For three days in August of 2000, in the Bulgarian town of Koprivshtitsa – a city-museum nestled in the Sredna Gora mountains east of Sofia – Jeff Mangum, of the former indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, bounded through the National Festival of Bulgarian Folklore with a tape recorder and microphone. The festival, a celebration of traditional Bulgarian folk music and culture held once every five years, floods the senses with a riot of singers, musicians, and revelers around every cobblestoned street corner. Mangum went home and edited the hours of field recordings into a single 33-minute track, and released it in June 2001 as Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1. Mangum’s name does not appear anywhere on the cover. The liner notes set the mood:
“These recordings were made drunk, running down the street, in a group of a thousand dancers, in the forest at night, or sitting on the side of a mountain capturing two or three groups playing at once…”
Speaking with Pitchfork in 2002, Mangum described the method used: going out into the world with a recorder and bringing the sounds home to assemble them into a montage with “thousand sounds in one minute.” Now, 25 years later, Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 remains one of his most hypnotic releases.
Opening to a buzzing mass of zurni – a double-reed wind instrument played across Central Asia and the Balkans – Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 cascades across a multitude of seamlessly dissolving sections, conjuring a sense of immersion despite the low fidelity of the recordings. Women singing in harmonies pitched forward from the nose (familiar to any listener of Neutral Milk Hotel) fade into a cacophony of bells thickening into a drone. Traditional Bulgarian instruments such as the gadulka, tambura, and tupan give way to ambient noise: car horns, bleating goats, loudspeaker announcements, airplanes overhead, cheering and applause – and always Bulgarian chatter in the background.
Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 is usually filed away as a footnote or curio. Listening to it today – not as ethnography or novelty but as a fully realized composition – a sensibility comes into focus that was operating long before Bulgaria. The conventional story told about Mangum’s genius centers on his songcraft: the dense and often inscrutable lyrics, the anachronistic instrumentation, the cathartic emotional release, the Anne Frank dreams. But the deeper continuity of his work lies in listening and, critically, assembling. He is, before anything else, a curator and builder of sound-worlds; the song is only one of his modalities.
The evidence hides in plain sight across the whole of Jeff Mangum’s early output. There is “Aunt Eggma Blowtorch”, a collage he allegedly assembled as a teenager, built from snippets of his sister playing piano, a blender, Ornette Coleman, and the voice of his mother claiming to hear sounds from outer space. There are numerous tapes and demos that preceded the first official releases, awash in static, hiss, distortion, garbled vocals, sudden tonal shifts, and assorted tape effects. What follows is “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye”, the sinister 14-minute wall of noise that closes 1996’s On Avery Island. The collagist impulse did not arrive after the songs. It preceded and produced them.
We have spent nearly three decades praising Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album,In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,as songwriting, but its sustaining architecture is largely textural: a patchwork of words, sounds, and effects, Mangum’s intuitive kitchen-sink approach to songcraft. Robert Schneider’s tape compression and distortion lend the album its signature fuzzy warmth. Scott Spillane’s horns seldom carry the melody; they simply arrive, like a gust of wind across an open field. Julian Koster’s singing saw is a found timbre, a haunting from a past life. Mangum’s own voice prioritizes grain over pitch, keening in the register he would recognize on that mountainside in Koprivshtitsa.
Of course, there’s the famous instrumentation: zanzithophone, flugelhorn, uilleann pipes, shortwave radio, euphonium, and air organ. The achievement of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is not just that Mangum wrote very good songs and dressed them in exotic robes; it’s that he assembled a listening space so precisely calibrated that the songs feel inevitable inside it. Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 makes this audible by removing the songs and leaving you alone with that calibration.
Jeff Mangum’s collagist output continued throughout the years, popularly thought of as his silent era. In the fall of 2002, appearing under the name Jefferson, Mangum took the 3 a.m. slot on the New Jersey radio station WFMU. The archives of those broadcasts – still live after 24 years – are essential listening. With freewheeling selections spanning free jazz, field recordings, recited poetry, primeval folk, and modern classical, they form a self-portrait more revealing than any interview.
Introducing one of the shows, Mangum said, “Sometimes it’s nice to listen to music and imagine a world inside of it, a world you can sort of grasp on to.” It’s a perfect summary of his approach. His musique concrète selections are particularly revealing: Alain Savouret (his personal favorite), Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, and Halim El-Dabh. That’s no tourist’s playlist; it’s a genealogy of the form, and you assemble it only if you live inside the tradition.
The familiar tragedy of Mangum – the recluse silenced by fame, guarding a masterpiece he could never top – gets the story wrong. Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 exists. The WFMU shows remain live, as do a pair of atmospheric mixes on his website. He has contributed to the songs and albums of numerous artists and friends. What the cult of Jeff Mangum foreclosed was not the possibility of new work but the hearing of it. Starved for another In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, listeners could only receive the album as hobby, oddity, or evidence of decline. Even now Wikipedia calls Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 a “collection” rather than a composition – a misrecognition written into the world’s encyclopedia.
If there’s any tragedy here, it’s that the future foretold by the release of the album failed to coalesce. That optimistic “Vol. 1” remains unfulfilled; there is no Vol. 2, a sequel forever deferred. Listening to Orange Twin Field Works Vol. 1 today, one thing becomes clear: the man we mourned as silent was never really silent. He was drunk on a mountainside in Bulgaria, spinning John Coltrane in a Jersey City studio at three in the morning, playing drums on other people’s records, seated at a computer layering in a thousand sounds a minute. He was doing the only thing he ever really did, in a room we never quite figured out how to enter.