In the late 90s, neo-psychedelicists the Olivia Tremor Management loved essential acclaim and a rabid cult following, however co-founder Will Cullen Hart – who died on Friday, aged 53 – wished extra. “Guys would come as much as us after reveals and inform us, ‘You’re my band!’” Hart advised me final 12 months. “However I wished us to be everyone’s band.” Nonetheless, Hart and his musical associate Invoice Doss had little curiosity in making music for “everyone”. And whereas main labels similar to Elektra sensed business potential inside OTC’s typically good and infrequently baffling acid-pop, document contract negotiations rapidly foundered over questions of artistic management, which Hart had no intention of relinquishing. “I didn’t wish to be wealthy,” he admitted. “I simply wished to have the ability to purchase extra tools and proceed to create cool issues.”
Such easy ambitions had bonded Hart with expensive associates Doss, Robert Schneider and Jeff Mangum again in junior highschool of their house city of Ruston, Louisiana. Hart’s mother and father, each inside designers, had inspired their son’s precocious inventive leanings – his mom stored him stocked with reams of paper to scrawl on. However music turned his chief focus after Schneider, his “mentor”, launched him to lo-fi home-recording. “Once we realised the Beatles made their information on four-track tape-recorders, it modified our lives,” Hart stated.
The quartet started making their very own music, posting one another cassettes and pushing the primitive know-how past its limits. Within the early 90s they relocated to Athens, a university city in Georgia, the place they began a musical collective, Elephant 6, which later advanced right into a document label. Hart, Doss and Mangum performed in Artificial Flying Machine, a psychedelic group with avant garde leanings, earlier than Mangum, who had a penchant for using lawnmowers and blenders as musical devices, left and Hart and Doss renamed the group the Olivia Tremor Management.
Their debut album, 1996’s Music from the Unrealized Movie Script: Nightfall at Cubist Citadel, was the primary Elephant 6 launch to win consideration exterior their airtight scene. A piece of scattered brilliance, it segued via drug-mangled pop to bold shoestring symphonies and uncompromising musique concrète. Critics rejoiced over the imaginative and prescient, the ambition, the wayward wandering and an accompanying bonus CD of instrumentals Doss and Hart recorded over two frenetic nights. They adopted it with 1999’s Black Foliage: Animation Music, throughout which Hart’s LSD consumption peaked. “I took acid fairly a bit, possibly 200 instances,” he stated, explaining it helped him hear “totally different dimensions”. Black Foliage was a darker journey; as soon as it was carried out, Hart stop acid. “I realised I’d discovered all I may from LSD.”
Olivia Tremor Management broke up the next 12 months. Hart had been experiencing signs of then-undiagnosed a number of sclerosis (MS) and, he advised me, “I didn’t have the emotional ‘no matter’ … I lower folks off. I couldn’t deal with a confrontation. I ended answering the door and the phone.” After his friendship with Doss fractured, Hart shaped a brand new group, Circulatory System. However his signs grew extra severe; after a interval of hospitalisation, he was recognized in 2005. The information prompted a reconciliation with Doss, and OTC reunited at that 12 months’s All Tomorrow’s Events pageant in Camber Sands.
“We have been a band once more and it was good,” Hart stated. However whereas he and Doss started work on a 3rd Olivia Tremor Management opus, it stays uncompleted. Hart struggled along with his MS, which he stated had “destroyed” him. “Recording on daily basis? I can’t try this any extra. There are these buzzing sensations that gained’t cease. It’s horrible.” Then, in 2012, Doss died immediately of an aneurysm. And whereas Doss had accomplished all of his vocal tracks for the brand new document, for years Hart couldn’t face ending the album with out him. “Days after Invoice handed, I realised I couldn’t hold doing this. I wanted to let it go.”
Within the years after Doss’s dying, film-maker Chad Stockfleth labored on a documentary in regards to the Elephant 6 scene, his enthusiasm re-energising the obscure Athens collective. “We have been all an emotional mess after Invoice died,” Schneider advised me. “Chad’s digital camera was like a therapist and a therapeutic started.” Hart and Schneider returned to the unfinished Olivia Tremor Management album. Work progressed slowly, however Hart was “actually having fun with engaged on the tracks”. The primary two songs to floor from the album’s periods, Backyard of Gentle and The Similar Place, appeared on Bandcamp on Friday, with Schneider noting that earlier than Hart died, he was “excited and joyful to see folks have been downloading it”.
Certainly, whereas the final decade or so of Hart’s life was characterised by sickness and tragedy, there was additionally a way that he had lengthy since made peace along with his ambitions, and recognised clearly what he’d achieved along with his music. Stockfleth’s movie particularly had supplied a a lot wanted dose of perspective. “It’s like I’m watching any person else,” he advised me final summer season. “And people children are cool! It makes me joyful. We did one thing and I’m actually pleased with it.”
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