Ray Gun

March 1998

"Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel Emerge from the Elephant 6 Collective with the Four-track Odyssey In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Bob Gulla

Music. Sometimes it's a way of life. Sometimes it is life. When every waking moment, and likely many sleeping moments, is dedicated to music, like it is for the gang of musicians and bands known as Elephant 6, and you have trouble separating life from art, you're doing something right . . . and, if you're lucky, wonderful.
In a rickety, turn-of-the-century house in Athens, Georgia, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and four other E6 bandmates / musicians are lucky. They spend most of their time playing or recording, and the rest of it scratching their collective chins, plotting the next session. If nothing else - food, shelter, money, clothes - is constant, at least they have their music.
"Everyone is recording all the time," says Mangum from his home. "If I'm not doing something personally, somebody somewhere is doing something you can play on." Along with NMH, other Elephant 6 bands include Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control, and off-shoots thereof.
Not that Mangum and company are getting rich by their work. (They've lately discovered the joys of regular potato soup.) This is indie rock for the sake and spirit of indie rock, to revel in the intense sonic camaraderie of electricity and invention, and to make a field open enough to nurture a community's spasms of creative joy.
"I've know some of these people since I was five," says Mangum. He grew up in Ruston, Louisiana, along with Apple's Robert Schneider and Olivia's Bill Doss and Will Cullen. "It all stems from where we grew up and it goes beyond music." But he feels too much is being made of the Elephant 6 phenomenon. "It's not anything in particular. I've read press that has tried to make more of it than it is. With us, you just have to show up and say, 'Can I play harmonica on that?' We're not snobby people."
If E6 isn't an exclusive musical collective, it is a nomadic, overnight camp existence, more about an "on the lam" lifestyle than carving out niches in a particular place. Last year alone, Mangum finished writing in March then zig-zagged from Denver to Austin to Long Island to Manhattan before finally "settling" in Georgia. [Note: The author here refers to 1996] "We're always moving somewhere," Mangum admits. "We tend to find ourselves leaving places more than coming to places. Typically, I'm more comfortable packing my things in a box than having them sit all folded on a shelf. That's too properly arranged."
If the E6 crew ever do settle down, Mangum explains that it will be in some kind of communal musical utopia for which they've already laid out (perhaps under a thick cloak of marijuana haze) some mental blueprints. "Eventually our plan is to start a commune in the middle of nowhere," Mangum explains, "because we want to drop out of society as much as we can. [Robert's] into geodesic domes and Buckminster Fuller, so he wants to initiate some of that thinking. We want to build giant waterwheels for electricity . . . We're piecing [the idea] together bit by bit. Will wants to set up speakers all throughout the woods and have random noises come out at random times. I'd be the activity guy and read Zen to everybody, trying to bring people together." In the sober light of day, Mangum reconsiders, but only momentarily. "Maybe it seems ridiculous. But we're all used to being together all the time."
As roseate as isolationism sounds, if it affords the principals in E6 the kind of creative atmosphere in which they continue their often brilliant work, then what the hell. Here's a hammer and a few cans of baked beans. Go to it. Truth is, Mangum's work already smacks (in a good way) of isolationism. His insular modus operandi - often a cockeyed cornucopia of bizarre musical instrumentation: accordion, melodica, trombone, euphonium, zanzithophone, and uillean pipes - is as heartwarming as it is disorienting. First heard on the band's unorthodox but inspirational four-track hodgepodge On Avery Island, the new manifestation sounds in full flower on their follow-up In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, an even more intimate and ambitious work than its predecessor. Neutral Milk Hotel consists here of multi-instrumentalists Julian Koster (formerly of Chocolate USA and now of Music Tapes), Scott Spillane, and Jeremy Barnes. Though it contains more solo acoustic compositions than On Avery Island, the new album is more of a collaboration.
"Sometimes the other guys would send me off into the other room [while recording]," says Mangum, "and I'm sitting there eating Chinese food hearing all these little 'boops.' Then I'd come back in and they'd ask, 'Whaddaya think of this?' and I'd totally freak out. 'Yes! That's it!'"
Still recorded on four-track ("this huge junk thing the size of a refrigerator"), In The Aeroplane features distorted guitar, soaring imagination, and dense tube-driven melodies. "We trusted our instincts on this one," says Mangum. "It was all very spontaneous."
Written and recorded whenever the NMH nomads' orbit crossed - in Denver; in Manhattan; in Providence, RI at the Terrastock festival - the material is cohesive and credible, hinging on the brilliantly scattered ensemble for its music and on Mangum's fertile, psychedelic-inspired mind for lyrics.
"One day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea / But for now we are young, let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we see," he sings on the Sgt. Pepper-esque title track. And for a moment, the struggles, the potato soup, the boarding house lifestyle all disappear, and the romance of pop emerges through the idyllic styles of Neutral Milk Hotel.
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