Biography
In the early 90s,
a collective of indie musicians who called themselves Elephant
6 appeared out of nowhere. They were in love with the
60s, and shared the philosophy that the only recording equipment
necessary to create a Great Psychedelic Album was a four-track.
The movement multiplied quickly, and just before it fizzled
out in the early 21st century, there were literally dozens of
bands recording lo-fi experimental indie psychedelia.
But even then, the movement was led by the "big three" E6 bands:
Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples in Stereo, and the Olivia Tremor
Control.
Of these, OTC
are by far the most experimental. They started out right
at the beginning of the E6 movement as fairly straight-up indie
rock, but fused with strange sound effects. As they continued,
their love of psychedelia and electronics became more apparent
and their ambitions increased, culminating in the amazing 70-minute
Black Foliage. At the same time, the same five
musicians operated under the name of the Black Swan Network,
under which name they released their most experimental instrumental
and electronic material. 1997's tour EP was credited to
both of them, and was a recording of a show in which OTC played
songs while the same musicians played sound effects at the same
time, under the name of BSN. Unfortunately,
the band decided to "temporarily" break up in 2000 so that the
individual musicians could pursue solo projects like Circulatory
System and the Sunshine Fix. Rumor says that lead singers
and writers Doss and Hart are no longer on speaking terms, so
OTC may be gone for good. We can hope, though...
- Alex Temple
[January 2001]
The
Olivia Tremor Control vs. the Black Swan Network (1997)
This album may
have some of the most misleading packaging I've ever seen.
First of all, it's almost impossible to find the name of the
band anywhere on it. The inside box lists the guest musicians,
but not the members of the band itself. There are seven
tracks listed, although there are only two on the CD.
And when you do finally notice the ring of "THEOLIVIATREMORCONTROLTHEBLACKSWANNETWORK"s
around the image on the cover, you're still being misled, because
the Black Swan Network actually consists of the same exact people
as the Olivia Tremor Control. The alter ego was created
to allow the musicians to release entire albums of tape collage,
without a pop-song in sight, without having to confuse OTC fans.
According to rumor, OTC and BSN would tour together, the same
musicians playing instruments and singing as OTC while they
produced sound effects as BSN. At any rate, this album
is just what the title suggests: stylistically in between the
two bands. It's entirely instrumental except for some
spoken samples, with the out-and-out arhythmic chaos kept to
a minimum, and there are hints of OTC's psych-pop in some instrumental
arrangements of pieces from Dusk at Cubist Castle and
Black Foliage.
So is it good?
Actually, yes it is. For an album so clearly self-indulgent
in nature, it goes overboard very rarely. Sure, there
are a few moments here and there that aren't really necessary
(like the confusing layering of voices saying "one, two, three,
four" towards the end of the first track), but for the most
part it holds my attention very well, and there are quite a
few strikingly beautiful moments. At times it even drifts
toward the sort of quiet, minimalistic post-rock-electronica
that Mouse on Mars has been exploring recently. The emergence
of Floydian psychedelic instrumentals out of sound collage is
done as effectively here as it is on Black Foliage, and
perhaps more subtly. Of course, there's nothing here that's
going to stick in your head for days or grab you by the balls,
and I wouldn't want to listen to the album every day, but this
is ultimately a really nice piece of work from a band that's
clearly having a lot of fun and has the natural talent to make
it fun for the listener as well. -
Alex Temple [June 2002]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
Black
Foliage: Animation Music, Vol. 1 (1999)
Do you like the
Beatles? Do you like early electronic music by folks like
Schaeffer, Stockhausen and Varèse? Do you wish
you could have an album that draws almost equally from both?
If so, look no further. The Olivia Tremor Control's final
album is the moment where everything came together for the band,
where their catchy retro-psych-pop and their vast musique concrète
soundscapes were fully integrated for the first time.
And not just into a coherent album -- into a 70-minute concept
album which may be one of the most serious and complex statements
ever to come out of the indie scene.
Even the actual
sound of the album is truly unique. Yes, the skeletons
of their songs are often remarkably similar to the Beatles.
A few songs sound a good deal like the Beach Boys ("Hideaway")
or early 70's Floyd ("Paranormal Echoes"), but the majority,
particularly "A Sleepy Company" and "The Sylvan Screen," sound
like lost outtakes from Revolver. What prevents
OTC from sounding like a clone band, though, is the textures.
First of all, there are a LOT of weird instruments on this album.
Sure, the Beatles did a fair bit of experimentation in that
realm themselves, but Black Foliage is an album that
opens with a passage for FOUR THEREMINS(!). In addition
to that, the songs are interspersed with noisy, chaotic sound
collage tracks which sample bits of the songs and manipulate
them into strange patterns, as if some supernatural being were
picking up chunks of raw music, throwing them at the wall and
listening to them burst apart. But even beyond that, the
musique concrète techniques spill over into the songs,
so that a track like "A Peculiar Noise Called 'Train Director'"
has strange noises in the background almost all the way through,
and dissolves into an electronic sputter towards the end.
Various types of electronic manipulation are everywhere, from
the use of a variable speed oscillator to turn a clarinet into
a bassclarinet on "Black Foliage (itself)" to the heavily distorted,
almost incomprehensible vocals on "A Place We Have Been To"
-- and, possibly most mind-bending of all, an astounding passage
in "I Have Been Floated" in which the music gradually fades
between recordings of 10 different vocalists singing the same
vocal line.
All of this could
result in pure wankery if done by a lesser band -- indeed, if
done by OTC half a decade earlier in their development.
But Black Foliage, for all its insane production values,
incredible density of ideas and sheer sprawling length, is a
beautifully constructed album. It's "psychedelic" in the
sense that it seems to conjure up images if you close your eyes
-- but it's also "trippy" in the sense that it takes you for
a ride. I mentioned earlier that this was a concept album;
while this is true, it's not easy to tell exactly what the concept
might be. But there is a dramatic curve, and the extremely
abstract, cryptic lyrics, full of recurring meaningless phrases
like "below the bark" and "above the flags," appear to describe
a long and arduous trip into some sort of dreamworld.
Side one is like
falling asleep, with the music getting progressively more surreal
and mysterious; it concludes with "Grass Canons," an enormously
evocative combination of circuitous vocal parts overdubbed canonically,
darkly evocative chord progressions, blocky percussion and minimalistic
celesta parts. Side two further explores this surrealism,
with songs like "A New Day" having different sets of lyrics
in each speaker. On side three, the music takes a turn
for the disturbing -- the title track (on whose bassline much
of the rest of the album is based) is quite dark and bottom-heavy,
and the 11-minute sound collage "The Bark and Below It" takes
ambient electronic psychotropics to a new level of anxiety.
Then, on side four, the darkness continues with the creepily
catchy "California Demise 3," a song that sounds kind of like
the Beatles, if the Beatles had been possessed by demons and
wrote songs about dying in car crashes. The enormously
grim "Another Set of Bees In The Museum" featres a vocal melody
which is a quarter-tone off from the instrumental parts, and
truly reflects the experience of a nightmare in that harmless,
even ridiculous things ("ants and snails having porridge parties")
seem inexplicably terrifying.
But the album
doesn't end in this nightmare. Instead, the brilliant
"Hilltop Procession" allows us to wake up and experience the
beautiful realization that it has all been a dream, the strangely
percussive lo-fi folky strumming of its opening gradually fleshing
out its texture and emerging gloriously back into the Elephant
6 collective's trademark vocal harmonies. The band sings,
"There are no explanations for the things you see, so don't
look to me to validate your dreams," and the accompanying dominant-tonic
resolution may be one of the most satisfying to ever appear
in a rock album. The hairs on the back of your neck rise
to a beautifully spacey passage whose unusually open texture
owes something to the Doors' Strange Days, and the album
closes with a tune borrowed from their previous double album,
Dusk at Cubist Castle, as if to say that everything is
all right and we're back in the real world now.
So, yeah, this
is one hell of an intense album. While its approach is
quite different from the composed complexity of much "prog,"
it has real motivic development and a really effective overarching
structure, and it deserves to be taken seriously. I recommend
listening to it in the dark and with headphones, especially
since the vocal parts tend to get buried under the sound effects
on most speakers. Black Foliage is a trully brilliant
piece of work, and is a must-hear for anyone with an interest
in psychedelia.
- Alex Temple [January 2001]
