Olivia Tremor Control's Final Album: A Swan Song 25 Years in the Making

Robert Schneider signed on to co-produce the Olivia Tremor Control's long-delayed third album in the summer of 2012 — and three days later, his collaborator Bill Doss was dead at 43.

The story behind "The Same Place," the Athens, Ga. band's final record, is one of friendship, interruption and an analog-era collective's stubborn way of working. David Peisner reported the account in a new profile of the group, whose last full album cycle began in the 1990s.

How the album came together

Schneider — songwriter, producer and leader of the power-pop band the Apples in Stereo — visited Doss and Will Cullen Hart in Athens that summer of 2012. He was preparing to move to Atlanta for a mathematics graduate program at Emory University. Part of the draw, he said, was being 90 minutes from Athens, where he could spend weekends helping his friends finish the band's long-in-the-works third album.

The three men grew up together in northern Louisiana, playing in bands and forming the musical collective Elephant 6 with a fourth friend, Jeff Mangum. Mangum played early on in the Olivia Tremor Control before turning to his own band, Neutral Milk Hotel.

The Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel sold more records. But the Olivias, as fans call them, arguably best embodied Elephant 6's free-spirited ethos, according to Peisner's account.

Their method was pure cut-and-paste. The band favored a lo-fi recording aesthetic, and songs weren't so much written as assembled. Doss and Hart filtered their core influences — late-era Beatles, Brian Wilson's "Smile" — through a deliberately surrealist lens. Live, they played theatrical, unfettered sets.

Schneider had produced the band's first two double-albums: the lush, sprawling "Dusk at Cubist Castle" in 1996 and the darker "Black Foliage: Animation Music" in 1999, an experimental-pop collage. After that, the band's musical engines idled — not for lack of ideas.

What happened to Bill Doss?

When Schneider met the two men in the attic studio of Doss's Athens home, the plans were grand. "Bill talked through the entire story arc with me," Schneider said in a phone interview from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he is now a mathematics professor at Michigan Tech.

"They had a chart on his wall, an outline," Schneider said. "Bill and I made a map for how we'd finish the album. I signed on to co-produce."

Schneider moved to Atlanta the final weekend of July 2012. "I talked to Bill Friday night as we were driving into town," he said. Early Monday morning, Doss died of a hemorrhage. He was 43.

"I had to call all my friends and his bandmates," Schneider said. "It impacted everyone physically."

What does this change for the band's legacy?

The album, assembled in the spirit of the collective that produced it, now stands as the closing chapter of a band that outlived two of its own and still finished the record its founders mapped out on a wall in an Athens attic.