The Psych Ward–Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One by Olivia Tremor Control
The Psych Ward–Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One by Olivia Tremor Control
Happy 25th birthday to Olivia Tremor Control’s incomparable album Black Foliage! OTC plays a grand role in the story of Elephant 6, the musical collective of neo-psychedelic musicians of the late Nineties/early Aughts. The album was recorded on various four—and eight-track machines over three years, then overdubbed, compiled, collaged, and produced by the band and Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider.
The two main songwriters are Will Cullen Hart (the experimentalist) and Bill Doss (the pop patronus). Together, their flint and tinder relationship ignited an incandescent inferno of unparalleled artistry. Owing a debt to Varèse, Zappa, Xenakis, and Stockhausen in its musique
Black Foliage was conceptualized as an exploration of dream states, a 69-minute song cycle free-flowing one track into the next without pausing for reflection.
concrète tape manipulation excerpts, this is precisely where art and music collide to transmute into auditory particulate matter. The other two-thirds of the sonic dinner plate is the psych-pop meat and two veg—the base layer throughout the numerous tracks on this resplendent offering—lovingly drawing from the Beatles and Beach Boys alike. If “Only a Northern Song,” “Revolution 9,” “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,” and “Wind Chimes” were all that existed of those two artists, it would be clear this album is the uncontested progeny.
Black Foliage was conceptualized as an exploration of dream states, a 69-minute song cycle free-flowing one track into the next without pausing for reflection. The album bubbles like primordial magma, crusting over into new land formations of psychotropic islands. The effects are way out, sometimes intrusively smearing the beautiful pop melodies and purposefully distracting the listener, which is perfectly exemplified on the track “A Place We Have Been To,” breaking up the Byrds-esque psych-pop perfection with brain-melting intrusions.
The five “Animation” tracks interspersed throughout are variations on the same theme. They are rearranged in different ways as funhouse reflections of each other and give off a strong Residents vibe in their construction and execution.
Repeat listening is required. This is DENSE! So much is going on that when I first heard it, I was instantly inspired to record an album like it but didn’t know where to begin. Just when you think you have a handle on what’s happening, you hear something else that jumps out like a jungle cat. SURPRISE! Didn’t hear THAT the first seven times.
Highlights: “A Peculiar Noise Called “Train Director”, “A Sleepy Company,” “Another Set of Bees in the Museum”
Related: Psychedelic Rock in the 90s
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