February 1st – Jeff Mangum is interviewed in Pitchfork by Marci Fierman, his first interview in more than three years. “I made a record of montage sounds in ‘99 under the name Korena Pang, but it was never put out because it didn’t do it for me. It was mostly taking all the four-track recordings I’d done throughout the ’90s and collaging them, but it turned into a mishmash that I wasn’t totally in love with. That record was more just a collection of twenty different home recordings, whereas the montage work I’m doing now is like a thousand sounds in one minute. Now I’m able to go out into the world with my field recorder, record sounds, and bring them home to collage on the computer. The raw sounds can really move and come alive that way. I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.” He doubts there will be another Neutral Milk Hotel album, and goes on to explain: “I went through a period, after Aeroplane, when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling. I think that before then, I had an intuitive innocence that guided me and that was a very good thing to a certain point. But then I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it… Also, I think that the difficult thing after Aeroplane was that, when we started doing the Elephant 6 thing, we had a very utopian vision that we could overcome anything through music. The music wasn’t just there for entertainment: we were trying to create some sort of change. We had a desire to transform our lives, and the listener’s lives. I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after. So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain… I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can’t just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level. When I realized that a lot of my understanding of these issues was on a pretty flimsy platform, that’s when the platform started to give way.”
February 26th – Dressy Bessy: Sound Go Round. From Matt Cibula’s review in PopMatters:
Dressy Bessy is a Denver band that is loosely affiliated with what used to be known as the Elephant 6 ‘collective.’ Elephant 6 used to get a lot of press, back when Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel and The Apples (In Stereo) were all busting out with albums every year, each one urging the others further afield in their mission to bring weirder and wilder 1960s noises and 1990s experimentation together. This label—which some within the camp have been trying to shake off—is more a group of loosely connected friends than an actual musical genre, but what it boils down to for Elephant 6 bands is this: Pop = Good, Psychedelia = Better, Psychedelic Pop = Perfection. This is not necessarily an original philosophy, but it’s pretty much true, and these bands released some albums that set the late ‘90s indiescene on its collective ear. But now everything has changed. OTC has joined the ranks of ‘dearly departed’ by splitting into two equal parts: Will Cullen Hart’s amazingly sloppy/tight ensemble Circulatory System, and Bill Doss’s über-pop project called The Sunshine Fix (which released their first stunning/confusing full-length a couple of weeks ago; I’ll review it as soon as I understand it). Jeff Mangum is taking his own sweet time on the new Neutral Milk Hotel album, and the Apples have been taking a big ol’ chill pill while Robert Schneider collaborates by phone with XTC’s Andy Partridge. Meanwhile, it has fallen to the ’second-tier’ Elephant 6 bands to keep the flag flying. Last year, of Montreal came correct with Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse (which is nowhere near as awful as its title), and Beulah released the really wonderful The Coast Is Never Clear…First up in the new year: Dressy Bessy’s Sound Go Round. To which…I have completely knuckled under. Dressy Bessy’s first real album, Pink Hearts Yellow Moons, can be entirely summed up in its title; it sounds like romance, it sounds like sugary cereal, it’s both. Tammy Ealom, the singer and lyricist of Dressy Bessy, is pretty clearly the mastermind of the band, but here’s where it gets complicated: not only does she share the basic sensibility of The Apples (In Stereo) frontman Robert Schneider—which can be stated as ‘The Beatles and the Beach Boys sure were good, but the Archies might have been better’—but she shares a guitar player with the Apples, John Hill. And, of course, Hill and Ealom are also romantically involved. The other two members of Dressy Bessy are the talented rhythm section of Darren Albert on drums and Rob Greene on bass. There’s no other way to say it: Tammy Ealom is one of the most unassuming and perfect songwriters in modern pop. She doesn’t sound like she gets out much, but it’s not like Brian Wilson did any club-hopping either. These songs are the kind of things that people who do nothing but listen to records in their room all day long for their entire childhood write—there, but for the grace of having no musical talent, go I. This is the genius of Dressy Bessy’s bubble-gum pop: it makes the personal into the universal, and assumes that if there’s one lonely funny quirky person in the world, that there are at least a few more out there who want to hear songs by that person…
March 8th – Beulah represses their first album, Handsome Western States.
April 2nd – Marshmallow Coast: Ride the Lightning
April 16th – Beulah performs on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, their network television debut. Hilarie Sidney posts on the Townhall, “Hi everyone, just wanted to let you know that the new Apples record is coming along just great. It should be done by the end of the month or early May. We will try to release it by mid to late August. Robert and Andy Partridge are still passing demoes back and forth, (they’ve got about 30 songs in the works, only half of those will go on the record) and that record will be recorded sometime this summer, and should come out by the end of the year. No plans to tour until right around the time that the new record comes out. Robert, Max, and I are moving, so we will need to settle in our new place.” Shortly thereafter, the Apples move from Denver, Colorado, to Lexington, Kentucky.
April 22nd – Kindercore is featured on an article on the rise of indie labels in the Orange County Register. “Every decade or so comes a great shift, a cultural upheaval that drags popular music away from safe choices and toward the unexpected. Here comes the next one. As mainstream music stagnates via carbon copies of yesterday’s sound and record sales continue to fall, a wave of new bands is preparing to invade, most recording not for the usual corporate outlets but for a rapidly proliferating line of independents. Labels with names like Barsuk, Saddle Creek, Vagrant and Kindercore…Clearly some kind of coup is brewing. Yet even the most hopeful among industry insiders think its subversive forces remain on standby. ‘It’s weird how it’s developing this time,’ says Dan Geller, co-founder of Athens, Ga., indie label Kindercore and a member of neo-new-wave outfit I Am the World Trade Center. ‘When we started, in 1996, I had this grand vision that within five years we’d have this musical revolution that would sweep across the nation. I thought a band like the Strokes would show up and things would change overnight. And people are interested. But they’re not so interested that they’ll give up Britney just yet… This time it’s happening much slower. I mean, excitement for the Strokes started more than six months ago, and they’re just now getting on radio. It’s taking much more effort for a return of the indie sound to happen.’”
May 7th – Elf Power: Creatures. It’s well received in some quarters, but Pitchfork is harsh: “Maybe I shouldn’t be so tough on the guys. After all, I know what rejection feels like, and Elf Power’s been through a few tough breaks of their own lately– what with bigshot producer Dave Fridmann moving on to greener pastures with Mogwai and former member Bryan Poole leaving the band to rock out with the drummer of Jucifer. Maybe that’s why the new album sounds so faint and distant, and why this new Elf Power seems only a shadow of their former selves.”
June 1st – Fablefactory’s singles and rarities collection, We Won’t Rock You, is issued on Happy Happy Birthday to Me. The label also releases Elekibass‘ debut record, California, which includes the offbeat Japanese band covering of Montreal’s “Springtime is the Season” and the Great Lakes‘ “A Little Touched.”
June 2nd – The Apples in Stereo appear on The Powerpuff Girls episode “Superfriends” performing “Signal in the Sky.”
July 1st – Elf Power & the Gerbils @ the Middle East, Cambridge, MA – PopMatters’ review: “The Gerbils on stage appeared to be what you might call ‘fried’ indie rock. They looked like a band that would be most comfortable playing in a small town bar in the middle of Ohio. And quite frankly, they’d probably be the town treasure. Each band member commanded a unique presence, particularly [Scott] Spillane. With his longish white beard and hat, he could have passed for an Amish heavy metal fan. While Gerbils‘ drummer Jeremy Barnes was, according to the text on the band’s website ‘getting married to a woman in Europe,’ E6 everyman Eric Harris was filling in on drums. Elf Power’s Laura Carter joined him on stage for double drum duty and it was that aspect of the band’s sound that was the most significant throughout their set. They opened with the traditional ballad, ‘Hangman’ and Spillane’s voice wrapped deep around the words — sounding surprisingly similar to Johnny Cash.”
July 31st – Happy Happy Birthday to Me issues Vince Mole and His Calcium Orchestra’s long-delayed 7″, originally intended to be released on Elephant 6.
August 15th – Pitchfork reports, “[XTC’s Andy] Partridge reports that his collaboration with Elephant 6 principal Robert Schneider has been put on hold until Schneider has completed promotional commitments for the Apples in Stereo’s Velocity of Sound, due October 8th on SpinArt. Partridge and Schneider have written approximately 35 pieces of music for the project, which has been known as Orchestre Fantastique. Partridge and Schneider had planned to record the album this fall in London. As previously reported, the Apples kick off a fall tour with Clinic September 24th in Lexington, Kentucky…”
August 20th – Great Lakes: The Distance Between. Magnet Magazine: This threadbare-yet-noble surviving platoon of the Elephant 6 army can spew out a fuzz-laced garage assault hot enough to wilt the magnolia blossoms on your dining-room table. But aside from crystalline Michael Nesmith and Zombies covers, what makes Great Lakes stand tall enough for a battlefield commission is a knack for fusing The Band’s post-Civil War melancholy with Spiritualized’s feats of ballroom levitation.
August 29th – Jesse Jarnow profiles E6 for No Ripcord: “[The members of the Elephant 6 collective] are still very much alive and continue to create a prodigious rate. Two recent endeavors both come in the form of record labels — Orange Twin Records (run by Elf Power’s Laura Carter) and Cloud Recordings (run by Circulatory System’s Will Hart and John Fernandes). The former…turned into something across between an artists’ colony and a planned community. This, of course, is a lofty ambition. But why not? One gets the sense that these folks could crank out a concept album before supper and still have time to read a book. The latter project, Cloud Recordings, goes a long way towards proving just that. Like Sun Ra’s Saturn Recordings, Cloud was designed to meet the high energy output of the musicians… Each of Cloud’s [CD-R] releases come in homemade packaging — spray-painted, markered, xeroxed, and otherwise created with great love. It is inspiring. Holding a Cloud recording, one doesn’t feel as if he has made some consumer choice presented to him by a media conglomerate. It’s just some music by some people. If one were to record his own album, most of the E6ers would probably be happy not only to hear it, but to trade their latest tapes for it. The Elephant 6 Recording Company has changed the way I relate to music. Music still can inspire genuine community beyond Venn diagrams of products purchased.”
September 7th– To all who preordered it (via the E6 Townhall), Julian Koster begins shipping copies of The Music Tapes’ storybook album, The 2nd Imaginary Symphony for Cloudmaking. Narrated by Brian Dewan, the eccentric singer/songwriter who provided some of the artwork for the Music Tapes‘ first album, the hour-long, spoken-word Cloudmaking traces the adventures of Nigh, a child who discovers a secret factory where clouds are made. The story was written by Julian, who also provides background music and effects. Packages shipped include a hand-drawn tee-shirt and a CD-R of the album, with color-photocopied album art by Julian and one of his hairs stuck under the label in a distinctly personal touch. He would later inform fans that the album was incomplete, and a more polished version would be issued by Merge; as of this writing it has not yet been officially released.
of Montreal – A Question for Emily Foreman
September 24th – of Montreal: Aldhils Arboretum. A step in a different direction from Coquelicot, Aldhils presents straightforward, Kinks-inspired pop/rock. Rolling Stone: “Kevin Barnes has finally hit musical paydirt. The loosely structured ‘group’ that he fronts is the most prolific of the Elephant 6 Collective, having released six albums of increasingly interesting prog pop since 1997, culminating with Aldhils Arboretum, the most coherent. Coherence does not, however, mean that Barnes has found stasis, even if the disc’s opening track is literally about sitting around, ‘Doing Nothing.’ There’s a childlike wonderment to Barnes’ stunted voice, when he sings about ‘Pancakes for One,’ which are no fun. Or when he tells the tale of his alcoholic neighbor Larry in ‘Isn’t It Nice’: ‘One thing I’ve learned is that you never buy Larry beer or else he’ll bug you everyday.’ The cast of characters that peppers Barnes’ musically simple songs are all flawed at some level. But in his own way, the man of of Montreal compels you to discover the beauty in these flaws, and in his music. It’s not difficult. It’s also kind of fun.”
The Instruments – When the Stars Shine
October 1st – The Instruments: Billions of Phonographs & Elf Power: Nothing’s Going to Happen are released on Orange Twin Records. The former is fronted by Heather McIntosh of Japancakes and Circulatory System, and features contributions from all the members of CS as well as Jeff Mangum, Andy Gonzales, Julian Koster, Scott Spillane, John D’azzo, Chris Bishop, Laura Carter, Susan McCarrell, and Katie Bierman. The Elf Power CD consists solely of covers (beginning with the title track by the Tall Dwarfs), and includes the Come On EP which had previously been a tour-only release.
The Apples in Stereo – Where We Meet
October 8th – The Apples in Stereo: Velocity of Sound. Cam Lindsay writes in Stylus, “I can’t honestly say that I’ve followed every single moment of their career, but what comes out of Velocity of Sound is new to me. When I hear it, I wonder why they never sounded this good before. Gone are the 60s overtones, replaced with something noisier and even more melodic. One reason behind this change might be the fact that they have apparently never brought in an engineer to mix their songs until this recording. Bryce Goggin, who has worked with Pavement, Sebadoh, and Ramones, was their pick and, quite obviously, they couldn’t have done much better.” Still, a lot of the fans dislike the album’s raw, stripped-down approach. Of this reaction, Robert later tells the AV Club:
It was almost intended to be that way. I went through this phase where I was listening to a lot of R&B, The Velvet Underground, Pavement, and Ramones. I got to a point where I felt distaste for ornate, baroque, psychedelic production. The Elephant 6 scene had blossomed into such a huge thing, and every single time I saw a band, they had 13 people on stage with 12 theremins or something. I understand that those people were doing it partially because I did it, but it became predictable for me, and uninteresting.
Robert Schneider and John Hill on MTV2’s 120 Minutes
October 14-December 16th – Jeff Mangum, as “Jefferson,” puts together a program for New Jersey’s WFMU consisting of sound collages, experimental compositions, lectures by Stephen Hawking, and some of his favorite artists.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw – Maremaillette
October 15th – Jeremy Barnes, formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel, The Gerbils, and Bablicon, releases his first album under the name A Hawk and a Hacksaw. Interviewed in Splendid, he says:
The reason that I use [the name] is the book Don Quixote, by Cervantes. I was reading that a lot while I was recording and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the album, and there is a quote from Sancho Panza, one of the characters, who has all of these sayings that he says all the time, and that was one that stuck in my head. Apparently someone said it was also in Hamlet, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not. A few people have said that to me. It’s basically that someone who has gone mad can’t tell the difference between a Hawk and a Hacksaw, that’s what they say in Don Quixote. But in some translations it’s actually something like a hare and a handsaw, there are different ways to translate it…When I was living in Chicago I think the urban environment completely affected what I was doing and made me produce music in a different way. I moved to France, in order to live with my wife, and also to come up with an album of my own because I kind of liked the idea of doing something by myself for once. When I arrived I thought it was going to be very different than it turned out to be. In my head, what it sounds like was not at all what came out. I think that living in the French countryside…a lot of French composers and also Eastern European music really influenced me and changed everything into what became the album.
October 22nd– Elephant 6 is dead, reports Toronto weekly The Eye. Will Bryant of Pitchfork spreads the news in “Elephant 6 is Dead – Long Live Elephant 6”:
Well, it’s finally official. After nearly two year’s worth of rumors and speculation, a recent piece in Toronto newsweekly The Eye has confirmed that the Elephant 6 collective started by Ruston, LA chums Robert Schneider, Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss, and Will Cullen Hart in the early 90’s is ‘effectively defunct.’ The article, which refers to Elephant 6 in the past tense, notes that the purpose of the collective (to elevate awareness of underground bands affiliated with the then-fledgling Apples in Stereo) has more or less run its course, peaking with Warner imprint Sire’s major-label distribution of the Apples’ Toul Soul Evolution in 1998. Two of the collective’s founding bands– The Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel– are unlikely to be resurrected soon, at least not in the glorious full-band touring incarnations of four years ago. Other Elephant 6 flagship bands have since found berths at indies such as SpinArt, Kindercore, Emperor Norton, and Velocette, or started their own ventures (most notably Orange Twin and Cloud Recordings). None of the current releases from Elephant 6-affiliated bands (the Apples’ Velocity of Sound, Elf Power’s Nothing’s Going To Happen, or of Montreal’s Aldhils Arboretum) bear the collective’s distinctive handdrawn logo. The competing Happy Happy Birthday To Me and Kindercore singles clubs, which cranked out limited-edition seven-inchers with handmade covers from Elephant 6-affiliated bands, folded in December 2000 and December 2001, respectively. The last two Kindercore singles club efforts, including a much-ballyhooed Essex Green/Sunshine Fix split single, were plagued by pointless, months-long delays (and are still listed as “forthcoming” on Kindercore’s official website). Some Kindercore subscribers, who had paid in full for the singles in advance, were lured by a promised Olivia Tremor Control single that never materialized. Last year, the bloated collective was forced to make a formal distinction between which bands are actually part of the collective and which bands are actually part of the ‘extended family’ of Elephant 6, which lead to some pretty baffling exclusions (obscure side projects like Dixie Blood Moustache and Von Hemmling are full-blown Elephant 6′ers, while better-known acts including of Montreal are considered family). ‘Everybody’s still friends, but it got really confusing,’ Apples drummer Hilarie Sidney told The Eye. ‘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.’ ‘Extended family’ member Derek Almstead of of Montreal is quick to point out, however, that the members of the Elephant 6 members remain friends and are continuing their creative endeavors under different guises (see Circulatory System tour story below). ‘Nothing’s really changed actually, just re-cast and reformed,’ Almstead writes in a post to the official Elephant 6 webboard. ‘We’re all still here churning it out, and we all still help each other.’ But as for the logo that for many signified Elephant 6’s entire purpose of affiliation and endorsement, Almstead was more blunt: ‘Oh yeah, the stamp is totally dead. Free your mind! It’s not about a stamp!’…The decade-long reign of Elephant 6 is set to be documented in a final label compilation, according to Sidney, though it’s been on the back burner for more than two years: ‘That’s how organized we are.’
November 13-December 3rd – Circulatory System tours with Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t and The Instruments
November 23rd – Happy Happy Birthday to Me releases Fablefactory’s posthumous album, Freak Out Hard on You, as well as the debut full-length from Kingsauce, Please Don’t Change the Channel.
December 19th – Beulah posts on their website that their next album will be their “fourth and final.”
