Elephant 6
A loose collective of psychedelic-pop bands who started in Denver before relocating to Athens, Georgia, sharing members, home-recording gear, and a shared four-track ethos.
- Neutral Milk Hotel★ Named as an influence by 8 artists on the map
Jeff Mangum, one of the original Ruston friends, moved to Athens specifically to be near the rest of the collective before recording as Neutral Milk Hotel.
- of Montreal
Kevin Barnes joined the collective later, in Athens, after it had already relocated there — not one of the original Ruston friends, but folded into the same circle once he arrived.
- Olivia Tremor Control
Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, both original Ruston friends alongside Mangum, pushed the collective's more experimental, tape-collage wing furthest.
The room
Denver then Athens, Georgia · 1993–2000
Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Robert Schneider grew up together as friends in Ruston, Louisiana, absorbing the same Beatles and Beach Boys records before scattering and regrouping first in Denver and then in Athens, Georgia, where the loose collective took the Elephant 6 Recording Company name. What held the group together wasn't a shared address so much as shared equipment and method — four-track home recording passed between members' bedrooms rather than time booked in a commercial studio.
Robert Schneider produced across much of the collective's catalog, a circumstance of how Elephant 6 pooled its limited resources rather than a case of him influencing the other bands' sound.
Room to room
The bands here shaped 1 band in 1 other scene; 2 bands from 2 other scenes shaped them.
Red: who a band here shapedBlue: who a band here learned fromPoint at a band to see only its links; click a scene to go there.
- Lower East SideNeutral Milk Hotel shaped Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
- Greenwich Villageof Montreal learned from Bob Dylan.
- CBGBof Montreal learned from Patti Smith.
What came out of it
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea's slow rediscovery turned Elephant 6's bedroom four-track aesthetic into a direct reference point for a later generation of indie bands, including members of Arcade Fire and the Shins, while Olivia Tremor Control's studio abstraction found later admirers in acts as large as Radiohead and the Flaming Lips.
