| Robert Schneider | |
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Performing at The Black Cat (10/20/06) |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Robert Peter Schneider |
| Born | March 9, 1971 Cape Town, South Africa |
| Origin | Ruston, Louisiana |
| Genres | Indie pop Indie rock |
| Occupations | Singer-songwriter, guitarist |
| Instruments | Guitar Keyboard |
| Years active | 1987 to present |
| Associated acts | The Apples in Stereo Marbles Ulysses American Revolution Neutral Milk Hotel |
Robert Peter Schneider (born March 9, 1971) is one of the co-founders of The Elephant 6 Recording Company, along with Will Cullen Hart, Bill Doss, and Jeff Mangum. He is perhaps best known as the lead singer/songwriter behind The Apples in Stereo.
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After spending the first six years of his life in Cape Town, South Africa,[1][2] Robert Schneider's family moved to Ruston, Louisiana. In Louisiana, Schneider befriended Mangum, Hart and Doss and began discovering and playing music with them. After graduating from Ruston High School, where he was Junior and Senior class president, and spending two years at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, Schneider moved to Denver, Colorado to attend university. Although he subsequently left school to pursue his musical ambitions, his academic interests remain strong, being an avid student of analytic number theory, and in recent years Schneider has studied mathematics at the University of Kentucky as well as composing, producing albums and touring.
Soon after moving to Colorado in 1991, Denver Schneider met Hilarie Sidney, Jim McIntyre and Chris Parfitt, who formed the indie pop band The Apples (the name was subsequently changed to The Apples in Stereo). The group made their first release in 1993 with the Tidal Wave EP that became the inaugural release on the Elephant 6 record label.
Schneider's prowess in harnessing the sounds of Elephant 6 bands became apparent with his distinct production style. In addition to producing all of the albums for The Apples in Stereo, he's produced work for the Olivia Tremor Control, the Minders and a number of other artists, but is best known as a producer for his work on Neutral Milk Hotel's critically lauded In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The Wall of Sound production style implemented by his heroes Phil Spector and Brian Wilson was used on these records and cemented Schneider's reputation as the man behind the sound of many bands of the Elephant 6 label, which grew through the 1990's into a sprawling collective of psychedelic pop and experimental groups.
Schneider has a number of solo projects. One, a project called Marbles, began with lo-fi Beach Boys-esque recordings done with Will Cullen Hart, and is the name most of Schneider's solo work appears under, beginning with the 1996 debut album "Pyramid Landing" and Other Favorites on spinART Records. Another project, Orchestre Fantastique, is an instrumental venture which recorded a soundtrack for the as-yet unreleased film Dean Quixote. Schneider also collaborated with Andy Partridge of XTC in the early 2000's, with the pair reportedly writing over thirty songs together by telephone; the project, however, produced no recorded results.
Schneider formed a comparitively dark band in 2004 called Ulysses in Lexington, Kentucky, and released the 2005 album 010 on Eenie Meenie Records recorded live with a single microphone, and released a second Marbles album Expo in 2005 influenced by ELO.
During 2006, it was announced that Schneider was playing in a Kentucky-based psychedelic garage band with his brother-in-law, Craig Morris, called Thee American Revolution. Thee American Revolution released the lo-fi psych-pop album Buddha Electrostorm in 2009 on Garden Gate Records; the album was reissued worldwide on December 5, 2011, on UK label Fire Records.
Schneider occasionally records and performs children's music as Robbert Bobbert and released an album Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine under that name, and is in the process of developing an animated kids' television show based on it.
On December 20, 2006 Schneider appeared on The Colbert Report for the season's rock-themed finale. He performed an original composition ("Stephen, Stephen") about the show's host, Stephen Colbert, and then closed the show alongside Chris Funk (of The Decemberists), Peter Frampton and Rick Nielson with an "all-guitar jam". The Apples in Stereo later performed "Can You Feel It?" on The Colbert Report to celebrate the release of their Japanese 7" vinyl picture disc release of the same song. The Apples in Stereo were officially the first band scheduled to perform twice in the program's history.
Other appearances in popular culture include a cameo appearance as the banjo player in a bar fight scene in the 2008 Mike Myers Paramount motion picture The Love Guru, a short science fiction film starring Schneider and actor Elijah Wood entitled Explore the Universe with Elijah Wood produced as the prequel to The Apples in stereo pop video "Dance Floor," and the performance of The Apples single "Energy" by the contestants of the television show American Idol.
Since 2006 Schneider, a student of mathematics at the University of Kentucky during breaks from recording and touring, has composed using a Non-Pythagorean musical scale of his own invention based on logarithms, incorporated prime numbers and the sieve of Eratosthenes in both a composition for bell towers and in the score for a play by mathematician Andrew Granville and playwright Jennifer Granville that debuted at the Institute for Advanced Study on December 12, 2009, has written a plan for an electronic composition based on prime numbers lasting millions of years, and has engaged in a number of other experimental music projects taking inspiration from mathematical concepts.
Since September, 2010, Schneider has performed compositions in an experimental notation (including his score "Composition for Two Hemispheres" and a score by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel) for his Teletron Mind-Controlled Interface for Analog Synthesizers, a mind-controlled control voltage generator made from a circuit-bent Mattel MindFlex electronic toy, scored for one "conductor" wearing an EEG sensor with Schneider and experimental musician and visual artist Robert Beatty controlling the filters of Moog synthesizers. Other experimental musicians have subsequently built Teletron units from an instructional video Schneider released online.
In addition to producing nearly all of the albums for The Apples in Stereo, Schneider has produced many for fellow Elephant 6 bands, including the following.
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