Pitchfork

The slow, silent decay of the once-mighty Elephant 6 empire continues with the announcement that flagship E6 signing Beulah will be disbanding in 2003 following a final LP and tour. Roger Moutenot (of Yo La Tengo production repute) will record the band's fourth album in San Francisco beginning next month-- their first in a "live setting" as opposed to their previous method of laboriously home-recording each track individually. "We spent over five hundred hours recording the last one piece by piece and sometimes too much time is just that," Beulah's Bill Swan writes on the band's official website. "I mean, it was fun to sit around in the studio TV room watching [reruns] while one of the guys labored over playing a single part perfectly to a click track for four hours, but..."

Beulah, formed by Swan and former co-worker Miles Kurosky in 1995, were the first band to be signed to Robert Scheider's Elephant 6 label and invited to join the E6 collective proper (not just as "extended family"). Each of Beulah's subsequent releases was issued on a different label, which has caused extensive difficulty in keeping the group's back catalog in print. Beulah's beloved 1999 sophomore album, When Your Heartstrings Break, was initially issued on Sugar Free and remains unavailable (though a reissue is in the works for early 2003). A third album, 2001's The Coast Is Never Clear, was released by the now-defunct Capricorn imprint Velocette.

No official reason was given for the split, save a desire to ditch the starving-artists routine and pursue other goals. "This record (our fourth and final) should come out next fall barring something unforeseen," Swan writes. "As usual, we will tour to support it (there will be more than one round of touring). Then, not as usual, we are going to call it a day, go home to our wives, girlfriends and kids, get real jobs and become adults." As previously reported, the Elephant 6 collective ceased use of the fanciful moniker and logo last year and plans to eulogize the phenomenon with a final label compilation sometime in 2003.