There's this really excellent concert from The Olivia Tremor Control up on youtube, that I stole and put up on peertube as well.

https://communitymedia.video/w/ovRBj6LDYS198Vuay8Uat6

I've never seen these guys play live, and it's absolutely thrilling to see how they pulled it off.

The audio quality isn't perfect (if you want good audio quality from the band on a live set, look at their peel session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-J4uNNjKOo&list=RDq-J4uNNjKOo&start_radio=1)

If you don't know the band, skip the lives ets and go straight for "Music from the unrealized film script Dusk and Cubist Castle" which is perhaps my favorite album of the 1990s.

The Olivia Tremor Control - 04-27-1997 - Terrastock Festival, Providence RI

PeerTube

This is nuts: https://archive.org/details/otc1993-08-08

That's (probably) the first Olivia Tremor Control live show.

More than three years prior to the other live set that I posted.

It's neat to get to hear the band in such a primal state (although, I'll be clear that it is very primal.)

Olivia Tremor Control Live at Fun-O-Mat on 1993-08-08 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This recording comes with commentary. Kelly Hart says this is the first show under the OTC iteration; lineup was Jeff, Bill Doss, Will Hart, and Will...

Internet Archive
@ajroach42 i remember that album. Beautiful. Still have it on CD… somewhere.
@scattershot The live set is a lot of fun. The video quality is very good for 1997 and the audio quality is surprisingly good considering how much volume is happening.

@ajroach42 not much sadder than falling for a band and finding they're dead :/ i had no idea "neo-psychadelia" was a thing! i could have been listening to this all this time!

thank you. this is wonderful.

@fishidwardrobe while there is no one like them, every member of this band was involved in other bands. If you want, I can point you to some of the others.
@fishidwardrobe (also, check out Eli Pop on bandcamp)
@ajroach42 i'd love that!

@fishidwardrobe So "The Olivia Tremor Control" was part of a movement in Athens, GA called Elephant six.

That's the same group that produced Neutral Milk Hotel (which sounds *nothing* like OTC, but uses a lot of the same production techniques) and The Apples in Stereo (which shared a bunch of members with OTC, and frequently dabbles in similar spaces. Check out the album Fun Trick Noisemaker.)

Pipes You See, Pipes You Don't is a side project from OTC keyboard player.

Circulatory System is a lot of the same folks, importantly Will Cullen Hart who was half the main creative force behind OTC.

The other key creative force in OTC was Bill Doss who later formed The Sunshine Fix.

@fishidwardrobe Several of those folks drifted in and out of The Apples in Stereo. The key guy behind the Apples in Stereo was a man named Robert Schneider (no relation to the fash-ass)

If you're between ~30 and ~40, you've almost certainly heard Roberts song "Signal in the Sky" which aired *constantly* on cartoon network: https://youtu.be/qwo5diOymR0?si=Iw7f3o0pyYAXKrrz

That is not a great example of the kind of music The Apples did, but their albums vary wildly in style, so maybe nothing is a great example.

Robert had a solo project called Thee American Revolution that's really hard to find online ( so I uploaded it to peertube https://communitymedia.video/w/qwNTdD5xBEB3AtKd1z7Pth )

Powerpuff Girls ~ Signal in the sky (Let's Go) in 4K

YouTube

@fishidwardrobe

Some other bands to look into from this late 90s athens neo-psych scene include:
- The Minders
- Marbles
- Major Organ and the Adding Machine
- The Ladybug Transistor
- Elf Power
- Beulah

@fishidwardrobe I say that NMH sounds nothing like OTC, and that's mostly true.

But every once in a while, they did stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXxT70VlpIU

Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone (Hype City Soundtrack)

YouTube

@ajroach42 some more immediate synergy in your list. it's not often i hear music for the first time and it sounds *right*; "yes of course that bit comes next, i should have known that".

well, i have a lot of new bands to try… 😄

@fishidwardrobe If you get into this stuff, I'll absolutely recommend doing a deep dive into the live set and tape scene.

NMH's first real release was a super obscure tape called Hype City Soundtrack: https://archive.org/details/neutral-milk-hotel-hype-city-soundtrack-1993

It's a lo-fi mess, full of weird music concrete in addition to some early demos of their later songs.

But you can also find things like Marbles debut release: https://archive.org/details/marbles-marbles-1993

These guys recorded a LOT, and only a small amount of those recordings ended up getting a major label release.

Elephant six is a fun rabbit hole, and only some of the things you'll find on the journey are sad.

Neutral Milk Hotel - Hype City Soundtrack (1993) : Neutral Milk Hotel : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This tape was released on the Elephant 6 label and was distributed by Parasol Mail Order for a short time in 1993.This is one of a few cassettes that was...

Internet Archive