Will Cullen Hart always seemed to exist outside of time. The beloved Southern musician and visual artist, who died at age 53 on November 29, spent his life writing and recording some of the most incredibly profound and beautifully naive psychedelic music ever created. He was at the heart of a group of visionaries called Elephant 6 starting with four high school friends in Ruston, Louisiana, in the late 1980s. In the decades that followed, after moving their center of operations to Athens, Georgia, more and more people heard the intense psychological explorations carried out by Jeff Mangum with Neutral milk hotel; the sugary indie-pop records Robert Schneider made with Apples in Stereo had more instant appeal. But the Olivia’s Tremor Control – the group Hart led with Bill Doss, the fourth member of that initial E6 circle – was the timeless group, floating on a higher plane of endlessly hummed melodies and concrete traps.

The two Olivias albums released in the 90s, 1996 Music from the unrealized screenplay of the film: Twilight at the Cubist Castle and the 1999s Black Foliage: Animated Music Volume Oneare the kind of records that make the term “cult classic” seem inadequate. If you met them at the right age, these albums exploded your horizons, made you fall in love, and convinced you to tell others with a straight face that this Georgia indie band was the equal of The Beatles, The Beach Boys , and the Velvet Underground. One was a technicolor psychedelic-pop fantasy, the other a journey into darker, thornier inner space. They draw their strength from the complementary talents of Doss, a specialist in sunshine pop, and Hart, the heady alchemist of the studio. These two singers and their bandmates, bassist/violinist/clarinetist John Fernandes, keyboardist Pete Erchick and drummer Eric Harris, discovered wavelengths that have continued to resonate for almost 30 years now. But Doss died in 2012and now Hart is gone too. The dream that lasted so long has finally come to an end.

After Olivia Tremor Control broke up in 2000, Hart, Fernandes, Erchick and a few other E6 mainstays banded together to form the group. Circulatory system. The music they created is even less known than Olivia’s catalog, but her fans are just as fervent. If you were ready to follow Hart and his friends down the dizzying rabbit holes of Black foliagethen Circulatory System’s 2001 self-titled debut album took you even deeper inside. Since news of Hart’s death went around the world right after Thanksgiving, I’ve seen other fans turn to “Forever,” the campfire chant that ends the album: “We’ll live forever, and you know it’s true.” I thought of “Joy,” one of many brilliant koans that appear earlier on the LP: “If you still believe in joy/Even though the world is full of hate/We can explode inside , way inside/ There’s no reason to doubt it,” Hart sang. He was a musician who believed in joy even when it was difficult to achieve.

A few years ago, I spoke with Hart about a 20th anniversary vinyl reissue of Circulatory System’s debut album. He was a gentle, thoughtful, rambling presence on the other end of the phone line, and although this interview wasn’t published at the time, I revisited it this weekend and found it full of gnomic wisdom. He told me that Circulatory system‘s introspective tone came as he approached his 30th birthday in 2001. “All the things I think about go inward,” he said. “And in the end, ‘we will live forever.’ For me it’s like a sequence – something like The hidden side of the Moon. There is a beginning and an end. »

He talked about asking his old friend Jeff Mangum to play drums on some of Circulatory System’s early albums: “He doesn’t play drums on his own records. But he’s an incredible drummer, man. He recalls how he and Doss had to go their own way in the late ’90s – “I was ready to do my own thing, I guess” – and how they worked things out for a few Olivia reunion tours Tremor Control. after Hart was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-2000s.

For fans who rejoined the group after their initial breakup, this reunion seemed like a miracle. I remember an Olivia show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York in 2005, where Mangum, still far from re-entering public life, shocked everyone by appearing on stage to perform his vocal part of the Black foliage song “I was floated.” Olivia’s second reunion tour, circa 2011, was special in a different way: a chance to celebrate these musicians who had already given us so much, to thank them for coming back. Their final show took place in Athens just a week before Doss’s unexpected death from an aneurysm.

Hart kept returning to the idea of ​​something existing outside of linear time. He quoted some lyrics from the song Circulatory System “Prehistoric”: “From prehistory to the present day/Everything is in us. “Right now, where I’m sitting, it’s 1862,” he said, trying to explain. “And that’s what’s happening. I can’t get into it, but I feel it happening.

He continued: “When someone dies, I like to pretend to talk to them and they talk to me. I don’t really think that’s the case. But I like to dream that.

Over the past fifteen years, there have been periodic allusions to new music from Olivia Tremor Control. Year after year, Hart kept talking about coming back to finish some songs they had recorded around the time of Doss’ death. “I’ll get to sing with him one more time,” he told me. “I have a role where I come in on a line where he sings. I always sing with him.

Last week, two of these songs were released as part of the soundtrack to executive producer Rob Hatch-Miller’s documentary Elephant 6: “Garden of Light” a jangle-pop gem from Bill Doss, and “The same place” a more brooding interlude that was pure Will Cullen Hart.

When we last spoke, Hart continued to wonder if he would ever see Doss again. “I did it in a dream, once,” he said. “Sometimes I really feel like this could be real. He had many dreams in which I said, “I really feel like I saw him last night.” » » So today, listen to “Garden of Light” and “The Same Place”; listen Twilight at the Cubist Castle And Black foliage. It was always magical to hear what happened when their visions and voices intertwined. This magic is more bittersweet today, but it is still there. It will live forever and you know it’s true.