Will Cullen Hart, who co-founded the beloved and influential Athens, Ga.-reared collective Elephant 6 and played with its associated bands Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System, died this morning (Nov. 29) at the age of 53. Per a statement from longtime friend and collaborator Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo, Hart passed away from natural causes “suddenly, peacefully and in a very happy mood” following the release today of the first new Olivia Tremor Control songs in 13 years.
The Elephant 6 troupe began in the late ’80s with a few high school friends from rural Louisiana and came to encompass the aforementioned acts as well as Elf Power, Beulah, the Music Tapes and Neutral Milk Hotel. “There was a group of us who gelled because we didn’t want to be in Whitesnake,” Hart told SPIN in 2006. Hart came up with the term Elephant 6 to brand the bedroom boom-box recordings that they’d been dubbing over Vanilla Ice cassingles and trading among themselves (the collective’s work is chronicled in the 2022 documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co., directed by C.B. Stockfleth).
Upon graduation, Schneider moved to Denver and formed the Apples in Stereo, while Hart, the late Bill Doss (who died in 2012) and Jeff Mangum relocated to the underground music mecca of Athens, Ga., in 1993. With Schneider supervising, Elephant 6 became an actual label, specializing in seven-inches and cassettes. Meanwhile, Doss and Hart telemarketed for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Mangum washed dishes at an Italian restaurant — all three sleeping on cots in the same attic — as more artists entered the fold, rehearsing songs together after Sunday-night potlucks. “We weren’t exactly having drug orgies or anything,” Elf Power’s Andrew Rieger told SPIN.
With Doss and Hart leading the creative charge, Olivia Tremor Control emerged in 1996 with the acclaimed album Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle and followed it with another well-loved LP, Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One, in 1999. The group was inactive until a short 2005 tour, then reformed for shows in 2008, 2011 and 2012. A new album had been in the works for years, and today’s new songs, “Garden of Light” and “The Same Place,” were the first to be released from those sessions. Hart also recorded five albums with Circulatory System between 2001 and 2014.
“He was my partner in crime in our teens and early 20s, my dear friend, roommate, bandmate, and we pursued a vision of art and music together our whole lives, to this very day, that we hatched as children – together,” Schneider wrote of Hart. “Will was infinitely chatty, infinitely funny, infinitely expressive, infinitely creative. He was energetic, sweet, tender, earnest, alternately totally chill and totally explosive. Will suffered from multiple sclerosis for almost two decades, which gradually reduced his mobility, his ability to play guitar, and his ability to tour – but he kept up his productivity, his songwriting, his recording and his art, and lived life in a state of heightened creativity. He was infinitely loved by me, and by his bandmates and the Elephant 6 and Athens communities.”
Speaking of the efforts to finish the in-progress Olivia Tremor Control album, Schneider said, “[musician/engineer] Jason NeSmith is the hero of the finishing of the two OTC songs. Jason and Will worked together on mixing the two songs, sending mixes back and forth to me for comment, and then started to make progress towards other unfinished OTC tracks. Thanks to Jason, Will gained momentum, and new enthusiasm, and their studio collaboration blossomed over the last two years, even with MS affecting Will’s mobility more and more. He pushed forward to the finish happily, bravely.”
“I am so thankful to Derek and to Jason for their engineering work on the final OTC album,” he continued. “May the history of this classic band record the vital role each of them played as partners to Bill and to Will. And Kelly Hart, Will’s wife and his co-manager of the rebooted Elephant 6 label, is the hero of bringing the songs into the world. These beautiful songs – perhaps among the best psychedelic pop songs ever recorded – exist today, and Kelly told me that this morning Will was excited and happy to see people were downloading it. Today is a day of victory for W. Cullen Hart – his last day represented a triumph. Today is the day that Will’s perseverance, his sincerity, his struggle with MS and his devotion to Bill and their common vision, bears fruit.”