Bugging The Bandwidths

Animal Collective have gone arthropodal on their visceral and seething return.

Originally published in Clash Magazine 
Cover Story August 2012
Words: Matthew Bennett

We’re getting psychedelic in our lunch-hour with Animal Collective. Walking around the Barbican with Avey Tare, Geologist, Panda Bear and Deakin, it’s good to see all four members of this porous collective back together again. Gone is the intercontinental file swapping and remote idea generation; back is the voodoo of live jamming and the addictive chemistry of creation within four walls and numerous dimensions.

But prepare your antenna. The Animal Collective have flipped their volatile script once more.

Many readers will be more than aware of their ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’ album, a warm, aqueous, pulsing and melodic crossover communiqué. It was their eighth studio LP and for many, including Clash Magazine, deemed the best album of 2009.

‘Centipede Hz’ however is viciously earthy. And deliberately so, as Panda Bear takes up full residency on modified drums, and Deakin strides out of hiatus as the band stretch their rhythmic legs as a quartet in more warped harmony.

It is the closest the band have come to a concept album. Becoming obsessed with both the notion of alien forms and otherworldly creatures they also visualised this album as a landscape to investigate the lost, wandering sonic frequencies that gets beamed across the universe. They relished harking back to their love of radio and the tangle of white noise, reception and vanished signals that pepper our planet and our heavens.

Penned back in Baltimore in a barn belonging to Deakin’s mum, they set up the writing process like a rock record. They invited back Ben H. Allen III as co-producer - a man who can clearly give the band some oft-needed perspective to lift out the pop from their morass of layers and competing structures.

Allen’s green fingers are again evident as he’s unearthed magical moments like ‘Moonjock’, ‘Father Time’ and ‘Mercury Man’, which are all as edifying and catchy as anything Animal Collective have ever made. So for fans worrying about their more recent dalliance with pop structures worry not. It’s a case of goodbye ‘My Girls’ and hello ‘My Creepy Crawlies’.

They ask you to take these eleven songs as the soundtrack to a fictional extra-terrestrial astral performance space, or a lost radio station eternally pumping out the jams to the celestial voids. Also, take these tracks with some air before plunging deep with them. They are arcane and mottled, burnished and seething in segments.

In celebration of their psychedelic verve Clash sat down and shot some lysergic breeze. Here we heard Panda Bear talk not in A-sharps and octaves, but instead why a song needs to be MORE like the trunk of a tree.

From here our antenna were up and we needed to know who was the best at tripping and why you should dive deep into such experimentation. We also found out their secret to the longevity that has allowed ten LPs to develop from their primordial midst - and finally, whether Panda Bear and Tupac did ever shoot some basketball hoops together...

What’s the most significant development in the world of Animal Collective as far as ‘Centipede Hz’?

Panda Bear: The biggest one is just that it sounds a whole lot different than the last album. I feel like that’s made pretty clear pretty soon in the listening experience.

Avey Tare: But also the fact that there’s four of us playing on the record; informationally it’s important because it’s a different band of sorts, a different sound, from a different band line-up.

How hard was it to pick up the pieces after the huge success and acclaim of ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’?

Deakin: Not really that difficult in that every album so far has been our biggest album, from album to album, so it just felt like business as usual for the most part. It didn’t seem like there was a lot of contemplation about what ‘Merriweather’ was and what we had to do from that. It just ended, and then we did some other stuff and then we moved into a new era. It felt pretty natural.

What words were you using with each other to describe what the next album would be?

All: Alien band.

Avey Tare: Centipede.

Deakin: Geological. Sweaty.

Avey Tare: In terms of the percussion, we said wooden. At one point, wooden, blocky.

Panda Bear: Clunky.

Avey Tare: Some of our other stuff previously has a lot of watery, aquatic sounds, so we made a conscious decision not to use any sounds that were like that.

Panda Bear: We tried to steer clear of reverb.

Avey Tare: During mixing we were thinking a lot about the title and the idea of the radio station, or some sort of venue, or alien bar where the music would be generated from if it was a performance space for an alien band. We were thinking a lot about that place so ‘centipede’ seemed to be the word that fit what the overall sound was and then it was just a matter of, ‘Oh, is it going to be ‘Hertz’ or is it ‘Centipede bar’? (Laughs)

Throughout your discography there’s references to broadcasting into space and your messages being lost up there and travelling forever. Did you sneak any hidden messages into your sound design, or get any cheeky alien banter going?

Panda Bear: No. Although I do get excited about sounds that seem like they’re magical. You listen to a song and you think you heard something in there and then you play it back and you kind of can’t find it the second time around. I feel like there are moments like that on the record.

Deakin: There’s some radio stuff Avey Tare does on some of the songs that is syllabically suggestive. Like we all hear different things or messages or sayings and it’s something different to what you perceive it as being.

The reason I ask is that there’s a space programme where we broadcast Pie into space as a sign of our intelligence.

Deakin: Are they broadcasting Pie?

Panda Bear: The number?

Avey Tare: No, like an apple pie! (Laughs)

With this broadcast element in the background would you call it a concept album?

Panda Bear: Not really. It was too loosely thrown into the songs to really play that much of a role.

Avey Tare: But it’s probably the most ‘concept’ album we’ve ever had though.

Deakin: It was more an idea that I think motivated a certain approach to how we would deal with things like transitions, especially in a live environment. I think there was an interest in keeping it in a more frantic, broken-up, moving quickly, vibe. We talked about those types of radio transitions, it was kind of like a really clear way to talk about it - so it kept us on task in a way.

Where did you pick up the fragments of broadcasts on the album?

Geologist: YouTube a lot of the times. They were older recordings of people’s cassette tapes from when they were younger, not ours personally but some people’s on the Internet. Josh [Deakin] got some from a little radio he had.

Deakin: Brian [Geologist] and I took a trip. We were on a boat in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico. I had a shortwave radio with me and I picked up a bunch of stuff from South East Asia and some of it came from Mexico.

So if the Centipede has a frequency, have you settled on what it is?

Deakin: Yeah, but we can’t tell you. (Laughs)

Avey Tare: We were visiting these crazy car collectors and one of the guys used to be Janis Joplin’s bodyguard and is friends with the studio manager - they collect guitars and crazy instruments. They have one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar amps for example. And they were talking about a frequency that was taken away from the Bible and rearranged. It was in the original scale and it’s a frequency of harmony that if a certain amount of people sang it at the same time, hummed the note, then all this great change would happen.

Deakin: I wish I could remember what it was called because that’s the name of their band I think too.

Avey Tare: Maybe that’s the frequency.

Deakin: (Laughs) As you can see we’ve already forgotten it.

Apparently there’s a ‘wet-note’, a frequency that agitates the female clitoris. I used to DJ with a guy who was determined to find it and play it beneath his DJ sets in clubs.

Deakin: You mean the resonant frequency of the clitoris? What did he think it was? Did he ever find it?

He thought it was 22hz. But I don’t recall seeing swathes of females having orgasms in front of the DJ booth.

Deakin: (Laughs) That’s low.

Then there’s the ‘brown-note’ of course, which makes people involuntarily shit themselves.

Avey Tare: What’s that frequency?

Deakin: It’s higher, maybe forty? I don’t know.

Do you harbour a fantasy that other life-forms will be listening to ‘Centipede Hz’?

Geologist: Yeah. I always thought that. I’ve had a radio show and I like the idea that if you’ve been on the radio and you skip out into the atmosphere and there’s a part of your energy that’s physical, that [the sound would transmit infinitely] until it bumps into something or somebody hears it. I like the idea that no-one would hear it and it would just go on forever.

What’s the best rumour you’ve ever heard about your band?

Geologist: That Panda Bear used to play basketball with Tupac!

Panda Bear: That I was buddies with him when I was young. He grew up in Baltimore.

Geologist: I think my sister actually went to high school around the same time at the School for the Arts in Baltimore that he did.

Panda Bear: Unfortunately for me it’s not true, and fortunately for Tupac.

‘Centipede Hz’ was written in Baltimore but with you all living in different places, so how much of a Baltimore album actually is this?

Avey Tare: It’s hard to say because we wrote the album in Baltimore.

Geologist: But we recorded it in Texas. I think of it more as a California record.

Panda Bear: I think that if you put the same room that we wrote this and the same room we recorded in anywhere else it probably would have sounded the same.

With the album being denser than previous how much discussion did you have over album architecture?

Avey Tare: Architecturally it feels like it’s more inside of space or a spaceship. It’s more grounded somewhere not so expansive. Previously we used this term ‘Merriweather’, that to us is hearing music drift off from a stage out into the atmosphere. It was definitely not that kind of thing, it was more visceral and right in your face. I think for certain songs Ben [Allen] our producer played a large part coming from a more song-writing side of the music world. He was like, ‘Well you have all this stuff in this song, maybe it could be organised or mixed in such a way where things are spaced out and you can actually hear this part of the song?’ I think, for us, we’re so familiar with the song side of it sometimes but because we’re also interested in the environmental side and the sonic side we’ll focus on that and just always think anyone can hear the song in there - so it takes somebody like Ben to be like, ‘No, I think you need to organise it more like this and this’, and then the song really comes out. It really helps to have Ben there in the discussion to get the architecture and figure out the way it’s mixed.

Geologist: I actually don’t think we wanted it to be as dense as it was. But we didn’t want it to be airy. We wanted it to be more confined, direct space, but we talked about making it more of a minimal, almost like a Silver Apples [record]. There’s only a few elements but they’re still really energetic.

It’s good to hear Deakin back. But it’s very interesting to note how few established bands can be so relaxed about having such flexible boundaries of who is in the band. It’s rare to have such malleable or porous roles.

Avey Tare: For better or for worse it’s always been accepted for us no matter what level of success we’ve had that we’re as comfortable as a two-piece as we are as being four. I feel it’s just being confident that we’re doing the right thing and it’s working the best way possible. I feel if there was more times when it was harder and a bit of a struggle we wouldn’t keep on doing it.

What’s the secret behind the longevity of Animal Collective?

Deakin: I think some of it’s just been luck, like sticking to our guns in situations where generally a lot of other forces in the world would have suggested doing things otherwise.

Geologist: Earlier in an interview one magazine just wanted to go album by album and have us talk about each of our ten full-lengths, retelling the story. A lot of it was like, ‘Man, that sounds terrible!’ That experience of that tour or getting tired of each other and then for unexplained reasons, we never really had a reason, we decided to get back together and start up again. I was listening to the whole thing unfold and I guess we just like playing together. It’s really as simple as that because there were so many times when it was like, ‘That should have been the end right there!’ But a few months went by and we wanted to play together again.

For all the new fans of the band reading this, can you all go round the table and reveal what you think the band member next to you is best at in the band?

Panda Bear: Avey Tare is best at song writing and singing.

Avey Tare: And Panda Bear drumming and song writing.

Deakin: Geologist really accentuates the environments of songs and he figures out what the core sonic environment is in the song and really brings it out.

Geologist: [In superhero voice] I’m The Accentuator!

Panda Bear: He’s the bass man for this record too.

Deakin: He’s the Geddy Lee of this record. Minus the voice.

Geologist: Deakin’s guitar playing. I think he’s one of the best musicians in the band and adds a layer of melody that you never knew would be in the song.

We’re going heavy on psychedelic imagery for this cover in homage to your music. So who is the biggest tripper in the band?

Avey Tare: That would definitely be a big fight between me and Geologist. (Laughs)

Geologist: Definitely.

Deakin: Panda Bear and I are a distant third and fourth. I’m third and Panda Bear is fourth. But we’re distant here.

Avey Tare: We’re more recreational, those guys, not so much.

Deakin: I like my psychedelic experiences spaced out and poignantly important.

Geologist: Even if you and I [to Avey Tare] were equal there’s the one time you went to the mall and told me you didn’t find any and lied to me.

Avey Tare: Yeah, I was with another friend and we went walking around looking for acid. We were lucky to grow up in a time when rave was so prominent on the East Coast and the flood of acid would come into the suburbs and so you could get it at the mall pretty much. So we’d hang out there a lot (laughs). Any time you went there. So we’d always hang out at the mall. We went to this concert to see Pavement and wanted to take some acid but my friend and I got some and there wasn’t enough for some other people to take.

Geologist: He didn’t tell me until later that night that he’d been on it all day. He held it pretty well.

When the band first formed did you write and rehearse on psychedelics?

Avey Tare: I think I remember trying to play music once towards the end of a trip and thinking we were at Brian’s house in the basement.

Geologist: You and I did ‘Traction’.

Avey Tare: I remember thinking, ‘This is kind of gross. I can’t do this, playing this instrument.’ It was more just listening to music. We would do that all the time.

If you had to give ‘Centipede Hz’ a colour what would it be?

All: Orange!

Avey Tare: Orange and pink would be the most dominant colours. Also like monochrome black and white, like a burnt-out old sci-fi film or something.

And do you use colours as reference points when writing?

Avey Tare: Yes.

Geologist: It feels good.

Avey Tare: I think we use visual references more than anything.

Panda Bear: If we could say all that technical information then sometimes it may be quicker in some cases, but we don’t really know how to do that.

Deakin: It’s the most common form for talking about how to arrange a song, creating an image. We’ll talk about visual, emotional and psychological type ways of what a song should feel like or what a part should… evoke. It’s really awkward for us to watch us as a band that’s been playing music as long as we have and all of us having classical training as children to be like, ‘I’m not sure what key this song is in, but I think you’re supposed to play an A here.’ ‘No, it’s not an A, try an F.’

Panda Bear: That’s my example. You could be like, ‘I want it to be more like the trunk of a tree’ when you could be like, ‘Just try and play an E.’ (Laughs)

So why should people get psychedelic at least once in their lives?

Deakin: To me the idea of psychedelia is what I associate most with my childhood experiences and it’s something I’ve tried in different ways as I’ve grown older to carry with me. I think as you grow older a lot of things change in terms of what you need to think about in your daily life and how you deal with things, and your experiences as a child - that’s psychedelic. That question is about keeping certain avenues in your perception open whether it comes to art or music or more - even just daily activities and what it means to move about in the world. To me that’s what psychedelia is and it’s actually a very child orientated way of doing things. It’s an appreciation of making music in which all the elements have a lot of blurred edges or ways that sounds and ideas cross and meld to create something new. And it’s something that might feel different depending on how you’re viewing it and at what moment you’re viewing it in - and I think that’s something that solely carries through all of our music.