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Return Of The Psychedelic Tapeheads
03/22/1999 6:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Mac Randall
Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, the principal singers and songwriters for the Olivia Tremor Control, are absolute bedroom recording obsessives. Give them a four-track cassette deck, a couple of crappy microphones, and some lo-fi effects boxes, and you might not see them again for several months. To hear them talk about the laborious creation of their latest gleefully psychedelic opus, Black Foliage (Flydaddy), is to have your mind reel at the thought of so many hours of intense, nitpicky work. Which is more than okay by this Athens, Georgia-based duo. After all, reeling minds are just what they're after--if your mind reels, doesn't that make it more like a tape? Cool. (Sorry about that last goofy observation; after spending an hour or so with the frighteningly energetic Doss and Hart, one's thought process is likely to go on all kinds of crazy tangents.)
"We did this one on various machines," Will says, seated in the living room of one of Flydaddy's head honchos on New York's Upper East Side. "A couple of cassette four-tracks, a digital four-track, and a couple of quarter-inch eight-tracks, whatever was working that week." The weeks added up to over two and a half years. Bill, who's sprawled on the floor beside Will (yes, the names are confusing, aren't they?), chuckles and says, "We didn't mean for it to take that long. It just did, mainly because things kept breaking." At one point, several of the band's own tape recorders went down for the count at almost exactly the same time. While waiting for the gear to get fixed, they set up at the home studio of pal Robert Schneider of the Apples In Stereo, who also helped engineer OTC's last album, 1996's Dusk At Cubist Castle.
"Also," Doss adds, "sometimes we weren't able to get sounds we liked right away. Then we had to figure out how to get it the way we wanted it. I've spent over a week on a bassline, sitting there every day playing it over and over again until it's right."
You really spent over a week on a single bassline? "Yeah, seriously. I like to listen to mixes over and over, all day long. Maybe I'll hear a horn part somewhere but can't get it right, so I'll make a cassette of the song, put it in the car, drive around with it, listen to it for a week, until it works itself out and you say, 'Okay, this is the way it should go.' Then you try it and see if it works."
Adding difficulty to OTC's task was the sheer ambition of what they wanted to achieve. "If we were just going to do a rock record," Doss says, "it would be easier. But when you're trying to put 20 different things on a song that's already there--20 more things, not including the basic tracks--it's hard to fit them all in and make them sound right." The main danger of taking this wall-of-sound approach with fairly low-tech equipment is that, as Hart explains, "things get buried. We'd end up with stuff that all sounded great, except the drums were completely gone. So then you grab that cardboard box and just pop along with the song, whatever you can do to fill up that last space."
The result of all this effort is a complex tapestry of almost constantly shifting sonic patterns. Sometimes you're set down for a moment amid a clump of Beach Boys harmonies only to confront a wash of distortion set to a booming tribal beat. Sudden blasts of horns and strings add to the pleasantly jarring effect. Though there's an obvious appreciation of classic '60s-style pop behind much of this music--tracks like "A Sleepy Company" and the naggingly familiar "I Have Been Floated" owe much to folks like the Beatles, Byrds, Zombies, and Todd Rundgren--OTC's allegiance to psychedelic aesthetics goes beyond mere reconstruction of other artists' past glories. On one of Black Foliage's later tracks, "Another Set Of Bees In The Museum," Doss and Hart come right out and pose the question that's central to their work: "How can we liberate the world of sound?"
Whether the world of sound is actually liberated on this album is a tricky question, but there's no doubt that it's severely stretched through OTC's brilliant use of collage techniques. Countless numbers of tracks are manipulated in multiple ways: sped up, slowed down, played backwards, heavily processed, edited out and then re-inserted elsewhere. Several linking tracks called "combinations" take musical elements from various other songs on the album and blend them, often surprisingly, in a clever audio approximation of a jigsaw puzzle. This triggers memories of another '60s icon, Frank Zappa, a reference that Hart is quick to second. "Uncle Meat! Yes!" he yells enthusiastically. "That definitely was an inspiration. Things zip in, say hello, and then fly by. Sometimes they're recognizable, sometimes not, but I think as you listen to the album more, you're able to untangle them."
Along with their friends Neutral Milk Hotel and the Apples In Stereo, OTC are members of the independent Southern collective known as the Elephant 6 Recording Company, an organization that's part record label, part musicians' club, part support group for retro psych-pop freaks. The whimsy that marks the products of all the Elephant 6 bands is exemplified on Black Foliage's "California Demise 3," during which the lush vocal harmonies in a dramatic stop-time section are joined by the dulcet tones of a ringing telephone. "Growing up in Louisiana," Hart says, "we were all friends and we did stuff together. Robert [Schneider] was the first one to get a four-track, and once we understood that there was this machine that we could record on, we all got our own. And then the madness set in."
Now that Black Foliage is hitting the streets, the OTC boys are gearing up for their next tour; these notorious home studio tinkerers are gradually becoming more comfortable as a live act. Usually they perform as a five-piece band, but the ensemble can get much larger sometimes. During their gig at the first Terrastock Festival in Providence, Rhode Island, back in the spring of '97, it seemed like nearly everyone within shouting distance of the stage got up and joined in at some point. The loose, rollicking party atmosphere was contagious. "Well, for that show, we were going for a loose, rollicking feel," Hart says, then rolls his eyes. "Oh yeah." Doss laughs and adds, "And we nailed it."
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