Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Read Online Free

community wound up making Athens their home.
    During two separate periods, around 1991 and then again circa 1994, Athens would exert a seemingly magnetic pull on the Rustonians. The first time it happened, the force field wavered and sent them all bouncing around the country before they’d had a chance to properly congeal as a creative community. On the second go-round, it held.
    Athenian Lance Bangs first became aware of the Ruston contingent when he saw a performance by Synthetic Flying Machine, the three-piece comprised of Will Hart, Bill Doss and Jeff Mangum on drums. This was in Frijoleroes, a burrito joint where bands sometimes played for free. “They were kind of like weird, noisy psychedelic music. It’s my understanding later that they included some early versions of what became Neutral Milk Hotel songs, but nothing that I understood or recognized at the time. It was interesting, because they’d come to Athens from Ruston and had a different thing going on from the darker, guitar-based, angsty thing that was happening with a lot of the bands in town. After Nirvana, people were into the Jesus Lizard or a bunch of bands on Touch & Go or Amphetamine Reptile. So it seemed like this band was weirder and more psychedelic, and yet were young people doing an interesting thing that wasn’t just a retread.”
    Lance recalls that there was no awareness among Athens music people of the history of home recording that preceded Will, Bill and Jeff’s arrival in town. There was, however, a sense that Julian Koster was an interesting multi-disciplinary artist—he made sculptures and funny, offbeat videotapes—and musician. So when Julian began collaborating with the Ruston crew, that reflected well on them.
    Julian Koster says, “I think we’d all been drawn to Athens. I found it incredibly beautiful, at that time especially. There was almost nothing here. The sense of motion that permeated most places didn’t seem to exist here. It felt as if it were a sleepover camp.” Julian and a friend had arrived in Athens in the early 90s, knowing no one. At first they slept in their car, but were almost immediately invited into thehome of some musicians they met. Julian couldn’t get over the way people didn’t lock their houses and how welcoming they were to strangers. And he loved the little downtown basement club called the Downstairs—ostensibly a restaurant, although the only cooking apparatus was a toaster oven—with its pile of records that anyone could play.
    Soon he hooked up with Jeff and Will, who he recognized as soul-friends, and with whom he stayed in touch even as they all scattered to other parts of the country. Julian was pulled away by his band commitments, but even so, once Jeff and Will were gone there wasn’t much reason for him to stay in Athens. But the bond between the trio remained strong. Julian says, “We were part of each others’ imaginations by that point. I could be alone somewhere, but they were always there with me. They were waiting to be inspired by me and I was waiting to be inspired by them. They were really, really special friendships that didn’t have much to do with geography or even being around each other.”
    On one of Julian’s band’s tour stops in Athens, they turned up bass-less, their bass player having quit a few days earlier. Bill Doss joined the band on the spot, and the links between Julian and Elephant 6 grew stronger. Eventually the performative musical chair act would fill the ranks of Olivia Tremor Control (where longtime Koster collaborators Eric Harris and Peter Erchick would find a permanent home) and Neutral Milk Hotel.

Of Denver, which is a nice place to visit
    Apparently, Athens wasn’t going to be magic for the Elephant 6 gang like it had been for the bands in the early 80s. They knew they wanted to live together and make music and art—but where? No one had any money to speak of, which might seem limiting, but then again, not a one of them was tied to a