Optical Atlas

I was deeply saddened to learn this morning that Vic Chesnutt died over the weekend after falling into a coma from an overdose of muscle relaxants.  Here’s the article from the Athens Banner-Herald.  Constellation Records has a post up here which includes some thoughts from his friends, including Jem Cohen, Michael Stipe, Jeff Mangum, and Mark McElhattan. 

Earlier this year I met Vic when he came through Madison with Elf Power to support their collaborative album Dark Developments.  We cleared out some room for him to sleep on the couch by moving the rug and coffee table, so he wheeled on in and amicably cursed out my dogs who tried to sleep with him.  In the morning he and I were the first ones up, and while my Westie sat on his lap we exchanged dog stories for a good while.  He was a kind soul who delighted in revolting and offending.  Laura Carter at times seemed like his mother, offering “just ignore him” looks while he regaled us all about how he could trick his dog into eating his boogers.  And he was nice enough to sign my tour poster, even though his name was advertised nowhere on it.

He was sardonic but you could see the heart behind his words.  Even when we were talking film (I was debating whether to go see the documentary Sherman’s March, and he said, “I saw that film.  The guy in it is really annoying.  It drives me crazy.  I saw it twice. You should go see it, it’s an important film!”)  – he was a flurry of contradictions, passionate and funny.  When he was onstage, his diminutive physical presence was overwhelmed by his voice – he seemed to become his vocals, pouring himself through the microphone.

Pinnochio at the Townhall offered this link to donate to Vic’s family.  If you haven’t watched them already, a good way to remember Vic would be to watch the films he put together with Jimmy Hughes on the Vic Chesnutt/Elf Power European tour.  It’s a Vic’s-Eye-View of the world.  You can browse through the Elf Power category to find them.

The end-of-decade lists began in earnest around early fall, and I’m always a bit conflicted on the exercise; I find them, for the most part, ridiculously pointless and arbitrary, but surely I’m as compelled to read them and argue over them as anyone else. I began to think of some kind of end-of-decade feature which could be run on this website, but most seemed just as frivolous, just as arbitrary (best E6 songs of the decade, best E6 bands of the decade, best E6 live shows of the…). Really, who cares? What I found much more interesting was the story of Elephant 6 in the ’00s, which is the story of a fall and re-emergence of the “collective” (perhaps best defined here as a group of old friends celebrating their artistic collaborations) as well as a microcosm of the struggles – and occasional semi-miraculous rewards – any independent musician faces with limited recognition.when confronting a vast and competitive marketplace. The piece I was compiling, which was attempting to be a chronology of major E6 events of the past ten years, quickly expanded as I tracked all the storylines which starkly materialized.

Most critics and fans who have looked seriously at this (admittedly marginal and cultish) subject acknowledge that the golden years of Elephant 6 ended in about 1999. By that year we had seen the release of The Olivia Tremor Control’s second (and, to date, final) album, Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume 1; Neutral Milk Hotel’s final album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998); The Music Tapes’ 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad (1999); The Minders’ Hooray for Tuesday (1998); Elf Power’s A Dream in Sound (1999); Beulah’s When Your Heartstrings Break (1999); and The Apples in Stereo’s Tone Soul Evolution (1997). Artists in the collective used the Elephant 6 logo, designed by Will Hart in the early 90’s, with self-conscious pride, even though by now they were, for the most part, applying it not to the “Elephant 6 Recording Company” label, but on indie labels such as Merge, Kindercore, and SpinArt. Athens, Georgia, had long been a significant landmark on the roadmap of American music, and the fact that so many of the E6 bands were located in Athens (“Elephant 6 East” to Denver’s “Elephant 6 West”) had something to do with the music media’s keen interest: significant coverage to the E6 brand was given by major publications such as Rolling Stone, who profiled the collective as though they were living the communal hippie lifestyle Down South. But fabulous records kept coming, some pop, some borderline avant-garde, bearing that familiar logo and touched with an almost manic inspiration. There was a feeling of movement – or perhaps, a Tidal Wave – that, ultimately, seemed to break against the shore and settle at the turn of the millenium.

Slowly, the E6 logo began to vanish from releases. Affiliation with the collective was once seen as easy access to a built-in audience, a real gift for an unknown band; now groups such as Beulah and The Minders deliberately began to distance themselves from E6 in interviews, perhaps frustrated at the barrier to being viewed as unique artists in their own right. Neutral Milk Hotel began to turn down offers for potentially lucrative gigs, as Jeff Mangum made the decision to step out of the spotlight just as the light was becoming burningly intense. The Olivia Tremor Control turned their 1999 tour to support Black Foliage into a “farewell tour,” and announced they were going on hiatus (an official website was briefly active in early 2000, selling CDs of their John Peel performance and accepting more dream tapes from fans, before it too went extinct). With two of the three tentpole bands gone, The Apples soldiered forward, but there was a five-year gap between 2002’s Velocity of Sound and 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder. In October 2002, an article in Toronto’s weekly The Eye proclaimed E6 was dead, with Hilarie Sidney of The Apples backing up the claim, stating, “Everybody’s still friends, but it got really confusing…Robert and I were sick of dealing with the record-label end of it and, honestly, we were just ready to move on, and I think everybody else was too.” Others argued that E6 was alive and well in Athens. Perhaps it was the last refuge. With Beulah in San Francisco and The Minders in Portland, both having less and less to do with E6, some strands in the collective were cut; when The Apples left Denver, Colorado, for Lexington, Kentucky, the idea of “Elephant 6 West” vanished too.

Life was starting to get in the way. Jeff Mangum suffered a nervous breakdown, then began a long process of healing – out of the public eye. Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney, the Apples’ two lead singers, divorced. Will Hart suffered from undiagnosed multiple sclerosis; his increasingly distracted behavior was one of the reasons Bill Doss left the Olivias to resurrect his old solo project The Sunshine Fix, as he admitted in a later interview. For his part, Will created Circulatory System. Songs which had been performed live by OTC on the farewell tour finally surfaced in polished form on The Sunshine Fix’s Age of the Sun and Circulatory System’s eponymous album (both 2001); any OTC fan asking for a reunion would have to resequence their CDs together. Similarly, although Hilarie would not leave the Apples until 2006, in the five-year gap between Apples albums she worked on her project with husband Per Ole Bratset, The High Water Marks, while Robert released two solo albums, each utter opposites in both recording technique and attitude (Ulysses and Marbles). Meanwhile, Will found himself going blind in his right eye. After a brain scan, he discovered he’d had MS for a decade. He’d been assembling a follow-up to his 2001 Circulatory System record, but the recordings and remixes stacked up without much organization. It seemed it might never materialize. Then an invitation in 2005 from actor Vincent Gallo to join his curated All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK, led to a reunion of The Olivia Tremor Control, who subsequently toured the U.S. The shows were packed, many with young fans who had come to E6 too late to witness OTC in their heyday. The enthusiasm from the crowd was infectious. Something began to turn. Will’s friends in the collective helped him assemble his volumes and volumes of Circulatory System recordings into a cohesive second album. He began to spend his Sundays recording new OTC material with Bill Doss.

One could argue that E6’s comeback began with that 2005 OTC reunion tour, but I tend to feel that it didn’t really begin in force until that old familiar logo began to reappear on albums again, starting with 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder. Robert’s newfound enthusiasm (or nostalgia?) for his old label seemed to spread, and the logo started to appear on albums from Julian Koster’s Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes and The Singing Saw at Christmastime to Marshmallow Coast’s Phreak Phantasy (to which Will contributed). No new Neutral Milk Hotel album surfaced, but the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise tour, concurrent with the premiere of the Major Organ and the Adding Machine film (and Jeff Mangum’s surprise appearance on the tour, singing the show’s encore, “Engine”), certainly felt like a satisfying capper to the collective’s journey through the decade. (In addition, as I was putting this article together, a new track by Jeff Mangum – covering the Tall Dwarfs’ “Sign the Dotted Line” – was released by Merge Records as part of the Chris Knox tribute album, Stroke.)

But if that’s the major arc, there are many other stories here as well: the fall and rise of Kindercore Records (an E6-friendly Athens label which released major albums by of Montreal, The Essex Green, Dressy Bessy, and others), which in some ways seems to mirror that of Elephant 6; the evolution of the Orange Twin Conservation Community, spearheaded by Elf Power’s Laura Carter and others, which almost seems like the “grand Elephant 6 experiment,” the ethos of the collective put to the test as a way of life; and, of course, of Montreal’s self-reinvention mid-decade, followed by a sudden and stratospheric (by contrast) success, and the challenges of dealing with that level of commercial success while maintaining control of one’s identity. While of Montreal and The Apples in Stereo ascended to new heights, others such as The High Water Marks, The Minders, Great Lakes, and The Sixth Great Lake put out superb albums to minimal recognition. Some bands – Circulatory System, The Essex Green, Dressy Bessy – received more comfortably broad accolades. Soundtracks played a key role. Many came to Dressy Bessy through But I’m a Cheerleader; or to of Montreal through The O.C.; or to The Apples in Stereo through The Powerpuff Girls. You never know what it will take. Although I’ve largely excluded the instances from this timeline, there were a multitude of American television ads featuring Elephant 6 music, beginning early in the decade with The Apples in Stereo and The Ladybug Transistor, until, finally, you had of Montreal appearing as themselves (in full glam regalia) on a T-Mobile ad. As popular tastes in music changed – and divided into niches thanks to the blogosphere and iTunes – much of this shift was reflected not in commercial radio but in television advertising (as I write this, someone somewhere is trying to get a Submarines or Chairlift song out of their head because a commercial just put it there). By the end of the decade, no E6 fan would be particularly startled to hear a tune by Robert Schneider or Kevin Barnes on TV. “Pop,” to the greater public, meant something different in 2009 than it did in 1999.

You will notice, perusing this timeline, that events become more clustered and precise from about 2006-2009. This is because I initiated Optical Atlas in March 2006, and it’s a cinch to track down specific dates and events from that point of time forward. Events prior to that date required more research, which becomes difficult when one realizes how ephemeral the internet is. I did not assign specific dates to those arising straight from my memory and nowhere else. Therefore, if you have information you would like to see added to this timeline, or corrections you feel need to be made, please contact me. Obviously there will be limitations I impose for the sake of consistency and to avoid too much tediousness.

So here is the story of the Death and Rebirth of something that’s been called Elephant 6:

The Decade in Elephant 6: 2000-2009

2000: Go
2001: Up the Country
2002: Pulled Out to Sea…
2003: The Long Goodbye
2004: California Demise
2005: The Many Keys to Reunion
2006: High Atop the Silver Branches
2007: Sun is Out
2008: Holiday Surprise
2009: Mandatory Rebirth/Prerequisite Afterlife

Orange Twin Records is offering a sweet deal for the holidays: $50 will get you the following…

*One Orange Twin Hoodie
*Your choice of 2 of our latest releases. Choices are
OTR034 Madeline “White Flag”
OTR032 Visitations “The Conundrum Tree” (CD only)
OTR031 Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums “Dark Developments”
OTR030 Nana Grizol “Love It, Love It”
OTR029 The Instruments “Dark Smaland” (CD only)
*Our choice of 3 titles from our back catalog! (CD only)
*And some stickers/postcards/show fliers/what have you!
*…And We’ll wrap it all up for you in our quaint, unique, whimsical fashion and ship it to the recipient!

Christmas is next week, so you’d best hurry over and order.