SPECJALNE - Artykuł

10 lat In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Ej wy. Dopiero w zeszłym roku dane mi było odkryć, że bez Pamiętnika Anny Frank ten album by w ogóle nie powstał. I skończyłoby się tak, że Jeff Mangum pewnie wypaliłby się poświęciwszy życie filozofii i psychodelicznym projektom zgrai włóczykijów z Elephant 6. Jak wielkiego zaniedbania się dopuściłem, i jak bardzo nie miałem ABSOLUTNEGO pojęcia o In The Aeroplane Over The Sea zobrazuje ten tu felieton, którego autorami są szczęściarze nie muszący się wsłuchiwać, by uzewnętrznienia Jeffa Manguma rozumieć stuprocentowo i bez wysiłku. Mój zamysł zrodził się również z innego powodu – wiecie, być może są jeszcze dorodniejsze krążki, których dziesiąte urodziny Porcys powinien uhonorować białym confetti. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea wydaje się jednak być z tych wszystkich pozycji które przychodzą do głowy czymś najdziwniejszym (głos Manguma), bardzo mało logicznym (połowa piosenek to cztery akordy na akustyku: G, Em, C, D) i też czymś nad Wisłą mocno tajemniczym i nieznanym. Tymczasem to jak istotny wydźwięk miał i ma ten album w Stanach (i w ogóle na zachodzie) może co mniej zorientowanych silnie zaskoczyć. Ten negatywny wpływ, polegający na rozprzestrzenieniu się nadwrażliwych kapelek, pal licho, bo jak się okazuje wpływ pozytywny – wcale nie dotyczy tak bardzo procesu tworzenia muzyki, a raczej czegoś znacznie, znacznie poważniejszego.

(PS: ułożenie wypowiedzi nie jest przypadkowe, ma jakąś tam narrację, tłumaczenie zaś tych wywodów na polski czy zbytnie ich edytowanie wiele by im moim zdaniem odebrało. Thank you for all of this once again.)

OJ (Je Suis France)
The France was lucky enough to be in Athens throughout the time Jeff & the gang were recording this record. We would find ourselves in some random Athens basement watching Neutral Milk Hotel play all these new songs before the record came out. When it did finally come out, it was all that anyone in Athens listened to. Every party you jammed, Neutral Milk Hotel. Any restaurant you jammed, Neutral Milk Hotel. Any car you got into, Neutral Milk Hotel. Not a bad thing, I just think some folks may have become oversaturdated. For example, I dont think I have probably listened to the record since 1999. Not because I don’t like it, simply because I have heard it literally 400 more times than your average human. (Darkness also tells a story of listening to an Atlanta Braves game on the radio in his car before one of their shows at the 40 Watt once. He looked over and 2 members of NMH were scrumping one car over! Funny.)

Fred Thomas (Saturday Looks Good To Me)
It would be really easy to selectively remember immediately loving Aeroplane, recognizing it's unprecedented weird mystical genius at first listen, but that wasn't the case for me. When it came out, it was another record. One I listened to eventually and sporadically, soaking it in very very slowly, and always alone. The strange thing was that it was a record everyone I knew had, and listened to, and you heard sometimes in someone's car or on at a party, but it wasn't one anybody talked about. And not because it wasn't good or worth talking about. It was too good to talk about, and me and all my friends who usually loved to pick music apart were having these intense moments with this surreal new album on our own, maybe even afraid to talk about it, or unaware it was making a universal impression until we started talking about it. I remember my old punk band was on tour with Aloha in 2000 and me and Tony were in the front seat, arguing about the melodrama in the lyrics of "King Of Carrot Flowers". I thought it was silly and bombastic then to sing about what seemed like phony memories of fork fights between your parents, he thought it had a place. It would be the first of what became many conversations about the record over the next 8 years, but all the conversations stayed with the same unspoken kind of understanding that whatever had happened to produce this document had succeeded in saying something that everyone had been waiting for for a very long time. Like a movie like "The Holy Mountain", or Anne Carson's poetry, or any other work so personal and flawless one can only ever really look in on it and wonder, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea has the rare distinction of existing only technically inside commerce, criticism and opinion. You can of course have an opinion about it, but it would be really hard to even approach the intentions that made it, let alone the constantly unravelling impact it has had and continues to have a decade later. I came to understand with the thousands of other people who have been changed by this music, that you could argue to finer points, but the core of what the record meant was perfect, pure and silently understood.

Ariel Pink
hmmm. thanks for the tip. never heard the record but i'll give it a listen....

Felicity Mangam (Function)
Trying to think about it, but I can't stop thinking about Jeff Mangum Orange Twin Field Works: Volume 1 at the same time. There is something really ominous about Mangnum's music, it kinda spooks me, like the look of clouds turning just before a thunderstorm, the true rawness and presents of his songs/tunes/assemblages makes a techni-beauty of shards and shades of happiness and darkness at once. I feel l have to stare at his music with my ears over and over again.

Jason Pegg (Clearlake)
I've probably missed the deadline to contribute to your article, but I've been digging the neutral milk record

I'd never heard it before I got your email, although I'd heard lots of people talking about it for ages.......

so I went out and bought it – discovered it's actually been re-released on my label Domino

I listened to it over the weekend and it's very beautiful

I was sure we did a gig with neutral milk hotel, years ago in a Brighton venue called 'the Lift'

although I may be wrong????

I don't remember much about them – except they seemed to be a bit like Low – I do remember a bit of fuzz bass

I'm not listening to a lot of modern records (ok this is 10 years old) the rest of the band do me compilations of stuff

and after reading that this was a supposedly seminal album, a part of me was thinking ' oh come on then! it can't be all that!!!!'

but It's just got that magic going on ......it's weird and flawed and out of tune and he sings gobbledeygook and then all of a sudden....the most beautiful line, and chord change, and sound and stuff
it's a perfectly formed little thing

I also read an interview with Jeff Mangum – he sounds like a special person........ I know lot's of people want him to do more music but he's searching for something....not just in art, but also in life
thanks for introducing it to me

Rob Kallick (The Changes)
I bought this record on a whim – it was on the wall of "staff favorites" at my local record store and I liked the cover. I picked it up and realized I knew the band name as a web site had listed this as one of the best albums of the 90s, so I decided to give it a shot based on these two recommendations. When I got home and played it I was pretty surprised - it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. The part where Jeff sings "I love you Jesus Christ" was particularly striking as I had never heard anyone sing like that before. I was a little confused as to how I should feel while listening to this, but I was filled with a sense of excitement almost immediately. And then when the cathartic finale of that song kicked in I was hooked - not just to this record, but to music in general. It wasn't long thereafter that I took up guitar (and later bass) and joined a band. A band I am still in to this day.

Ben Jacobs (Max Tundra)
In An Aeroplane Over The Sea – not as good as the Olivia Tremor Control album.

Fred Nicolaus (Department Of Eagles)
I use Google's email program, Gmail, meaning that whenever I write to someone, I am shown a list of ads that Google thinks I might be interested in, based on what I've written. When I sat down to write a note about one of my favorite albums, Neutral Milk Hotel's profoundly brilliant, profoundly weird In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Gmail decided to show me an ad that read "DOWNLOAD FREE NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL RINGTONES!" I clicked on the link and followed a set of short instructions, and eventually I was able to download "Two-headed Boy", a song that, in its original form, gets me choked up pretty easily. Even rendered as a series of digital beeps on my half-broken cellphone, it sounded good. I think that says something.

Danny Seim (Menomena)
In the year 2000, I was still living with my father in a suburb of a suburb called Cornelius, Oregon. I was going to school in downtown Portland, so I had an hour-long drive (each way) to look forward to every afternoon. I listened to a lot of music on those drives. Around that time, a friend sent me a mix CD with a bunch of stuff ranging from Beck to Spoon to Wheat. At first, all of the mix just sort of blended together, like all indie rock tends to do, but there were two notable exceptions. The first was a song called "King Of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1", and the second was called "Ghost". Both were by a band with a weird name that I had never heard before. The songs were even weirder. But then after about a month, I realized that I would skip past all the other bands just to listen to that guy with the incredibly sincere vocal delivery and the long breathless phrases at the top of his range that I could never quite sing along to without gasping for air.

Once at school, I remember sitting in boring art classes where we were supposed to be learning how to animate words and corporate logos. It was a night class and I kept myself awake by secretly scouring the internet for any sign of this band. I read every interview with the singer that I could find. I looked in every local record store for the full-length album that contained these two songs, but no one carried it. I found a lot of plastic dividers with the band name written on it, but only an empty space where the CD should have been. I gave up looking and ordered it off Ebay. It immediately became the only thing I listened to, for months at a time. Few bands have impacted me in this way. Neutral Milk Hotel makes me cry.

Kevin Barnes (Of Montreal)
I view that album as a high water mark in music. It's amazing that such a classic and important record could remain so underground. in a way, it's great that it has, cause it has enabled everyone who has fallen under it's spell, to feel a special, personal connection with it. The songs penetrate the fog of my mind in such an indescribable way. I have been moved to tears at NMH shows. I can't say that that has ever happened before or since. the greatest aspect of the songs on ITAOTS, is that, though they are full of pain and confusion and passion and madness, they never seem self pitying or self indulgent. Jeff Mangum's voice, on that record, was a portal through which, the animal agony and maniac joy of the universal human spirit, found amplification.

Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie)
Has it been 10 years already? In 1998 I was first moving away from my hometown to a slightly bigger college town with exciting new friends and a huge recording studio where we all hung out. It sounds like paradise maybe. At the time it felt like endless constant fun work. I heard this record by Neutral Milk Hotel and had a vague awareness of another island of friends making big music together across the big ocean of America, but I was too absorbed in the projects around me to pay too much attention. But I listened to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea so many times to the point where I didn't have to put it on anymore. It was always playing in my head. That saw! How can anything sound so strange and sweet? Also, a couple years later in Athens GA there was a guy hanging around after the show who needed a ride home. I think I gave Jeff Mangum a ride home. –Jędrzej Michalak