Elephant six

The Elephant Six Recording Company is a musical collective founded in Athens, Georgia by Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart (both, now formerly, of The Olivia Tremor Control[?]), Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel[?]), and Robert Schneider (of The Apples (In Stereo)[?]), the four of whom grew up making music in Ruston[?], Louisiana. Several Elephant Six bands began to find commercial success in the late 1990s, including Beulah[?], Elf Power, The Music Tapes[?], and Of Montreal[?], as well as the founding bands mentioned above.

The most characteristic trait of an Elephant Six recording is the eclectic and exotic instrumentation: along with the guitars and drums you can hear, for example, the flugelhorn, singing saw, wandering genie, and one-note piano on Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane over the Sea"; the euphonium, selemintan, and magnus organ on The Olivia Tremor Control's "Black Foliage"; the sitar, "magic robot voice," and Nepalese copper shawn on Elf Power's "When the Red King Comes"; and everything from sarangi to clarinet played by fully eighteen backup musicians on Beulah's "When Your Heartstrings Break". This is the ostensible nature of the "collective": instruments, players, and space are shared among many bands.

See also Indie rock.