Olivia Tremor Control Founder Bill Doss Dead at 43

The Olivia Tremor Control singer Bill Doss has died at age 43, according to a post on the band’s official site. “We are devastated by the loss of our brother Bill Doss,” says the band’s statement. “We are at a loss for words.” No cause of death or other information has been released.

Doss co-founded the Athens, Georgia psych-pop act with childhood friends W. Cullen Hart and Jeff Mangum in the early Nineties. (Mangum soon left to form Neutral Milk Hotel, another key part of the Athens scene that called itself Elephant 6.) The Olivia Tremor Control released two critically acclaimed albums on indie labels – 1996’s Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle and 1999’s Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One – before splitting up in 2000. Doss went on to release two albums with his own band, the Sunshine Fix, and later joined fellow Elephant 6 band Apples in Stereo.

The Olivia Tremor Control reunited for a handful of shows in 2005, and toured several times in later years. Just last week, they played the Georgia Theater in their hometown on July 26th.

Last year, the Olivia Tremor Control released its first single in a decade, and a new album had been discussed. “We’ve got two songs for the next Olivia record, in my opinion,” Hart said in 2009. “They’re on Bill’s hard drive . . . We’re working toward something. I’m not sure that we know, even.”