The other day, I saw Jeff Mangum walking down the sidewalk. The vitalizing force behind the band Neutral Milk Hotel was talking, or maybe singing happily to himself. He looked about as self-conscious as a four-year-old meandering blissfully over a playground-- just as he often looks to be saddled with the weight of the world's suffering. One thing for certain is that Mangum is incapable of hiding his internal state of being: emotions skitter across his face like rapid weather fronts beating their way to the coast.

Soon after the celebrated release and tour behind Neutral Milk Hotel's last album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea , Mangum seemed not only to have ducked the spotlight, but perhaps to have stepped inadvertently into some negative-matter black hole. Those of us here in Athens, Georgia knew he was hanging out with friends, shooting the shit and pursuing odd and sundry projects the way most of us do. Yet, to the bulk of his admirers, Mangum's movements remained a mystery. The Internet buzzed with queries and speculations from curious and concerned fans, but Mangum remained doggedly elusive to the public eye. This is the first interview he has consented to in more than three years.

Neutral Milk Hotel, composed of Mangum, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes and Scott Spillane, had already accumulated a large following by the time In the Aeroplane over the Sea , their second album, was released in late 1997. But Aeroplane elicited a response from listeners that made a palpable wave in the music world. The album inspired a profound emotional response in people; many a cynical music critic wrote of being moved to tears by its baroque beauty and raw honesty.

While the current of enthusiasm over Aeroplane sometimes became overwhelming to the band, they rode it out with characteristic humility and good grace. They spent all of 1998 touring extensively in North America and Europe, and then... nothing. The members of Neutral Milk Hotel dispersed into other bands within the Elephant 6 collective, or started their own projects. Mangum could be found collaborating occasionally on his friends' records, but masterminded no new material of his own, as far as anybody could tell. When R.E.M. offered Neutral Milk Hotel the chance to open their shows in Atlanta in 1999, Mangum declined, citing a desire to prolong his sabbatical from live performance. Fellow Elephant 6'ers Elf Power and Olivia Tremor Control opened instead.

Neutral Milk Hotel fans were puzzled when, after three years and no sign of a new album, Mangum produced another work. It wasn't a Neutral Milk Hotel record, but a compilation of Bulgarian folk music titled Orange Twin Field Works, Volume One which he had recorded at the Koprivshtitsa Festival in Bulgaria. Jeff and friend Josh McKay (of the Athens-based band Macha) had discovered a mutual love of the country's folk music, and decided to experience the festival together in the summer of 2000. (Proceeds from sale of the disc goes to Bulgarian charities.)

Not long after the Field Works recording appeared, the Elephant 6 label Orange Twin released Mangum's Live at Jittery Joe's , an acoustic concert recorded in 1997, and reissued Neutral Milk Hotel's first single, "Everything Is." Jittery Joe's was put out partially as a response to bootlegs being sold on the Internet at exorbitant prices, and also because so many people were writing in lamenting the fact that they'd never had the chance to witness Neutral Milk Hotel live.

I had a chance to talk with Jeff Mangum in January and February about where he's been these past few years, and what may be in store for him in the future.

Pitchfork: Did you intend to make a CD when you went to Bulgaria?

Jeff: Mainly I just wanted to experience the festival, and I brought my field recorder along just to record it for my friends. I came home, threw all the tapes into the computer and put it together in two days. But my friends really liked it and thought it should be released.

Pitchfork: Do you think Neutral Milk Hotel fans will appreciate the Bulgarian music?

Jeff: I think some will. I tried to put it together and present it in the way that I experienced it-- the way that the music makes me feel. For me, there's a lot of intrinsic mystery and power in that music, but a lot of people don't perceive folk music from around the world as something that fits into their lives or their psyche in any way. So I tried to present it in a different way to give it more of a chance to sink into people's heads.

Pitchfork: How did you present it? Did you make the songs shorter?

Jeff: No, I just tried to bring forth, through the editing, what were the highlights-- what meant the most to me. So often it's all about the frame that you put something in for people. Bulgarian folk music isn't hard to find, but people still won't listen, so I tried to change the frame so people could see it in a fresh way.

Pitchfork: What other sorts of field recording have you done?

Jeff: Well, I went through France and Spain recording. I went to a couple of festivals and recorded the sound, but that was for more of a tape collage project. So in France and Spain I was recording a lot of things like bells, animals, children, parades and protests. Those sounds end up in a montage piece I'm working on. Every sound that I recorded goes into the collage. Want to hear some of it?

Pitchfork: Yeah.

Jeff rolls his chair over to his computer and turns it on. It releases a long string of vivid sounds, which are visible on the monitor as a sound graph. A cathedral bell, a man coughing, an accordion playing, hooves clomping, children cheering, a snippet of a woman telling a dream in a lilting English accent: "...and he brought me and my sister up the tower, and he showed me my parents, who he turned into pieces of fish..."

Jeff: You get the basic idea. I've been working on this for years and years. I wish I could work on it all the time, but if I work on it for more than a few hours a day I start going insane. It can take an entire week to make twenty seconds of music.

Pitchfork: How long have you been working on the montage stuff?

Jeff: Well, I made a record of montage sounds in '99 under the name Korena Pang, but it was never put out because it didn't do it for me. It was mostly taking all the four-track recordings I'd done throughout the 90s and collaging them, but it turned into a mishmash that I wasn't totally in love with. That record was more just a collection of twenty different home recordings, whereas the montage work I'm doing now is like a thousand sounds in one minute. Now I'm able to go out into the world with my field recorder, record sounds, and bring them home to collage on the computer. The raw sounds can really move and come alive that way. I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.

Pitchfork: Do you expect to do more field recording of folk music?

Jeff: I'm hoping to be able to go to Romania to do some documentary and sound work with some people there, but I'm still waiting to see if it's going to work out.

Pitchfork: I know you're interested in visions and dreams, and that you sometimes record other people's visions and dreams for your montage pieces. Do you remember many of your own?

Jeff: I did have a vision about a year ago that had an impact on me.

Pitchfork: What was it?

Jeff: Well, I was lying in bed slowly coming out of sleeping, and this voice in my head told me to go back in; to not quite wake up yet, but just to stay in that in-between place. So I did. I slipped back down and stayed in the halfway point. Then I was standing on the ocean. I saw a blur come around, from my right side to my left. It was a hand putting something next to me. When I looked closer I saw that what the hand had put there was a little sea turtle. I looked up to see who had put it there, and there was this mulatto boy looking at me, smiling. I picked up the sea turtle and put in my hand and it turned into a butterfly. And then it turned into a black spider. It kept turning into a butterfly, a spider, a butterfly, a spider. It would pulsate between the two. I put my hands around it to grasp it and blood ran out of my hands and fell into the sand. Then as I let go of it, the blood rose up from the sand and turned again into the butterfly/spider. It hovered about a foot above my hand, and turned into a little ball of light. So that whole sequence repeated two or three times: it would land back in my hand, turn into a creature, and when I tried to hold it, it would crush again into blood, and when I would let go the blood would rise back up and turn into a ball of light.

Pitchfork: Do you know what it means?

Jeff: Yes, I pretty much understood it right away. I didn't have to analyze it afterwards. The butterfly and the spider represented two opposing sides: all the things that I love and consider to be beautiful and gentle and wonderful, and all the things that threaten me... the things about life that I can't come to terms with because they don't fit into my nice, happy picture of the way I want the world to be. It kept morphing back and forth to show me that they're both one and the same; they're dependent on one another to exist. When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it. But when I let go and let it be what it was, it would turn into light to show me that both sides come from the same source. I think the vision was trying to tell me to just live and be joyful and stop creating these internal wars over all the pain that is within myself and that I see all around me. That's how I interpret it.

Pitchfork: Does your music stem from dreams and visions sometimes?

Jeff: Yes. I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I'm feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep and those play out even more in my dreams.

Pitchfork: What is "active imagination"?

Jeff: It's a Carl Jung term. It's sort of staying in that place between sleeping and waking. Just allowing your mind to completely begin to flow with images. Allowing it to become whatever it becomes. You know, you go to bed filled with worries and thoughts, caught up in that everyday kind of thing. With this, you try to concentrate on what you think is really important, or some type of interesting or mysterious image, and then allow your imagination to become like a stream. You can let the stream go, and just observe it to see what happens.

I've always been interested in recording other people's dreams. A lot of people are. You heard the montage piece. I'm trying to create a dream world with the montage. It's like when you look at a Dada or surrealist montage-- I just love taking fragments from everyday reality and recombining them. Everything in the natural world is so amazing, but because we're used to seeing it in one way we take it for granted. We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them-- creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.

Pitchfork: Is this reframing process something you use in your songwriting in general? Do the songs come out of fragments?

Jeff: Yeah, usually I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product. Especially nowadays, it's so easy to have a library of two thousand CDs, books and records. So many things. We're used to having all of these finished works of art in our life that seem to arise out of nothing. I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.

Pitchfork: The songs start out fragmented-- do they still feel fragmented at the end?

Jeff: No, typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything goes [loud slurping, sucking noise] and comes together in the song.

Pitchfork: Will there be another Neutral Milk Hotel album?

Jeff: I don't know. It would be nice, but sometimes I kind of doubt it. I just feel like these windows open up for something to be honest, and they don't stay open for very long. I guess my path feels sort of different now... I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly want to make music a bigger part of my life in the future than it has been for the last couple of years.

Pitchfork: But you're writing some songs now, right?

Jeff: Mmm... I haven't written in a while.

Pitchfork: But you said just the other day you were working on some new songs?

Jeff: Oh yeah, but I decided it's shit and put it aside. I go through this all the time, though. I'll have all this crap written and I think it's just shit so I'll discard it, and then I'll play a few things for friends and they'll say, "Oh, that's fine," and I'll say, "Oh, really? What about this? This one's really fucked up-- just tell me if it sucks..." And they'll say, "No, it's good!" And then I'm like, "God! I've got half a record done!" [laughs]

Pitchfork: You said you went through a time when you weren't writing, or felt like you couldn't sing anymore.

Jeff: I went through a period, after Aeroplane , when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling. I think that before then, I had an intuitive innocence that guided me and that was a very good thing to a certain point. But then I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

I feel like we're so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to love... everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents... As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I'm a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is. Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it. I'm not saying that I've overcome anything, but I've definitely seen the blinding truth of how imperative it is that we have to overcome these problems.

Pitchfork: How did these realizations make it difficult to create songs?

Jeff: The songs were what I stood for. It was a representation of the platform of my mind that I stood on. And if the platform of the mind is crumbling... then the songs go with it. Also, I think that the difficult thing after Aeroplane was that, when we started doing the Elephant 6 thing, we had a very utopian vision that we could overcome anything through music. The music wasn't just there for entertainment: we were trying to create some sort of change. We had a desire to transform our lives, and the listener's lives. I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after. So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain... I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can't just sing my way out of all this suffering. I have to try to understand human nature and myself and the nature of suffering and a lot of these other issues on a deeper level. When I realized that a lot of my understanding of these issues was on a pretty flimsy platform, that's when the platform started to give way.

One of the biggest wounds that I carried around with me for a long time was that a very dear person in my life, and the person who had probably the biggest influence on my life artistically, had been molested and abused by her father from the time she was a baby. After Aeroplane came out, I saw her going through a lot of pain, and I also saw some of my other friends crumbling. So I realized that even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music... it didn't provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people's everyday lives.

Pitchfork: Don't you think that your music has served that purpose, at least some?

Jeff: Well, I would hope it would have a healing effect. The music is supposed to be healing.

Pitchfork: I think what's really healing about your music is its honesty; it has a rawness and a willingness to be vulnerable, and that touches people.

Jeff: I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

Pitchfork: Did it have anything to do with the success of Aeroplane , and that now there were so many people listening to what you might do?

Jeff: No. I don't really worry about that. It was just very strange timing to get in over my head. I don't know how it happens... it was like nobody in the world cared, and then everything just sort of exploded, and then I just sort of dropped off the face of the earth, in my mind and everywhere else. And then I come out of this fog and there are all these amazing, nice people who come to see us play [with Circulatory System], and they're all so sweet and intelligent and nice to talk to. It blows my mind. I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted-- that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people.

Pitchfork: What happened to the songs you wrote after Aeroplane ? Will you ever use them?

Jeff: I don't know if I'll use them or not. Probably not. They are what they are, but I just feel really different now. One weird thing about those songs is that they were so linear. They weren't abstract in any way, and they weren't really fragmented, either. They just came out like [makes long farting noise] .

At this point, Jeff goes into a long monologue describing some of the images and reciting some of the lyrics in the songs, which include a hermaphrodite girl and a boy whose consciousness shrinks to a small point and birds start being born out of his face. The lyrics are terrible and beautiful in the way so many of Jeff's lyrics are, but these are definitely a bit more story-like and disturbing than his usual fare. They have been edited out at Jeff's request.

Pitchfork: Do you look at the songs now and wonder if it was too twisted?

Jeff: It was more like I thought to myself: if you're really so concerned with this type of suffering, then there are different ways to put your energy into confronting it. You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.

We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything.

So, after Aeroplane , I felt I needed to take a bit of a harsher look at life, and that's what I did. So often, everywhere we look, we seem to find obstacles and facades and smokescreens, so it was really nice to find things in the world that actually spoke to me. And I felt like Eastern thought really spoke to me. Because it isn't trying to cover up the pain in life; it's trying to deal with it and overcome it in an intelligent way.

I think the reason I love Eastern thought so much, and mysticism in general-- but especially Buddhism-- is because it seems to me an attempt to look life squarely in the face, as it is. And to try to deal with the brute facts of the suffering in life, and the joy in life. I'm trying to find peace in the world, as it is. I'm feeling this sort of slow stripping of my mind, like the layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these little structures that have been imposed on me by my society that tell me how I'm supposed to view my life and the world. What I'm supposed to find to be important and what is not. Sometimes you see through so much of it that you feel like you're just a leaf blowing on the wind.