The Elephant 6 collective: a beginner's guide

The collective's masterpiece and the album that pulled the whole scene into the light. Jeff Mangum's 1998 fever-dream about Anne Frank, love and death (fuzz, brass-band horns, singing saw, his voice cracking at the top of every line) was produced by Robert Schneider and went on to outsell everything else E6 made combined. Mangum then vanished from music for the better part of a decade, which only deepened the myth. If you hear one Elephant 6 record, hear this.

The collective's most ambitious and experimental engine. Led by Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, the Olivia Tremor Control built sprawling psychedelic suites, perfect 1960s pop songs spliced with long musique-concrète sound collages. Their 1996 debut runs 74 minutes and was sold alongside a separate disc of pure abstract drone meant to be played simultaneously. Maximalist, dizzying, and one of the most inventive records the 1990s underground produced.

Robert Schneider's band and the collective's de-facto pop heart. Schneider (the producer who recorded half the E6 catalogue at his Pet Sounds Studio) wrote candy-colored, Beach Boys-besotted power-pop drenched in tape fuzz. The 1995 debut sets the template: bright melodies, stacked harmonies, and a deliberately blown-out home-recorded warmth. Schneider is also the man who literally named the collective.

The 1999 follow-up pushes the collage instinct to its limit: pop fragments dissolve into and out of swirling sound-loops, the same melodic motifs recurring like half-remembered dreams across 27 tracks. It's the band's most divisive and most worshipped record, the point where Elephant 6's tape-experiment side fully takes over. A grower, and a deep-end essential for the patient.

Before the funk and the costumes and the on-stage chaos, Kevin Barnes wrote sunlit story-songs about made-up characters. of Montreal's third album (1999) is its lush, twee-psych peak: a parade of vignettes about imaginary townsfolk, arranged with a chamber-pop sweetness that owes everything to the E6 ethos. The band would later become the collective's biggest commercial success by reinventing itself entirely.

The reinvention. By 2007 Kevin Barnes had blown up the twee and rebuilt of Montreal as a glam-funk vehicle for a very public nervous breakdown, divorce, depression, an alter ego named Georgie Fruit. Its centerpiece, the near-12-minute 'The Past Is a Grotesque Animal,' is one of indie's great emotional gut-punches. Proof the collective's children grew up and got strange in new directions.

The San Francisco wing. Miles Kurosky's Beulah made the sunniest, horn-bright power-pop in the family, but the 1999 sophomore record laces the brass and harmonies with real heartbreak underneath. Schneider mixed it; it's the sound of E6 craft applied to something closer to classic AM-radio songwriting. Endlessly hummable, quietly sad.

Athens stalwarts Andrew Rieger and Laura Carter made some of the collective's most consistent records, and 1999's A Dream in Sound is the high-water mark: fuzzy, fairy-tale psych-folk with a darker, more medieval edge than their peers. A reliable entry point to the deeper E6 catalogue, and a band that kept the flame burning longer than most.

Denver's contribution to the Apples' orbit. Martyn Leaper's Minders made jangling, British-Invasion-shaped pop, think the Kinks and the Zombies refracted through four-track fuzz. The 1998 debut is short, bright and unfairly overlooked, a perfect example of the collective's gift for melody you can hum on first listen.

The collective's strangest corner. Julian Koster (Neutral Milk Hotel's singing-saw player) built the Music Tapes around antique instruments, a sentient metronome named Static and a singing two-story-tall radio. The 1999 debut is the most fully realized vision of E6's homemade-wonder ethos: a record that sounds like it was found in an attic from a century that never happened.

After the Olivia Tremor Control split, Will Cullen Hart carried the collage tradition into Circulatory System. The 2001 self-titled debut is denser and headier than almost anything else in the catalogue, layered, looping, psychedelic, recorded by a rotating cast of nearly the whole collective. The connoisseur's E6 record.

Jeff Mangum's 1996 debut, recorded almost entirely with Robert Schneider, is the rougher, fuzzier first draft of the vision that would crystallize on Aeroplane. Distorted folk-pop buried in static and horns, more inward and less anthemic, and beloved by anyone who wanted more after the famous one. Essential context for the masterpiece.

By 2000 Robert Schneider had honed the Apples into a near-perfect pop machine. This is their most polished and tuneful set, a concept-tinged ride through Schneider's sunshine-psych obsessions, the record to reach for once Fun Trick Noisemaker has hooked you, and proof the lo-fi warmth scaled up beautifully.

The bridge record (2005), where Kevin Barnes first fused the old chamber-pop sweetness with the electronic dance-funk that would define his next phase. Sun-bright, hook-stuffed and quietly experimental, it's the most accessible entry point into of Montreal's prolific, ever-mutating catalogue.

Elf Power's 1997 breakthrough: a denser, more ominous strain of E6 psych-folk shot through with imagery of kings, monsters and the natural world turning strange. The fuzz is thicker and the mood darker than the collective's sunnier records, a reminder that the family had a shadow side too.

The catch-all compilation that gathers the band's scattered 7-inches, EP tracks and oddities, the perfect dose for anyone who finds the full-length collages overwhelming. It distills the Olivia Tremor Control's pop instincts into bite-sized form, and closes the loop on the collective's most restlessly creative band before Bill Doss's death in 2012 quieted the whole enterprise.