Will Cullen Hart gave the impression of living out of time. The American musician and visual artist, who died at the age of 53 on November 29, lived by writing and recording some of the most profound and wonderfully naive psychedelic compositions ever. From the beginning, in the late 1980s in Ruston, Louisiana, he was the centerpiece of the visionary collective called Elephant 6 along with four high school friends. After moving to Athens, Georgia, band member Jeff Mangum's psychological explorations with Neutral Milk Hotel reached more people, and the indie pop records Robert Schneider made with Apples in Stereo enjoyed immediate appeal. Olivia Tremor Control, the band of Hart and Bill Doss, the fourth member of the initial nucleus of Elephant 6, were timeless and floated up there, between endlessly hummable melodies and musique concrete.
In the 90s Olivia released two albums, Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996) e Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One (1999). They belong to the type of records for which the definition “cult classic” is not enough. If you came across one or two and you were the right age, you saw your musical horizons expanding, you fell in love, you swore and swore that this band from Georgia was as good as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground. One was a technicolor psychedelic-pop fantasy, the other a journey into a dark and tormented interiority. Their strength came from the complementary talents of Doss, master of sunshine pop, and Hart, daring alchemist in the recording studio. The music of the two singers and their bandmates, bassist/violinist/clarinettist John Fernandes, keyboardist Pete Erchick and drummer Eric Harris, has continued to resonate for nearly 30 years. Doss died in 2012 and now Hart is gone too. After so many years, the dream is over.
When Olivia Tremor Control broke up in 2000, Hart, Fernandes, Erchick and some other members of E6 founded Circulatory System. Their music is even less well known than that of Olivia, but it attracts equally avid fans who have followed Hart and his men into the winding tunnels of Black FoliageCirculatory System's self-released 2001 debut. Ever since the news of Hart's death broke just after Thanksgiving, fans like me have started quoting lyrics from Forever: “We will live forever, and you know that's true.” I thought about Joyone of the many brilliant kōans on the album. “If you still believe in joy, even if the world is full of hate, we can explode inside, deep inside, there's no reason to doubt it,” Hart sang. He believed in joy even when it was difficult to do so.
A few years ago I spoke to him on the phone about the 20th anniversary vinyl reissue of Circulatory System's first album. He was kind, thoughtful, a little rambling. The interview has not been published. I reread it after some time and found it full of gnomic wisdom. Hart explained to me that the introspective tone of Circulatory System was due to the upcoming milestone of 30 years of age. «All my thoughts are turned inward. And in the end, “we will live forever.” For me that record is like Dark Side of the Moona sequence with a beginning and an end.”
He told me that he asked his old friend Jeff Mangum to play drums on some songs on the first Circulatory System album: «He doesn't play it on his records, but he's an incredible drummer». He explained that he and Doss felt the need to go their separate ways in the late '90s (“I was ready to do my own thing, I guess”), and later reconnected for a couple of Olivia Tremor reunion tours Control, after Hart was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-2000s.
For those who discovered the band after the breakup, the reunion concerts had something miraculous. I remember an Olivia show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York in 2005 in which Mangum, far from returning to public life, shocked everyone by going on stage to sing his part of I Have Been Floatedfrom Black Foliage. Olivia's second reunion tour, in 2011, was also special, but in a different way: it was an opportunity to celebrate these musicians who had already given us so much and to thank them for coming back. The last live was in Athens, just a week before Doss's sudden death from an aneurysm.
Hart often returned to the idea of something existing outside of linear time and quoted, in our interview, part of the text of Prehistoric by Circulatory System: “From prehistory to the present / It's all within us”. “Right now, where I'm sitting, it's 1862,” he said. «It's happening. I can't get into it, but I feel like it's happening.” And then: «When someone dies, I like to pretend to talk to them and have an answer. I don't think it's really like that, but I like to imagine it.”
Over the past decade and a half the possibility of new music from Olivia Tremor Control has been periodically hinted at. Hart went on to talk about some songs that were recorded shortly before Doss' passing and yet to be finished. “I will be able to sing with him one more time,” she said. Two of these songs were recently released on the soundtrack to director CB Stockfleth's documentary about the collective Elephant 6: Garden of Light is a jangle pop gem signed by Bill Doss, and The Same Place a more moody song in pure Will Cullen Hart style (the film, also produced by Rob Hatch-Miller and Lance Bangs, is available in streaming).
The last time we spoke, Hart kept wondering if he'd ever see Doss again. «It happened to me in a dream. Sometimes I feel like it's true. I had many dreams that made me say: I really think I saw him last night.” And so now put it on Garden of Light And The Same Placelisten Dusk at Cubist Castle And Black Foliage. There is something magical in the way their visions and voices intertwined. That magic is bittersweet now, but it's not gone and will live forever, and you know that's true too.
From Rolling Stone US.
