"Will Hart scored a guitar organ," Elf Power keyboardist Laura Carter recalled in an interview with PopMatters five years ago, "so of course there's a little wave where everyone's album has a guitar organ on it." A lovely idea, isn't it? Everyone always making an album, anything they'd need on hand. That-- and a profoundly abiding love of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson-- is the germ of the idea that became Elephant 6, four boyhood friends' loosely-knit Louisiana-born, Georgia-bred turn-of-the-century psychedelic society and recording concern. The sheer number of people involved in the creation of the two records Will Cullen Hart and childhood pal Bill Doss helmed under the elegant name of the Olivia Tremor Control counts in the dozens. And though other Elephant 6 records would eventually capture more imaginations, the music on 1996's Music From the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle and 1999's Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One-- impossibly strange, omnivorously eclectic psych-pop-- are worlds unto themselves, the finest realizations of whatever sonic utopia these guys spent much of the 90s etching into a canvas a million cassettes wide.
Hart, Doss, Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum, and Apples in Stereo frontman (and Dusk producer) Robert Schneider grew up filling up Tascams with four-track nonsense in and around their Ruston, Louisiana, home, exploring genres headlong and forging bands at will. An early project called Cranberry Lifecycle eventually coalesced into Hart, Doss, and Mangum's Synthetic Flying Machine; from there, Mangum forged Neutral Milk Hotel, while Hart and Doss set about mapping out the Olivias' all-encompassing sound, some unthinkable matchup of Revolver-era Beatles or Smile-era Beach Boys, the tornado-alley skronk of 1980s Flaming Lips and Butthole Surfers, and the surreal wooze of post-Reichian tape manipulation. The singularity of Mangum's peculiar vision for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is what makes that record such a landmark; it's the multiplicity of the Olivias' music, though, that's their great legacy, their ever-changing, borderline egoless, all-together-now notion of what a psychedelic record could be. Veering wildly between sturdy sunshine-pop and sloppy ambient noise, calamitous hooks and conversations with the godhead, the Olivias' records are driven by an impossibly expansive vision. It's like Hart sings on "A Peculiar Noise Called 'Train Director'", a song about, among other things, moving in with a sound: "in the blink of an eye, you get several meanings."
In hindsight, the decidedly strange Dusk at Cubist Castle is the straight of the pair. Stately, sumptuous, and slightly otherworldly, Dusk is brimming with immaculate hooks and queries bound for the cosmos. Dusk's first half is certainly the most immediate stretch of songcraft OTC laid to tape, big, sinewy hooks brought to life in brilliant color. "The Opera House" is a blur of fuzz guitar and harmonica, leading off with the funny notion of going to the movies just to watch the actors move their mouths. The surreality of it all is certainly worth a mention: Catchy as they are, these songs are riddled with potholes, with weird left turns, with hooks that seem to bubble out of nowhere before receding into themselves. The one-two of "Jumping Fences" and "Define a Transparent Dream", joined at the hip by a gloriously gooey transition, are a triumph of taut pop proficiency. Littered as they are with references to the atmosphere breathing with life and a lonely psychonaut too caught up inside his head for speech, though, these tunes seek to transcend both consensus reality and the constraints of the straight-outta-1966 vibe of so many of their E6 contemporaries. Though clearly besotted with the freewheeling pop of the late-1960s-- Bill Doss' eternally impressive sideburns are testament enough to that-- they cut their songs with too many intersecting ideas to ever feel too fixed in one particular place for very long.
Black Foliage's pop moments are gnarlier, more restless, their hooks arriving at odd angles; all this they weave through a tapestry of orchestral bleats and backward-running loops, five seconds of scuzz enveloping four minutes of sheer bliss. Rather than relegate its sonic tinkering to its second act, Black Foliage dunks OTC's experimental tendencies directly into their popcraft. It's a magisterial vision, a whole world rendered in sound; it is also, at first, rather overwhelming, its constantly shifting sonics more than a little tough to settle into from moment to moment. Give yourself over to it, though, and Black Foliage is among the most satisfying psychedelic albums of any decade, a carefully controlled caterwauling chaos pushing along Hart and Doss' unanswerable questions and anthropomorphisms. You're aware of the Bardo, yeah? Black Foliage seems intimately acquainted with the thing, touting as it does both individuality ("don't hide away from your intricacies") and something more inexplicable; "I have been floated to this thought this hour," Hart, Schneider, and eventually Mangum sing, "on a series of events I cannot explain." Black Foliage is not some work of accidental genius, some acid-fueled inspiration point captured as it's being created; every wriggly second reveals painstaking craft, every hint of tape hiss seems to whisper of another good idea buried somewhere in the static. Still, it's pretty clear that the relationship these guys had with non-musical psychedelia was, at the time, fairly recent, and Black Foliage seems to carry hints of something a little beyond this world.
The large-scale sonic experiments-- swaths of silence, planes flying overhead, of alarm clocks and ambient drift-- that engulf much of the second half of both of these LPs are, even for longtime E6 devotees, something of a hurdle. Even in the midst of the woollier Black Foliage songs, their contrast with the pop-minded stuff that precedes them is so great, their tunefulness next to nil, the results are certainly self-indulgent and, for many, kinda boring; I had a friend in college who'd burned himself Cubist Castle with most of the eighth (and longest) "Green Typewriters" lobbed off so he wouldn't have to keep skipping it. Again, though, this seems to be the band's attempt at wrestling the psychedelic experience-- the initial flash, followed by the inward gaze-- into sound. They're not working through McKenna or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or anything here, but they bring the trip through all its stages; at the end, you're summarily exhausted and full of questions, your synapses having wriggled themselves awake one by one over the preceding quarter-hour. And, frankly, for guys who can bang out pop songs like they could, their experimental tendencies are very nearly as impressive; their noise is lush, their silence speaks volumes, and best of all, they're in on the joke. At the end of the extra-long "Green Typewriters", Hart jumps into another with a question-as-punchline: "how much longer can I wait?"
Though Cubist Castle appears untouched, Black Foliage has been remastered from the original tapes; the bass is a bit louder, the vocals a little fuller, and there's ever-so-slightly more clarity in certain patches. But the whirr of some dust-addled four-track still sits underneath these songs, which is as it should be. Either set comes with a download card good for hours upon hours of outtakes, alternates, radio sessions, and the like, much of it unreleased, out-of-print, or otherwise unheard. Taken together, the extra stuff's longer than the albums themselves; hey, nobody ever accused these guys of being especially judicious editors. I'm still working my way through the second disc of the Smile box myself, so all this seemed a little much at first, especially when they launch into their own stoned "Do You Like Worms" medley. But, listening to the extras, you realize just how much they were capable of, just how powerful their overarching vision for these records really was; four minutes from the very good "The Sky Is a Harpsichord Canvas" were excised from Black Foliage due to time constraints, and while it's fun to hear the expanded song itself in the spirit of excavation, knowing what didn't make the cut makes the remaining bits seem that much stronger. Flecks of the recurring instrumental themes that run through Cubist Castle and (especially) Black Foliage-- a little cohesion amidst all the cacophony-- speckle the edges of the bonus stuff as well, further testament to just how much lightning these guys were bottling. But it's the records themselves-- insistent, wise, daringly imperfect-- that are really the thing here. They remain the sound of a few old friends, a few more new acquaintances, and a thousand wasted sunny days spent carving out a couple mind-bendingly complex masterpieces.
