Will Cullen Hart, who co-founded the beloved and influential Athens, Ga.-reared collective Elephant 6 and performed with its related bands Olivia Tremor Management and Circulatory System, died this morning (Nov. 29) on the age of 53. Per an announcement from longtime pal and collaborator Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo, Hart handed away from pure causes “immediately, peacefully and in a really pleased temper” following the discharge at the moment of the primary new Olivia Tremor Management songs in 13 years.
The Elephant 6 troupe started within the late ’80s with a couple of highschool buddies from rural Louisiana and got here to embody the aforementioned acts in addition to Elf Energy, Beulah, the Music Tapes and Impartial Milk Lodge. “There was a bunch of us who gelled as a result of we didn’t wish to be in Whitesnake,” Hart advised SPIN in 2006. Hart got here up with the time period Elephant 6 to model the bed room boom-box recordings that they’d been dubbing over Vanilla Ice cassingles and buying and selling amongst themselves (the collective’s work is chronicled within the 2022 documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co., directed by C.B. Stockfleth).
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Upon commencement, Schneider moved to Denver and shaped the Apples in Stereo, whereas Hart, the late Invoice Doss (who died in 2012) and Jeff Mangum relocated to the underground music mecca of Athens, Ga., in 1993. With Schneider supervising, Elephant 6 grew to become an precise label, specializing in seven-inches and cassettes. In the meantime, Doss and Hart telemarketed for Moms In opposition to Drunk Driving, and Mangum washed dishes at an Italian restaurant — all three sleeping on cots in the identical attic — as extra artists entered the fold, rehearsing songs collectively after Sunday-night potlucks. “We weren’t precisely having drug orgies or something,” Elf Energy’s Andrew Rieger advised SPIN.
With Doss and Hart main the artistic cost, Olivia Tremor Management emerged in 1996 with the acclaimed album Music From the Unrealized Movie Script: Nightfall at Cubist Citadel and adopted it with one other well-loved LP, Black Foliage: Animation Music Quantity One, in 1999. The group was inactive till a brief 2005 tour, then reformed for reveals in 2008, 2011 and 2012. A brand new album had been within the works for years, and at the moment’s new songs, “Backyard of Gentle” and “The Identical Place,” had been the primary to be launched from these classes. Hart additionally recorded 5 albums with Circulatory System between 2001 and 2014.
“He was my accomplice in crime in our teenagers and early 20s, my pricey pal, roommate, bandmate, and we pursued a imaginative and prescient of artwork and music collectively our entire lives, to this very day, that we hatched as youngsters – collectively,” Schneider wrote of Hart. “Will was infinitely chatty, infinitely humorous, infinitely expressive, infinitely artistic. He was energetic, candy, tender, earnest, alternately completely chill and completely explosive. Will suffered from a number of sclerosis for nearly 20 years, which step by step diminished his mobility, his potential to play guitar, and his potential to tour – however he stored up his productiveness, his songwriting, his recording and his artwork, and lived life in a state of heightened creativity. He was infinitely liked by me, and by his bandmates and the Elephant 6 and Athens communities.”
Talking of the efforts to complete the in-progress Olivia Tremor Management album, Schneider stated, “[musician/engineer] Jason NeSmith is the hero of the ending of the 2 OTC songs. Jason and Will labored collectively on mixing the 2 songs, sending mixes forwards and backwards to me for remark, after which began to make progress in direction of different unfinished OTC tracks. Because of Jason, Will gained momentum, and new enthusiasm, and their studio collaboration blossomed during the last two years, even with MS affecting Will’s mobility increasingly. He pushed ahead to the end fortunately, bravely.”
“I’m so grateful to Derek and to Jason for his or her engineering work on the ultimate OTC album,” he continued. “Might the historical past of this basic band report the important position every of them performed as companions to Invoice and to Will. And Kelly Hart, Will’s spouse and his co-manager of the rebooted Elephant 6 label, is the hero of bringing the songs into the world. These stunning songs – maybe among the many greatest psychedelic pop songs ever recorded – exist at the moment, and Kelly advised me that this morning Will was excited and pleased to see individuals had been downloading it. As we speak is a day of victory for W. Cullen Hart – his final day represented a triumph. As we speak is the day that Will’s perseverance, his sincerity, his battle with MS and his devotion to Invoice and their widespread imaginative and prescient, bears fruit.”
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