Black Foliage: Animation Music, Volume 1

by The Olivia Tremor Control

one of those formative "fundamentally changed the way i see music" albums for me.

i have an older brother who suddenly became a very active, enterprising music listener around when he got his first job as a teen. we lived in a small, rural college town so he would listen to the local college radio station a lot and then go into the nearest big record store in the city with his bandmates to buy the records he could pick out. indie music was coming into its own around this time, tho Neutral Milk Hotel and its ilk hadn't really blown up online yet.

i was younger - around age 12 - and when he brought this album home i think it exactly fit in a slot of something that i had already wanted more of: i.e. those weird Beatles songs where they do bizarre things with tape loops and layered production (Tomorrow Never Knows, I Am The Walrus, etc). i was a huge Beatles fan as a kid, like many kids, and those were always the moments where it felt like the music took a step outside the bounds of "regular song" and took on a life of their own as a sonic space - there was some kind of larger story there.

Black Foliage takes that basic idea - 60's Beatles melodies surrounded by musique concrète - so much further. i later made a tape of this album and Dusk at Cubist Castle and i'd listen to them every day home from school on my walkman. it never got old. there were so many sounds! how did they make all of those sounds?? and with such limited analog equipment?? i didn't really have any idea - i still sort of don't. but it also made me aware of just how ambitious you could be with very limited means. i think that ended up being really important for me pursuing making music on the computer early on, even tho i didn't really have access to a lot of recording equipment. if Elephant Six could do it with a four track, i had no real excuse!

i tried in vain to foist songs from this album on people in my middle school. this was the era of nu metal and boy bands. people were very confused, as you might imagine. the combination of retro 60's sunshine/psych pop and intense sonic collage was very out of the zeitgeist of the mainstream, even if it was having a moment in the indie world. maybe i should blame this album for permanently alienating me from mainstream music for good - because it made me always ask for more. thanks for that, Elephant Six!

RIP to the legends Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss btw. and thanks to them and the rest of the Elephant Six crew for putting together this one-of-a-kind music. it matters a lot to people, even when it doesn't feel like it does.