The Apples In Stereo includes Marbles (Robert Schneider's longest-running and most prolific solo project), Ulysses and Orchestre Fantastique (other, more recent minor projects of Robert's, in which he appears respectively as frontman and as a solo artist), Von Hemmling (the longstanding project of Hilarie Sidney and Jim McIntyre, which Jim took over as a solo project once both of them joined The Apples In Stereo), Secret Square (Hilarie's side project), High Water Marks (another, more recent project of Hilarie Sidney's, which would become her sole outlet after she left The Apples In Stereo), Dressy Bessy (a project featuring John Hill, The Apples In Stereo's second guitarist), and finally The Minders, a band based in Portland but includable in E6 West since it was formed in Denver, where it was also based for a long time before eventually relocating to Oregon (and in a very early phase of the Denver period, Robert and Hilarie were also involved in this project).

E6 East and E6 West don't actually include every member of the Collective: besides the bands already mentioned, there are also so-called "outsiders", bands that can't be geographically traced back to either Athens or Denver. These are San Francisco's Beulah and Brooklyn's Essex Green, both discovered and recruited by Robert Schneider. For these bands, then, entry into the Collective didn't follow the preferential channel of shared acquaintances/friendships that, as already mentioned, is in other cases the most common practice, if not the rule: "A band," Schneider explains, "becomes a member of Elephant 6 by invitation. One way to become part of Elephant 6 is by association. Sometimes it happens, as it did with Beulah, that you listen to a band and think: this is a kindred spirit. This is Elephant 6."

Besides the bands listed above, which represent the Collective "proper", numerous other groups are counted among those belonging to Elephant 6, even though the absence of the Elephant 6 Recording Company's official logo on their albums automatically excludes them from the official, narrower circle of the Collective. These bands are generally grouped together under the so-called "extended family", and are characterized by the (even just past) involvement of members of the Collective proper. Among the various bands belonging to the extended family, one that stands out, not least for the considerable audience it has won, is Of Montreal, a prolific band based in Athens.

Many bands from the Elephant 6 Collective achieved a fair degree of commercial success, especially in the second half of the '90s: among these, besides the Collective's three cornerstone bands, Elf Power and Beulah certainly deserve a mention. The growing workload of the individual bands, tied to their increased visibility and to pressure from fans and media, led many of them to drift, both physically and psychologically, away from the idyllic communal situation that had built up over the years, often pushing individual bands towards greater individualism. This kind of media-driven diaspora, while on one hand having the advantage of highlighting the different talents by pulling them out of the homogenizing tendency inherent to such an excessively "incestuous" situation as the Collective's, on the other hand had a serious side effect, tied to the breakdown of the conditions needed to uphold the principle of "strength in unity": as a result, some Elephant 6 members, especially those by nature most exposed to the harmful effects of highly stressful conditions, went through a deep creative and personal crisis.

The most striking case is certainly that of Jeff Mangum, who suddenly withdrew into himself, shunning the spotlight and retreating into a silent hiatus from any activity, artistic or otherwise, to the point of creating a genuine "Mangum Case" in the public eye. Jeff's then-partner Laura Carter, one of the founding members of Elf Power as well as a "wild card" figure for many Collective bands, recalls of that period: "When Neutral Milk Hotel started getting so famous, Jeff began to pull back from the whole thing. A lot of people who approached us at live shows started having this cult-like attitude, and that scared me quite a bit, because we were nothing more than ordinary people. Sure, we were very excited about having created something so wonderful, so at first we felt totally electrified. But then, when things started snowballing so quickly, we all got a bit scared."

Slowly the Elephant 6 Recording Company began to fall apart, after having tasted, for a very brief span of time, the sweet fruits of glory, thanks in particular to the large-scale success achieved by Neutral Milk Hotel and, to a lesser extent, by The Olivia Tremor Control. Those few months of worldwide success were nonetheless enough to generate a growing sense of oppression and a widespread state of anxiety. On top of the founding members' personal crises came organizational problems and technical difficulties tied to the inadequacy of the recording equipment available. "The death of the party came as no surprise," Blur sang in 1997, and if one were looking for a prophetic line about the end of the Athens label's adventure, none better could be found: the decline of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, which effectively began in late 1998 with Mangum's crisis, culminated in 2002 with the announcement that the label was closing down — though this never turned out to be a final decision, since in the following years Elephant 6 continued to put out albums, albeit strictly in limited runs.

In any case, no longer able to rely steadily on the Athens label, many of the bands belonging to the Collective were signed by majors or turned to other independent labels, among which one in particular deserves mention: Orange Twin Records, a label founded by Laura Carter, which had already been running alongside the Elephant 6 Recording Company since 1999 and which effectively carried on its mission during the dark years, bringing together at its base (the Orange Twin Community) numerous artists originally tied to the Collective.

Relationships between Collective members in the post-Elephant 6 period continued both artistically and personally, and even during this period of silence from the Athens label, there were still several collaborations between the various bands. The communal spirit and the pleasure of sharing the same passions — the cornerstones of Elephant 6's "artistic creed" — thus remained unchanged even after the disappearance of the physically unifying element, proving that, all things considered, what Elephant 6 represents goes well beyond the four walls of a soundproofed building.

The feeling is that, among the former Collective's members, everything now happens in a less frantic, more relaxed way than in the past. What emerges from the interviews and comments given during this period by the various Collective members is a sense of widespread peace, a kind of return to the "normality" that preceded success, accompanied by a rediscovered, genuine passion for devoting themselves to music, alone or with friends, staying mostly clear of the chaotic pressures of the outside world. The words of Jeremy Barnes, drummer of the later Neutral Milk Hotel lineup, perfectly sum up the spirit: "I really believe it was just four kids from Louisiana working on their tapes to impress each other, and that, after everything that's happened, it's still just that, even now. Nowadays some of them couldn't care less whether the world knows what they're up to or not, while still caring a great deal about what their friends think."

In 2007 Robert Schneider decided to try relaunching the label, an idea the Apples In Stereo frontman had, in truth, never entirely abandoned, not even during the Athens label's years of silence. For the release of "New Magnetic Wonder", the band's latest effort, Schneider took up the Elephant 6 Recording Company banner once again, and the historic elephant logo proudly returned to grace an album cover, five years after the last time the US label had involved itself in promoting a widely-distributed release. On the occasion of the album's release, Schneider announced: "The Elephant 6 Recording Company is reopening its doors and windows and inviting the whole world: join us together with your friends and you'll create something special, something meaningful, something to remember when you're old."

Will Robert's enthusiastic words be crowned by the hoped-for revival of the Collective's historic label? It's too early to say, but one thing is certain: the spirit of the Collective has never faded away over all these years, while the most beautiful and precious meaning of Elephant 6 still lives on today in the intimate warmth of a group of friends, in their passion for music and in their unconditional devotion to the ideals they believe in. But above all, the spirit of Elephant 6 draws its life force from the deep, sincere affection that has always united its members, ever since a bunch of kids in Louisiana had fun trading self-recorded tapes. And, it seems, as long as those conditions endure, the story of Elephant 6 can never truly come to an end.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I Have Been Floated: An Oral History of the Elephant 6 Collective by Brian Heater

Elephant 6 Recording Company Primer by Mark Harris

Elephant 6 Recording Company official website

Have You Seen Jeff Mangum? by Kevin Griffis

Manifesto Destiny. The Elephant 6 in your Parish: literate pop by Melanie Haupt

Apples In Stereo – A Terrascopic interview by Jud Cost

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