Man, I go on vacation for a week and finally an Elephant 6 scandal explodes. And I've been waiting months to cover one. Oh well.

The long and short of it is covered very well by Pitchfork in this article, but briefly:

A post appeared on the Elephant 6 Townhall which appeared to be written by Jeff Mangum. In it, he claims that a new album is finally coming together, and he will start playing shows again, and everything sounded very exciting. It appeared to be confirmed by Kelly Ruberto, one of the go-to spokespeople for Elephant 6 (if such people exist), and John Fernandes gave an ambiguous answer that some found encouraging.

Then Robert Schneider gave everyone a cold shower by revealing the post as a hoax. After hearing the story, Robert emailed Jeff Mangum directly, who claims to have not written the post. It's pretty well confirmed in the Pitchfork article that it's really Schneider issuing the cold shower, not another hoaxster pretending to be Schneider, and I can add extra-extra-confirmation as Schneider sent me an email with pretty much the same wording as his debunking here.

I don't have any additional insight and I'm not sitting on any secret information. It would have been a great thing, if true, but for now the Neutral Milk Hotel waiting game continues.

Oh, and the Billboard article on all this is here.