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The Olivia Tremor Control

The Olivia Tremor Control

Athens, Georgia's Olivia Tremor Control turned tape loops, horns and fuzzed guitars into kaleidoscopic psychedelic pop across three decades.

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The Olivia Tremor Control

About

MOODS · psychedelic · dreamy · hazy · orchestral · whimsical · experimental · nostalgic · surreal · melancholic · lo-fi · kaleidoscopic · exploratory

BIOGRAPHY

The Olivia Tremor Control grew out of a Louisiana high school friendship between Will Cullen Hart, Jeff Mangum, Bill Doss and Robert Schneider, first as Cranberry Lifecycle, then Synthetic Flying Machine, before settling in Athens, Georgia and taking the name Olivia Tremor Control. Their homemade cassette exchanges became the seed of the Elephant 6 collective. In 1995 they recorded their debut, Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle, at Pet Sounds Studio with Schneider producing; it drew praise for its intricate, judiciously pop-inflected songcraft. Their second album, Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One, built partly from dreams fans mailed in on tape, was described by Pitchfork's Paul Thompson as fusing Revolver-era Beatles, Smile-era Beach Boys, 1980s Flaming Lips and Butthole Surfers skronk, and tape-manipulated wooze. The band split in 2000 after tension between Hart and Doss, reunited in 2005 and again officially in 2009, releasing new songs through the following years.

WHY THEY'RE COOL

Few bands fused 1960s pop idealism with tape-collage experimentation as fully as the Olivia Tremor Control. Rooted in the Beatles' and Beach Boys' psychedelic peaks and the musique concrete techniques of Pierre Henry and John Cage, they built dense, dreamlike records that doubled as sonic scrapbooks, even soliciting fans' dreams on cassette for Black Foliage. Critics heard an improbable synthesis of orchestral pop grandeur and skronking noise-rock chaos, a sound Pitchfork likened to Revolver and Smile colliding with the Flaming Lips and tape manipulation. As founding figures of the Elephant 6 collective, their homemade, collaborative ethos shaped a generation of American indie psychedelia, and the band's work carried through reunions and loss until its final album arrived after both key songwriters, Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, had died.

ON WOKE-1

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