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

of recording the songs he’d been writing on the road, it seemed natural to use the name for the project. The album title referenced a public garden on the Louisiana Gulf Coast where, Jeff once told an interviewer, as a teen he had a spiritual experience involving an ancient statue of the Buddha.
    The making of
On Avery Island
would prove an extraordinary creative experience for Jeff and Robert Schneider, who had only rarely recorded together before. Robert, the harmony prodigy obsessed with high-art Beatlesque production,was about to transform the world of his dearest friend, whose own aesthetic was steeped in lo-fi buzz and a passionate hatred of slickness. It sounds like a recipe for conflict and failure, and under ordinary circumstances might have yielded just that, but despite their differences, Jeff and Robert could work together as few producer/artist pairs ever had.
    On this, his first formal production gig, Robert devoted himself to realizing Jeff’s vision, even when Jeff was more sure of what he
didn’t
want the record to sound like than what he did. By checking his ego at the studio door, Robert offered himself to Jeff as a sort of second self, a sounding board who turned his own creative abilities to the art of another.
    Robert explains, “Jeff is my friend, I love him, and I wanted him to feel satisfied with what he did. That’s always the case when I’m producing bands, but with Jeff it was no artistic ambition on my part. I just wanted it to sound like whatever would make him happy.” Often, this meant putting aside the more complex arrangements that Robert favored for a more raw and simple sound, although on other occasions horn sections, harmonies and sound effects were brought in to striking effect.
    Robert was as much a band member as the producer: Jeff handled drums and guitar, while Robert played organ and bass, did the horn arrangements on “Song Against Sex,” “Gardenhead” and “Avery Island” and called in trombonist Rick Benjamin to realize them. Lisa Janssen from the band Secret Square played fuzz bass on “You’ve Passed” and “Gardenhead.” Jeff was most comfortable recording on four tracks, a limitation that Robert accepted, so long as they could use a four-track reel-to-reel machine (instead of the cassette version Jeff favored), bouncing some of the tracksbriefly over to two-track stereo DAT so they’d have a total of six tracks to work with. Onto these tracks they placed one guitar, the drums and the vocals, leaving three tracks to hold the organ, bass, horn or whatever other sounds Robert felt would enhance the track.
    Although Robert’s studio would soon become a destination for bands wanting an updated psychedelic recording environment, about half of
On Avery Island
was recorded in Robert’s friend Kyle Jones’s house, the same place where the first Apples in Stereo recordings were made. When Kyle recorded in the house, he called it The Sleeping Brotherhood; Robert’s name for it was Pet Sounds.
    Kyle had inherited the big, old house from his grandparents. There, Robert could record in the main studio, the kitchen or in the control room, finding the particular sonic qualities he liked in each space. He describes his recording philosophy, “It’s not that I’m against having a good sounding studio, that’s obviously the best scenario, but second best is to just capture the spirit of people in the room. That’s the way I always looked at recording: you’re not just trying to capture the people in the room, you’re trying to
create
a room, a fantastic kind of dream room that resembles a real room, but that’s populated with much more interesting furniture.”
    Some days Jeff would surprise Robert by bringing in inspirations hatched in half-sleep, like the aural hallucination of monks droning that he described for Robert, wondering if they could replicate it on tape. Robert: “And we did! There’s a long piece at the end of
On Avery Island
, the very, very