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.