About —
A loose agglomeration of overlapping bands across multiple cities, with their own record label (though its members recorded for others), Elephant 6 seemed to pride itself on being difficult to define. Schneider and Mangum formed the collective with Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart—the duo behind the another revered E6 band, the psych-pop group Olivia Tremor Control—as teenage misfits in the Deep South college town of Ruston, Louisiana, bonding over busted instruments and rented four-track recorders. When they scattered to different cities in the mid-’90s—Denver for Schneider and Athens, Georgia, for Mangum, Doss, and Hart—they brought Elephant 6 with them, eventually extending their banner to a hodgepodge of kindred spirits from San Francisco to Brooklyn. By the time the collective’s first wave of activity died down in the early 2000s, E6 could boast one of the biggest word-of-mouth breakthrough albums of the file-sharing era: Neutral Milk Hotel’s lo-fi, high-concept masterpiece, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. For listeners who dug deeper than that Merge Records release, Elephant 6 offered proof positive that a gaggle of musically inclined weirdos could do something similar in their own towns, too.