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The Elephant Six Recording Company was a musical collective founded in Athens, Georgia, USA, by Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart (both, now formerly, of Olivia Tremor Control), Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel), and Robert Schneider (of the Apples in Stereo), the four of whom grew up making music in Ruston, Louisiana. Several Elephant Six projects began to find commercial success in the late 1990s, including Beulah, Elf Power, The Music Tapes, and Of Montreal, as well as the founding bands mentioned above.
The most characteristic trait of an Elephant Six recording is the eclectic and exotic instrumentation: along with the guitars and drums you can hear, for example, the flugelhorn, singing saw, wandering genie, and one-note piano on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea; the euphonium, selemintan, and magnus organ on Olivia Tremor Control's Black Foliage; the sitar, "magic robot voice", and Nepalese copper shawn on Elf Power's When the Red King Comes; and everything from sarangi to clarinet played by eighteen backup musicians on Beulah's When Your Heartstrings Break. This was the ostensible nature of the Elephant Six collective: instruments, players, and space are divided among and shared among many projects.
In October 2002, the Elephant Six Collective as a fully functioning entity called it quits, due to difficulties in recording and lack of organization. The bands of the collective have since all moved on to various labels and projects of their own, though many are still friends and even tour together under various guises.
See also: Indie rock
Projects
External link
- Elephant6.com (http://www.elephant6.com/) – The collective's official site
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