By Vanessa Francone and Melody Lau
Animal Collective have taken their psychedelic sound to many ends of many spectrums over the span of 17 years and 10 albums, but on their latest release, Painting With, Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) have found themselves going back to the beginning – to the prehistoric times, that is.
Much has been made of the band’s approach on their 10th album and the way they’ve cultivated this so-called prehistoric sound: songs were stripped back to Animal Collective’s version of minimalism, dinosaurs were projected onto the walls of L.A.’s famous EastWest Studios and the foundations of the album were built around the vision of what Weitz told Pitchfork, “an electronic drum circle.”
While the results don’t feel terribly out of place in the wonderfully warped world of Animal Collective, it reveals a more relaxed version of the band’s tightly-wound and jam-packed sound. CBC Music talked to Weitz about the band’s new approach on this record, how dinosaurs and baby pools contributed to the studio’s atmosphere and Canadian saxophonist Colin Stetson’s remarkable contribution to the band’s lead single, “FloriDada.”
I've heard you guys described as freak folk, noise rock, experimental and new psychedelia. How would you describe your sound now?
I think we've been all those things at one point. We were talking about this recently; no matter what genre we're in, it always seems to sound like Animal Collective and get passed through the "Animal Collective filters" as we call it. We're not really sure what that filter is but we're open-minded people and all of us in the band have different tastes in music. Some of us like noise music more than others, some of us like techno more than others, so we've always been open to what each of us likes and what we want to bring to the table. So I think that combination of influences forms what is the Animal Collective sound.
You had dinosaurs projected onto walls in EastWest Studios while recording your new album, Painting With. Why did you do that and what affect did that have on the recording process?
It was a historic studio so it's one of the reasons why we were excited to go there and those studios look really nice in a classic kind of a way. The panelling on the walls, the wood and tile floors…but it could still be a little void of vibe so to speak. We wanted to feel like we were working in this classic space that tons of records have been in. You know, we see photos of it from the Beach Boys and Sam Cooke sessions, but we wanted to make it feel like our own place for a little while and give it the vibe we want the record to have. A lot of the sounds we were making were very prehistoric, so we wanted to make the place feel a little bit more natural, not just a room inside of a studio complex. We wanted to feel like, when we walked through the door, we were walking into our own world.
Because you spent a lot of time in the studio, correct?
Yeah, we worked 10-12 hour days for a solid five weeks, pretty much. Then there were two and a half weeks after that, that was mixing.
There was a baby pool in the studio?
[Member Dave Portner] likes having all the elements to be nearby, like the four natural elements. It's pretty easy to get air, obviously, and it's easy to get wood and stone because you're in a building, but water is sometimes the harder one. So how are we going to have water in the studio? Let's just bring a baby pool in there.
Did it serve any other purpose?
It became like a percussion instrument. We used the rims of it as a percussion thing. Based on how much water had evaporated in, it would kind of change in tone so it actually became a very useful tool for us.
Colin Stetson played on this record, how did this collaboration come about?
We love his music, especially the song "Judges." We were blown away by it a few years ago and so we've had our eye on him for a while. Saxophone was one of the things we had talked about incorporating as a challenge to ourselves. It's very rare that we like saxophone in music. It's fine in jazz, but we always thought it would sound really out of place in our music – any kind of horn, actually.
One of the challenges on this record was to find a way to take an element that we've always really been scared of or shied away from or flat out not liked and make it fit in there. If anybody can fit the saxophone into our music, it's Colin. There was a part in "FloriDada" where we thought a saxophone would be good there, but we didn't want to just hire a session musician because we didn't want to tell someone what to play, we wanted to be surprised. So we called up Colin and he agreed. We didn't really tell him what to play. We gave him the chords and told him to do whatever he wanted with the chords and he just played for an hour or two. We recorded everything he did. And then he was like, "Alright, you guys can pick what you want."
The songs on this album are more minimal than some of your past efforts. Was minimalism a challenge?
Minimalism in the Animal Collective world is still really full-on by a lot of people's definitions. But, for us, we wanted to leave a little more negative space in there. Noah had been listening to the first Ramones album a lot. We've never really done a record before that's very short, concise, energetic from start to finish and I'm interested in making a record with that kind of listening experience. We've never done that.
Normally, you’ve tested out your material live first but you’ve yet to actually perform the songs on Painting With onstage. What was the reason behind this change?
It was just to change it up and do something different. Bands refer to this thing called "demo-itis." When you get to the studio and you try to record it, you say, "Oh, well it's not as good. I don't like it as much as the demo." That's when you kind of ruin the song for yourself and just release the demo. That doesn't really happen for us a lot. Demos are usually like the live version of the song.
For [2012’s Centipede Hz] a lot of people came to the studio with demo-itis and everybody kind of had this version of what the song should sound like based on how they experience it onstage. So it could make you feel pretty precious about your parts, you know? You play it for a year and you feel attached to it. It's like a creature or something. So, for this album, we fell into it purely from a studio perspective. It sort of took shape for all of us at once. It was just a new way of relating to stuff and we've never done that before.
How is this all going to translate to a live setting?
There are never enough hands to do it all. We're going to have a drummer that we know from Baltimore play with us, that's the first time that has ever happened. We've never had someone join us onstage who’s not a member of Animal Collective. It's just to make the rhythm a little more human and allow us to make the songs looser and more open-ended onstage as opposed to just playing the programmed beats. I would say that's the biggest thing we're planning, is the live drummer.
Painting With has three different covers painted by Gang Gang Dance’s Brian DeGraw. How did this partnership happen?
We toured with Gang Gang Dance and they became kind of close friends of ours. Brian is also a visual artist and he posts his art on Instagram. We saw what he was posting this summer and we thought it fit with the music we were making. So we got in touch and it was his idea to do the three covers. A lot of the stuff he was posting on Instagram was portrait stuff so we wanted portraits of us done because we've never appeared on our covers before. He said, "Well I can do that, but I can't actually fit you all three of you on one and get it to look good so can I just make three different covers?" We called the record label and started to explain the justification behind it and they said, sure go for it.
How important are visuals to Animal Collective?
They're really important. We've always wanted a visual component. The way we started getting curious and passionate about music was through the soundtracks to movies. A lot of times, when we made experimental music as teenagers, it always felt like we were scoring an imaginary horror film. The visual aesthetic of the band is tied into the band’s identity. To us, it has always been part and parcel. You don't really separate the two.
I can see that with your website too. The homepage is pretty trippy. Whose idea was that?
That we actually can't take credit for. One of the programmers at Domino Records had this idea. When we saw that, we were like "Where did that come from? It's f--king awesome. That's our website! Give the dude a pat on the back."
by CBC Music via Electronic RSS
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