In the summer of 2012, Robert Schneider visited two of his closest friends in the world, Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, in Athens, Ga. Schneider, a songwriter, a producer, and the band leader of the long-running power-pop outfit the Apples in Stereo, was getting ready to move to Atlanta to begin a mathematics graduate program at Emory University. But part of the draw of relocating was that he’d be able to spend his weekends 90 minutes up the road in Athens helping his friends finish the long-in-the-works third album by their homespun psychedelic-rock band, the Olivia Tremor Control.
Schneider, Doss and Hart all grew up in northern Louisiana, playing in bands together and forming a musical collective known as the Elephant 6, along with a fourth friend, Jeff Mangum, who played in the Olivia Tremor Control early on before focusing his creative energies on his own band, Neutral Milk Hotel. Although the Apples and Neutral Milk Hotel became more popular, the Olivias, as they’re sometimes called, may have best embodied the Elephant 6’s free-spirited ethos.
The band put on theatrical, unfettered performances, and cultivated a largely lo-fi, cut-and-paste recording aesthetic. O.T.C. songs weren’t so much written as they were assembled, with Doss and Hart filtering core influences — late-era Beatles, Brian Wilson’s “Smile” — through an audaciously surrealist lens. Schneider had produced the Olivias’ first two double-albums, the lush, sprawling “Dusk at Cubist Castle” in 1996, and the darker, woozier experimental-pop collage, “Black Foliage: Animation Music,” in 1999. But since then, the band’s musical engines had been idling.
It wasn’t for lack of ideas. When Schneider met Doss and Hart that summer in the attic studio of Doss’s Athens home, they had grand visions for the band’s next album.
“Bill talked through the entire story arc with me,” Schneider said during a phone interview from his current home in Michigan’s upper peninsula, where he’s a mathematics professor at Michigan Tech. “They had a chart on his wall, an outline. Bill and I made a map for how we’d finish the album. I signed on to co-produce.”
Schneider moved to Atlanta the final weekend of July 2012. “I talked to Bill Friday night as we were driving into town,” he said. Early Monday morning, Doss died of a hemorrhage. He was 43. “I had to call all my friends and his bandmates. It impacted everyone physically.”
Doss’s death was the latest jarring twist in what, by then, was already a long, tortured path toward the Olivias’ final album, “The Same Place,” which was released Oct. 23.
Initially, in the years after “Black Foliage” came out, there were growing pains. The Elephant 6 had expanded to include dozens of bands with overlapping members, and its successes — in particular, Neutral Milk Hotel, whose 1998 album, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” became a generational totem — changed the Olivias’ prospects. There were disagreements about offers from major labels and creative differences between Doss and Hart. The band never officially broke up, but by the early 2000s, Doss and Hart were leading separate bands, the Sunshine Fix and Circulatory System, respectively.
“Bill and Will were just traveling in different directions,” the longtime O.T.C. multi-instrumentalist John Fernandes said on a video call from his Athens bedroom. “Bill was wanting to try more country and funk stuff. Will was getting more into a dreamy psychedelic mode. It seemed like they wanted to see what they could do following their own paths.”
Around the time the band splintered, Hart began experiencing serious health problems, which would eventually be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. In those days, he was mostly self-medicating with alcohol, and by 2005, his health was in noticeable decline, all of which precipitated a mending of fences within the band. Doss agreed to play some reunion shows as long as Hart got his drinking under control. By the early 2010s, the band was working more purposefully on new music. Then Doss’s death brought everything to a halt.
For years, the band sat dormant. Then, during the making of an Elephant 6 documentary, Schneider brought two new O.T.C. songs to the Athens-based producer Jason NeSmith’s home studio.
But after two days of productive sessions, work on the album ceased again for several more years. It was clear that Schneider felt it hard to press forward in the wake of Doss’s death.
In 2023, Hart and NeSmith began meeting regularly to work on the new music. Hart had long lists of songs, but finding the recordings, many of which had been made over the course of two decades on home recording devices, was tricky. A significant cache was on a hard drive in Doss’s attic.
“It’d been sitting unpowered for 11 years,” said NeSmith. “Miraculously, it booted up and mounted. Then it was months of seeing what there was in there.”
It soon became clear the album was already pretty far along. “The bulk of the work was done before Bill passed, but we didn’t have access to it,” said Derek Almstead, a longtime Elephant 6 fixture who’d joined the Olivias in the late 2000s and now lives in Pennsylvania. “There’s all these little secrets we didn’t discover until we got the hard drive back.”
Gradually, some songs were finished, mixed and mastered. On the morning of Nov. 29, 2024, the band released the album’s first two singles, the same songs Schneider had taken to NeSmith years earlier: the bright, catchy, Doss-penned “Garden of Light,” and “The Same Place,” a ghostly, string-laced meditation conceived by Hart. Later that same day, Hart, who was 53, died of a heart attack.
“It was devastating,” Schneider said. “But because at this point the band was so close to actually being finished [with the album], it didn’t collapse the second time.”
Completing the album without the band’s leaders was complicated, though.
“It was a rescue mission,” NeSmith said. “It wasn’t trying to write new songs. It was trying to rescue what it was.”
NeSmith, Almstead and Ron Kwasman, a musician and close friend of Hart’s, became the project’s production triumvirate. Schneider kept tabs from afar.
“There was a real intention to not add a lot,” Almstead said. “If something was going to be added, it needed to be something that fit naturally with what was already there or something we talked about that just hadn’t been done yet.”
Ultimately, many Elephant 6 mainstays, including Schneider, Mangum and Andrew Rieger, of the band Elf Power, contributed, as did members of the broader Athens music community. Working on it became a way of processing grief over the deaths of Doss and Hart.
“It was pretty spiritual to hear them singing together again,” Fernandes said. “I was getting chills playing with them in this realm. You could be there with your friends again.”
The resulting album both encompasses and transcends the long, strange trip it took to make it. Like its predecessors, “The Same Place” is expansive, a 27-track double-album that starts its second half with an experimental, meandering multi-song suite. But it’s also remarkably cohesive and infectious. Warbling sound effects, weird tape manipulations and swirling, hypnotic washes of noise decorate the album’s periphery, but at the center is unimpeachable songcraft.
“I don’t want to say there’s an end to this, but I believe this album wraps up the Elephant 6 of my childhood in Louisiana,” Schneider said. “It represents the culmination.”
The Elephant 6 still exists — Elf Power and Of Montreal remain active, and a newer generation inspired by the collective’s founders continues waving the flag — but it has changed. Of the four Louisiana boys who conceived it, Doss and Hart are dead, Mangum has receded from public life and Schneider primarily works as a mathematician.
In many ways, the Elephant 6 is a relic of an analog age when working together meant face-to-face interaction, and a local scene could develop largely insulated from outside noise. While advances in communications and recording technology have made musical collaboration immeasurably simpler and completely untethered from geography, the kind of intimacy you find among people who are in each others’ lives is not easily replicable.
“Elephant 6 was pre-internet and self-contained,” Kwasman said. “People had to be in the room. But it’s because of the internet that we were able to finish this record. That closeness is what formed this collective. The vastness is what completed it.”
For Schneider, the entire journey of making “The Same Place” has been difficult. “My veil of grief hasn’t lifted,” he admitted. But he’s found joy in seeing his closest comrades’ artistic ambitions finally realized in a way that honors the core values they held together since they were young.
“In that way, this represents a proof of concept of the robustness of Elephant 6,” Schneider said. “The people who conceived it fell away, yet their work, their ideas, their energy, their friendships, carry forward. And once they carry forward, they can spark new ideas, new efforts. So, in another way, maybe this is just the beginning of Elephant 6.”
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