Circulatory System 'Controls' Tour De Sprawl Benefit With A Lot Of Help From Its Friends

originally published October 10, 2001

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These days, one of the E6 mainstays is busily "on hiatus" and going in two different directions. When young multi-instrumentalists Will Cullen Hart, Bill Doss and John Fernandes formed the Olivia Tremor Control in Athens back around '92 or so, they dug their creative minds and souls into a pile of neo-psychedelic notions and vintage pop inspirations. The band became one of the most innovative and influential of the E6 collective, alongside Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and Apples In Stereo. Its 1996 debut double-LP, Dusk At Cubist Castle, was a sprawling flurry of ideas inspired by the weirder Beatles, Beach Boys and Skip Spence popcraft. 1999's Black Foliage: Animation Music By The Olivia Tremor Control followed with a keen experimental edge.

Despite rumors of a band split in 2000, the Olivias insisted it was on a "temporary hiatus" toward the end of the year. In the meantime, core songwriter Bill Doss stepped aside into his new project, the Sunshine Fix and released a tidy, self-titled EP on the Kindercore label. The other main members of Olivia Tremor Control - Hart, Eric Harris, Peter Erchick and Fernandes - have collaborated on a dizzying 22-song album titled Circulatory System and released it last month on the new Cloud Recordings imprint.

The debut album - recorded in Hart's home studio and in Chris Bishop's Radium Studios in Athens - features guest performances from various luminaries out of Neutral Milk Hotel, Japancakes, Flicker Orchestra, FableFactory, Music Tapes and other underground acts. While not an Olivia Tremor Control release by name, there are very few elements here that will be unfamiliar to fans of the band.


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Flagpole: Tell us how the new Circulatory System songs started taking shape.

Will Cullen Hart: It all started a couple of years ago really. I mean, I had a bunch of songs around. Some were a few years old. Some of them I wanted to save for a certain mood. It's difficult to explain, you know?

FP: It's not the "new" Olivia Tremor Control, right?

WCH: Right. I see parallels, but it's not the same thing.

FP: It sounds like this new album was collectively created by a number of people. But weren't you sort of at the helm with the writing and recording?

WCH: A lot of this stuff was overdubbed at home on a 16-track digital deck. I might run various layers of different instruments, through echoes and phasers and say, "This is what I'm going for." Then John [Fernandes] will come in and add some little klezmer part or add other melodies. I guess I wrote a lot of the basic song parts and lyrics, but I felt like this was really a collaboration. The songs really wrote themselves. It was fun.

FP: Where did the inspiration for the tunes come from?

WCH: Most of the songs were written off a couple of melodies. We just went from there. That seems to be the way I write naturally. At the end of it; it told the perfect story. I don't want to spell it out, but it's kind of a "look within" kind of thing... the awareness of the inherit nature of things and realizing that things are really just one. The subject of "time" is really in question.

FP: There are a lot of strange sounds and background noises going on through the whole album. I couldn't tell if they were instruments or what.

WCH: I love the home aspect - like turning a crappy old mic to an old guitar that's tuned in some weird way and writing a song and having people put layers of instruments over it. But I'm also into the sound effects, too. We try to use sound effects to help tell a story... like it's interrupting the music and taking you to another world. They're not sparing; I think they're used as texture. There's lots of bells and hand percussion recorded at various speeds with different amounts of reverb. There are recordings of birds that I manipulated and tried to make them sound otherworldly. Those things are important to me.

FP: So the sound effects and audio manipulations were all part of a master plan?

WCH: I wanted a lot of it to sound like an orchestra from another planet, you know what I mean? I hope that the textures came through like that. They're supposed to be subtle, but apparent.

FP: Did you have a specific sound in mind when you started recording this album? Were there any odd influences making their way into the process?

WCH: I still like the Beach Boys approach from the Pet Sounds and Smile stuff sonically. The way that they would have a rush of instruments all bursting together and then get really quiet. I'm really into that. I've also listened to a tape of this composer from the 1600's named Fresco Baldi Giralomo. He wrote stuff for huge, magnificent pipe organs. It's not religious, it's just spiritual. He called them "heavenly pitches." The tape had like a mile of staticky, crackly shit from the old vinyl on it, so hearing it in that way is like it's coming from another time. It really had an effect. Incredible.

FP: Who's playing drums on most of this?

WCH: Jeff Mangum plays on quite a few tracks. Eric Harris plays on a few, and I play on a few. It really is a mixture. On every track there's more than one drummer, sometimes all at once, sometimes not.

FP: Have you heard or read any early reactions to the new album that struck you as odd?

WCH: Somebody wrote me and said it was dark. I don't really see it as that, but whatever. I see it as half dark. In the end, it says, "You can find your own parade inside," like a happy children's song. I don't see it as dark. It's more like a search. I want people to embrace their joyous spirit or whatever, not go "Oh man, it's dark." [Laughs] Maybe it's both. I think it's more aware than dark. I like it.