Elephant 6, Olivia Tremor Control’s Bill Doss Passes Away

Founder of indie rock group the Olivia Tremor Control and co-founder of the highly influential Elephant 6 Recording Company collective, Bill Doss, has passed away of undisclosed causes at the age of 43. The news was announced on the Olivia Tremor Control website early Tuesday morning, US time, though the website has since gone offline due to the amount of traffic the news has driven there.

There were no details of the cause of death announced, rather a simple message stating, “We are devastated by the loss of our brother Bill Doss. We are at a loss for words.”

Doss formed Olivia Tremor Control with Jeff Mangum (who would go on to be the iconic leader of Neutral Milk Hotel) and Will Cullen Hart in 1988, the band born from the ashes of another project by the name of Synthetic Flying Machine. The band were one of the three initial projects that made up the Elephant 6 collective; the others being Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel and The Apples in Stereo.

The band split in 2000, after which Doss revived an old solo project The Sunshine Fix, releasing records under that name until the reformation of Olivia Tremor Control.