e were building a universe that was lo-fi, personalised and highly experimental,” says Robert Schneider of Elephant 6, a self-sufficient neo-psychedelic music scene that ruled 1990s Athens, Georgia. “We worshipped Brian Wilson, Brian Eno and Yoko Ono. We mashed-up psychedelia and pop and punk and experimentalism. And we had each other to buoy us, so we didn’t need the rest of the world’s approval.
Mangum, Hart and Doss formed Synthetic Flying Machine, an early vehicle for their riot of seemingly divergent influences. “Jeff and I really loved noise,” says Hart. “I’d record him turning on a blender, revving a lawnmower, switching taps on and off.” Doss, more interested in melody and formal experimentalists such as, soon left with Hart to form the Olivia Tremor Control, while Mangum started Neutral Milk Hotel.
But it was Mangum who would record Elephant 6’s signature opus – with a little help from his friends, of course. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the second album by Neutral Milk Hotel, fused Mangum’s avant-garde impulses with droning folk songs that Bangs describes as possessing “an Astral Weeks-esque internal turmoil”. It is a dreamlike suite of fuzzed-up folk, Appalachian mountain song and horn-driven laments tracing a narrative inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank.
Hart and Doss had renewed their friendship before the Olivia Tremor Control reunited for the 2005 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. Further shows followed, and in 2009 they began leisurely work on a third OTC album. Schneider, who had ended the Apples in Stereo after seven albums to pursue a PhD in mathematics, signed up to help make it. But in 2012, Doss died suddenly of an aneurysm, a “devastating loss” that Bangs says the Athens community is still struggling to recover from.
Stockfleth also called upon Bangs’ archives. “Early on, I made the decision to film Jeff every chance I got,” Bangs says, and his recording of Mangum performing solo acoustic embryonic versions of the Aeroplane songs in the back room of an Athens coffee shop yielded the 2001 album Live at Jittery Joe’. “I’d send friends like Michael Stipe and Elliott Smith tapes of Jeff performing, just wanting to spread the word about his talent.