Adam Clair, Author of Endless, Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery
Back when Adam Clair was in high school, he discovered new music in a way that many teens did in the early to mid-aughts: peer-to-peer file sharing. Through this kind of community-based approach to exploring new music, he discovered a bunch of artists he really liked and a few that he absolutely loved. Clair was particularly drawn to the eclectic psychedelia of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Of Montreal, both of which just happened to be part of the Athens, Georgia-based Elephant Six Recording Company. These bands certainly piqued his curiosity, but that initial attraction was just the beginning of a long and winding musical journey. He’d eventually find himself submerged in all things Elephant Six, living in Athens, and in the throes of authoring Endless, Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery, the first real book on this reticent and amorphous collective.
The inner workings and history of Elephant Six have been an almost two-decade-long obsession for Clair, and his dedication to piecing together the collective’s long, overarching narrative has allowed him to uncover so much that was previously unknown. In Endless, Endless, Clair gives even hardcore fans nuggets of information that could only originate from the minds of the collective’s key figures - the musicians who lived it and continue to carry on its legacy. To chart out this history, Clair compiled hundreds of interviews, spending hours upon hours meeting and developing relationships with members of The Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, Of Montreal, and more. While Neutral Milk Hotel and its founder Jeff Mangum may be the most revered of the collective, (and yes, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is indie rock canon), their story is really only scratching the surface. Endless, Endless takes you there, back, and there again. When it comes to this storied collective of musicians, nothing comes close to matching the breadth and depth of this book.
We recently had the chance to chat with Clair about the book, including its origins and his experiences living amongst the collective in Athens. He also graciously shared a playlist of five deep cuts by Elephant Six artists. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Adam Clair
So, take us back. What was your first exposure to Elephant Six? What do you remember about first discovering a band or a record that was part of the collective?
My first exposure to it was probably around 2002. I was in high school at the time, and in some ways the timing was terrible, because I had just missed the collective’s most active period. Neutral Milk Hotel was basically done by the end of 1998 and the Olivia Tremor Control broke up in 1999.
In some ways, though, it was perfect timing because I was a teenager, which means I was able to really delve into it. I discovered the music through the direct connect feature on AOL Instant Messenger. Using that, you could connect to someone else’s hard drive and download whatever they made available to share. A friend of mine had his whole music library available, so, I started poking around there and I either got to Neutral Milk Hotel or Of Montreal first. I had never heard anything like that before and I wanted to hear more. Then, I started reading and researching these bands and learned that they have side projects and friends who play music. So, it just exploded from there. I think, ultimately, one of the more interesting things about this collective is that it really rewards curiosity. The more you dig, the more you find.
When I first learned you were writing this book, I assumed you had maybe started this project about five years ago or something like that. That’s not the case, though. You’ve been working on this book for well over a decade. At what point in time did you realize that you wanted to write this book?
When I first discovered the music, I had no expectations that it would turn into something like this. When I was in college at Penn State, I became the music reporter for the newspaper. Through that, I’d cover some touring acts that’d pass through State College, but at the time, there was really no local music scene there whatsoever. So, I kind of got fascinated by Athens, Georgia because it has this legendary thriving music scene that’s been flourishing since the seventies. It became fascinating to me to figure out what it is that sustains that.
The bigger part of it came from being a music reporter and interviewing bands. Neutral Milk Hotel and Elephant Six would come up more generally during interviews I was doing. Then, some of the other Elephant Six bands would pop up as influences when I would talk to artists, regardless of what they sounded like as far as style or genre. I kept hearing these names over and over again. So, it started to occur to me that there’s something really influential here that hasn’t really been discussed. I really couldn’t find much out there about any of these bands.
In the summer of 2008, I had an interview lined up with John Fernandez, who plays in the Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System. The night before, I was talking to a friend of mine about the interview and he kind of offhand said, “you know, somebody should write a book about those guys.” By the end of the conversation, I was like, maybe I should write a book about them! I was about to graduate from college and I was a journalism major and realized like, there’s no real job waiting for me. So, I figured, maybe I’ll get started now.
I really got started on the book in the fall of 2008, which was when the first Elephant Six Holiday Surprise tour was happening. The tour was passing through Pittsburgh, so a friend of mine drove me out there for the weekend. It was great because there were 25 of them all in the same room and it was an amazing show. Jeff Mangum played for the first time in like 10 years that day. By the end of the night, the room had cleared out a lot, so I went around, introduced myself, and just kind of non-committally said I have this rough idea for a book. Many of them were super enthusiastic and supportive.
Later that month, I attended an Of Montreal show in Philadelphia. After the show, I chatted with Brian Pool, who was playing guitar for them at the time. He basically told me that, you know, a number of people have tried to do this already and gave up pretty quickly. You will need to, at some point, move to Athens, Georgia, and like really stay there for a while and get to know everybody. So, eventually, that's what I did. I quit the job that I had after graduating college to move down to Athens so I could work on this book.
I ended up living in Athens for most of 2010 and then for close to two years from 2015 through 2017. While I lived there, the research for the book was my focus. Some people were hard to track down for interviews. But in some cases, I could just go to a bar one night and I would see five or six people and introduce myself that way. Other times, I had to literally go to someone's house and knock on their door to see if they were interested.
There are so many things that I learned from reading this book that I didn’t know before, and I consider myself a pretty big fan of Elephant Six. Like, I didn’t know that Jeff Mangum and Robert Schneider (of The Apples in Stereo) were childhood friends. Over the course of doing your research for this book, was there anything you learned that surprised you?
I think one of the more surprising things was the extent to which there was disharmony among certain bands. I think from the outside looking in, it always felt like this utopia where everyone got along. There is some truth to that, for sure. These are not confrontational folks generally, but there was tension here and there. I think the closer you get to success in the traditional sense of getting a major label contract or something like that - not that any of these bands really wanted that - is when that happened. For example, just before The Olivia Tremor Control broke up, they were getting a lot of interest from major labels. This was the late nineties, so they were still catching that heat from the alternative explosion with Nirvana. Olivia Tremor Control got pretty close. They were in the negotiation process with a million-dollar offer upfront and were trying to make it work in a way that was artistically friendly. But even if they were to retain creative control, there were some members of the band that absolutely did not want to do that. Other members felt that they’d do what they want to do and they’d continue to do that regardless of how much someone paid them. That kind of came to a head when the band was offered to do a song for the Power Puff Girls. The creator, Craig McCracken, was a big Elephant Six Fan. Robert Scheider did a song for the compilation and so did Dressy Bessy. So, McCracken sent them a VHS of the show and they watched it. Most of the band said no way, this is too commercial, so, Bill Doss wound up doing it by himself. It’s a poppy, bright sunny-sounding song. For the other members of the band, I think it was for them, a very tangible example of the rift that was starting to expose itself. Not to say that that’s what led to the breakup of the band by any means, but it was more like one of maybe a hundred other examples of how that came to be.
The Olivia Tremor Control
At the very start of the book, you acknowledge that Jeff Mangum declined to be interviewed on the record for it. Despite that, the book turned out great, but he's such a key figure to the story that I'm wondering, were you discouraged at all at first by his lack of participation? And did it alter your plans or approach as far as how you went about writing the book?
At the start, I felt hopeful that Jeff would be interested in doing an interview, but I also kind of accepted that either he will or he won’t and there’s not much that I could really do. I certainly made my case to him a few different times. I totally respect his reasons for not wanting to go on the record and will not betray that confidence. From the start, though, I approached this with the thought that he probably wouldn’t. There are plenty of books on people who were not alive when the research for it started. There are people still writing books about Lincoln. So, if that’s possible, then, you know, at the very least Jeff is still alive and many of his friends are still alive. It’s a little different because there just was not much documented about the collective other than the records or an occasional bootleg. Not many people were really filming stuff. No one was really doing interviews that often. The interviews that did happen at the time were in print zines that were never digitized.
I was lucky enough to stumble on what turned out to be an awful lot of people who were willing to be interviewed. But, I basically knew going into it that I was going to have to do this most likely without his participation. Instead, I was going to have to do it through interviews with people who know him. In some ways, that proved to be more difficult than I expected because since Jeff’s been so clear about his own reluctance to speak publicly, I think a lot of his friends and collaborators are very respectful of that. And so, there were a number of times when I would ask a question that somebody might know the answer to, but they didn't really want to reveal anything without talking to him first.
There were other times when I would ask questions and people just didn't know the answer at all. For example, the first question I was asking people in 2010 was where does Jeff Mangum live these days? What is he doing? And every single person I asked would give me a different answer. Some people said Toronto, others said New York City, some said Europe. Shortly after I left Athens for the first time, he popped up at Occupy Wall Street in New York City when those protests were really in full force. He really moves around a lot. There's a quote that I found from him from some interview he had done in 1998 where he just talked about how he's more comfortable before he unpacks all his stuff. In many old interviews, he talks about how he’s living in one place, but he’s planning on going somewhere else. He’s never been really settled down in one place. So, that was challenging for sure, to the extent that his closest friends didn't really know all of the answers to the questions that I was looking for.
What I tried to do was answer the question that had inspired this book in the first place - which is why did Jeff Mangum stop making music? Because ultimately, I think that’s the most compelling question of this whole thing. It’s been an ongoing mystery for over 20 years now. And it’s not only that he stopped playing music entirely, but he also stopped recording, stopped releasing any music whatsoever, even old stuff. He didn’t do interviews. He didn’t even tell his own bandmates why he was stopping or even that he was stopping, really. As a journalist, my instinct is, well, there’s something going on here. I think I’ve answered that question in the book. It does take the whole book to explain the answer to that question, but I feel pretty confident in the conclusions that I’ve reached.
Do you have a favorite Elephant Six record and has that changed over the years?
It's something that changes. Certainly, Aeroplane is an all-timer. I think that's definitely a record that because of the emotional heft of it, you kind of have to be in the right mood for it. Whereas, I think the records that I listen to the most often are the two Olivia Tremor Control double albums. There are so many parts of those records that you can get lost in. They just cram so many different things into their songs. If I’m ever talking to someone who isn’t familiar with Elephant Six, I usually suggest that they listen to an Olivia Tremor Control song called “The Sylvan Screen.” It’s on Black Foliage. It’s not necessarily my favorite song in their catalog, but it has so many different things going on. It’s about six or so minutes long and starts with 45 seconds of just bird sounds. And then there’s a theremin, but there’s also some banjo and some four part harmonies. There are some heavy guitars, too. There are just so many different things going on.
They also recorded those records to tape, which is mind-boggling. They would have to basically playback the song in real-time and have the full band, plus some other folks, on the mixing board with their choreographed assignments throughout the song. You know, someone would have to pan the theremin left to right, turn up the treble there, all these different things. And then just to sync it up and then listen to that record, there’s like 20-30 things going on sometimes at once. It’s definitely one of my favorite albums to listen to on headphones.
It’s crazy to think about. When you think about the nineties and lo-fi recordings, and the bands that championed it, Guided By Voices comes to mind for me. The appeal for the lo-fi aspect of their records was that they sounded imperfect. Here, those Olivia Tremor Control records were lo-fi, but sounded perfect. That distinction is fascinating when you think about it.
Yeah, for some time period Elliot Smith was very into Neutral Milk Hotel and the whole collective. He toured with the Minders at one point. Those first couple of Elliot Smith Records, it’s just a guy in a bedroom with a guitar and a tape recorder and they sound incredibly intimate. It creates that kind of closeness. He also sang very close to the mic, so it sounds very lo-fi. Whereas, those Olivia Tremor Control records, they are lo-fi and recorded to tape.
But they sound huge.
They're huge. Yeah, exactly. They're gigantic. They're so sprawling and, and expansive. I don't know that lo-fi is really the right word for it. Robert Schneider, who produced those records and man and a lot of the big Elephant Six releases over the years - his approach was, there were whole Beatles and Beach Boys albums that were made on tape. If they could do it, why can’t we? Certainly, they didn’t have the same resources that those bands had, but they were very committed to maintaining that analog approach. I think so much of the human qualities come through that way as a result.
And without further ado, here’s Clair’s specially curated playlist of Elephant Six Deep Cuts, complete with an introduction and some contextualizing text for each track:
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a classic for a reason—several reasons, really—but there’s a lot more to the Elephant 6 than Neutral Milk Hotel. These songs, each of them individually excellent on their own, all represent themes that run through the collective, which is to say if there’s anything you dig here, you’ll likely be rewarded for excavating the E6 catalog further.
“The Sylvan Screen” by The Olivia Tremor Control
No Elephant 6 band embodied the collective’s creatively indulgent spirit more than the Olivias, and this track surveys the band’s maximalist tendencies in a tight six minutes, including a serpentine sound collage, a banjo plucked against a heavy electric guitar riff, a violin bowed over a ghostly theremin, horns calling-and-responding with distorted tape effects, ambient bird chirps, and complex a capella harmonies. Situated on side three of a double album between two of the record’s more abstract songs, it’s a pastiche within a pastiche, but it never sounds disjointed.
“I’ve Been Watching” by Secret Square
A short-lived side project of Apples in Stereo drummer and Elephant 6 cofounder Hilarie Sidney and Lisa Janssen (who also played with the Apples and Neutral Milk Hotel in those bands’ early days), Secret Square channels the fuzzier, lower-fi interests of the Elephant 6, namely bands like Flying Nun’s Tall Dwarfs and K Records’ Beat Happening—whose aggressively DIY approach was as much of an influence on the collective as their aesthetics—not to mention Pavement and the Velvet Underground. Along with power poppers Dressy Bessy and avant-garde performance troupe Dixie Blood Mustache, Secret Square is one of the collective’s handful of women-led projects.
“His Mister’s Pet Whistles” by Major Organ and the Adding Machine
The quintessential Elephant 6 band isn’t really a band at all, more of a Dadaist Polaroid, a document of the Elephant 6 community at a particular point in time. One person would compose the beginnings of a song and put it to tape—maybe a fractured, looping guitar riff or a surreal lyric—and pass it off to someone else, who would then add sound effects or some percussive toy piano and pass it to someone else, who might add a bass line or instead decide to cut the whole thing up and rearrange it. The tapes were passed around for years, and eventually, there was an album’s worth of material. Many people aren’t sure whether they’re on the album or, if they are, what they played on it, but you can hear elements from many of the collective’s most recognizable artists.
“Song for Oceans Falling” by The Music Tapes
This song–and really the Music Tapes’ whole catalog—captures another theme common to so much Elephant 6 music: preciousness. Using antique recording equipment and lo-fi techniques, Julian Koster (who played in Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and any E6 project in need of his trademark singing saw) imbues his music with a weathered quality that makes it sound like it could come apart at any time. Far from being a well-oiled machine, the collective operates like a delicate, improvised Rube Goldberg apparatus made from chicken wire, old luggage, and fifth-hand furniture, but the fragility is entirely the point: rickety and ramshackle by design, the music of the Elephant 6 exists at a human scale or not at all.
“Golden Street” by The Minders
While the Elephant 6’s most notable bands and the collective as a whole are often celebrated for their weirdness and sonic idiosyncrasies, many of its acts focused more on the pop side of psych-pop. The Minders are a relatively straightforward act within the collective, but their ‘60s-ish songwriting chops and knack for a catchy melody stand out even among a crowd of paisley-clas revivalists, while still fitting in. One-time tourmate Elliott Smith, himself a Beatles devotee, was fond of covering the band.
Bonus: “Black Swan Network (with Capillary Radar)” & “Black Swan Radar (with Enveloping Bicycle Folds),” by Black Swan Network
This is sort of cheating because Black Swan Network is just a nom de synth for the Olivia Tremor Control (and mostly just Will Cullen Hart), but no project better demonstrates the collective’s avant-garde interests. This is actually two pieces—B sides to two different seven-inch versions of the Olivias’ “Opera House”—composed to be played with that Olivias single and/or each other for a quadraphonic musique concrète experience. The two ambient tracks are layered together here, but playing them together from separate sources (two turntables or even just two browser tabs) introduces an aleatoric quality worth exploring.
