The History Of Remy Zero
Remy Zero was born Remy Boligee in Chelsea, Alabama about 1950. At around 16 he left home for Birmingham and found a job unloading trains outside the city. By 1969 he was living in a shack in a railroad worker's shantytown and had begun writing the first of hundreds of highly idiosyncratic songs. Around this time, he befriended Sam Bruno, a second-generation immigrant whose family would create a supermarket empire throughout the south.

Bruno had acquired an early model reel-to-reel tape recorder and decided to use it to record the songs of Remy Zero. Together they methodically filled almost thirty hours of tape with music, conversation, ramblings, and long periods of relative silence (in which trains, dogs, and distant voices populate an eerily vivid sound picture of his world).
By 1970, Bruno having since lost count of Remy Zero gave his recorder and two large boxes of tapes to the 12 year old Shelby Tate, whose parents were close friends with the Brunos.

Shelby was entranced by the strange recordings and having no other tapes, played them constantly. By 1988, he and his brother Cinjun had started a band with their friends Cedric LeMoyne, Jeffrey Cain, and Greg Slay. They eventually found themselves playing exclusively the songs from the Remy Zero tapes and decided that while free to rearrange, reinterpret, or recreate the songs in varying ways, they would always preserve the essence of the originals.

When they had a chance to make a record they adhered to this idea and even included snippets from the original recordings. Their bewildering music is sometimes highly expressionistic, sometimes bare and fractured and overall impossible to categorize.

The band and record company made numerous attempts to locate Remy Zero and his relatives but have so far been unsuccessful. It is hoped by using his name, Zero will come to hear of the band and perhaps establish contact.
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Band-mates Jeffrey Cain, Cedric LeMoyne, Gregory Slay, Cinjun Tate and Shelby Tate have known each other since their boyhood days in the South, a bond that Cinjun says goes a long way in the world of the music business. "In some ways music is our secondary focus. It's just something that happens between friends. This whole thing is really a sociological experiment. I think we'd be together whether we were making music or doing something entirely different."

The roots of such a creative kinship can be traced to Birmingham, Alabama, but the boys are quick to cite layovers in Nashville, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, among other stops along the way, as crucial steppingstones to their alliance. Their first album, 1996's self-titled debut, definitely hinted at the mesmerizing songwriting that was to come and it was their willingness to scrap conventional influences and hone in on their own musical strengths and eccentricities which led to what many critics hailed as one of 1998's breakthrough albums, the mercurial Villa Elaine.

Remy Zero's Elektra debut (Sept. 18, 2001), The Golden Hum, is far from today's typical pop music. From the from funky rock to intricate ballads with unexpected twists The Golden Hum offers the listener a mysterious, sensual quality that rewards repeated listening. When asked to describe the album, "liberation" was the first thing from Cinjun Tate's mouth. "During the making of this album, it was a very fire and brimstone sort of experience. There was a sense of determination and force that came out through the songs and that is the primary sort of feeling the album transmits."
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