When it came time for a new album, Animal Collective decided to keep it simple – they got together in a barn, turned everything up loud and jammed for a week. "We took everything to the sixth gear," they tell JIM CARROLL
THIS TIME, Animal Collective decided to bring it all back home. This time, unlike previous albums Merriweather Post Pavilion or Strawberry Jam, the band would create the new album with all four of them together in the same room.
Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, the band, close friends since they first met at schools in Baltimore in the 1990s, gathered in a barn out the back of Josh Dibb’s mother’s house and began to play.
“We just jammed and improvised for a week,” explains Dibb. “We didn’t come in with any clear songs so we just decided to get going, jam and start to make sense of the sonic landscape we would be dealing with.
“Pretty quickly, some things became clear from how Noah was playing his drums and the energy from that. I was playing guitar a lot again and Dave was playing his keyboards in a way which was a lot wilder than it has been for a while. By the end of the week, we had a sense about what we were going to do.”
Over the course of nine studio albums and a sprawling set of solo releases and side projects, Animal Collective have never repeated themselves. It means they’ve followed up the warm, hazy electronic breezes of the acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion with an album of cranked-up guitar effects, rollicking garage-band jams and wired-to-the-moon waywardness.
In some ways, that new album Centipede Hz is as much a product of its environment as the band’s mindset going into the barn. “It was such a small space,” remembers Noah Lennox. “I mean, we were really close; I could lean over and touch Josh on the shoulder from where I stood. I think that inspired the gnarliness and volume of the songs. We took everything to the sixth gear.”
“Taking everything to the sixth gear” is a good line to sum up Animal Collective’s instincts on this occasion because Centipede Hz is probably the most maximalist thing Animal Collective have ever put their name to.
When Dibb and Lennox talk about the process behind the album, they paint a picture where there was more, not less, in the mix.
“We knew we wanted to do something which was more performance-based, playing with each other rather than being slaves to the machine as was the case on the last album with loops and sequences,” says Dibb. “This time, we wanted a direct interaction between the musicians.
“The way we set up our individual soundstations was really complicated,” adds Lennox. “Josh had a lot of effects with his guitar and sample pad. Dave [Portner] split up his sound to have three different sound effects coming from the same instrument and signal, so one note would make three different sounds.
“Brian [Weitz] had his samples and the bass which he was working at the same time. My drums had contact microphones on each drum which became anther sound source. Even though there were only four of us playing, there was 10 different sounds being produced. From the get-go, we were going to produce a very dense sound.”
One noticeable aspect of the new album is the way radio noises and signals punctuate the tracks. Those sounds were partly inspired by Dave Portner’s brother, who was a DJ on a Top 40 station in Baltimore during the 1980s.
“I don’t think we were doing it in any nostalgic, reminiscent way,” says Dibb, “but we were picking up on what radio used to mean to us. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was good radio in Baltimore and it was a source of where to go to find music.”
“Our connection to music always came via the radio,” adds Lennox. “We’d listen to classic rock and top-40 stations in high school.”
It’s a different matter now. “I don’t think radio as I used to know really exists any more,” says Dibb. “It’s very homogenous and all the stations more or less play the same thing and it’s very frustrating and repetitive.
“The internet killed radio because it became the place where I’d go to find music and see what was happening. Stuff like Spotify and podcasts have this potential which is really exciting and is replicating the way old DJ shows used to work when you gravitated towards someone you knew had taste.”
Lennox feels the internet has also altered the process of discovery in other ways. “The thing I feel which has been totally lost, which is a real shame, is someone shoving music in front of you which you haven’t heard and isn’t maybe your thing. You have to be forced to deal with it. That’s when radio was really awesome. You have this perception that the internet opens your eyes and mind to all this different stuff, but it’s also closing down views and opinions.”
At this juncture, most bands would be fretting about how to recreate the complexity of the new songs in a live show but, as we know from experience, plugging songs from the album they’ve just released is not Animal Collective’s way. When people go to see them play in the coming months, they’re unlikely to hear songs drawn diligently from Centipede Hz.
Dibb believes fans know what to expect at this stage. “That process is pretty ingrained and natural for us. The challenge for us is to understand how other people perceive what we do and how to accept that is how it is and people are either going to accept or reject that.
“It’s easier because we have some experience under our belt. For better or worse, we’ve encouraged, if that’s the right word, our core fanbase to understand and accept it. There’s many different tiers of people who are interested in our music, but I think most people who’ve been with us a while get that that is how we’re always going to be. That’s more the relationship we’re interested in as well, to be honest.”
The band themselves know no other way to operate, says Lennox. “When Sung Tongs came out, we played some of the songs live and they sounded nothing like how they did on the record. That has happened pretty continuously since. Even before Strawberry Jam came out, the tours that were happening were Merriweather tours. People were hearing Strawberry Jam and going to the shows and hearing nothing that sounded like that record.”
Yet the band do muse about what it might be like to go back over a decade and more of old records and replay them. “Maybe it’s an idea to try something different,” says Dibb. “We’re the kind of people who like going to a show where you hear music you’ve never heard before, and I know there are people who feel that way.
“But there’s at least half the audience, if not more, who don’t feel that way. They want to go to a show and hear the band spit out the record like they’ve heard it at home. There’s a point when that becomes ridiculous because you can just put the record on at home. I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point, but there’s also an appreciation on our part that people want to have an experience where they feel a connection with the song.”
“But it will be a strange day when the four of us go ‘let’s figure out how we played Feels note for note, get those sounds back and try to recreate that’,” says Lennox
“At a certain point, though, with a certain distance, it could be exciting,” counters Dibb.
“But based on the first 15 or 16 years of our friendship, I can’t see that happening,” says Lennox before smiling. “We prefer looking forward. All the time.”
Centipede Hz is out today on Domino. Animal Collective play Dublin’s Vicar Street on November 6
Artful dodgers: AC at the Guggenheim
LONG-TIME Animal Collective watchers will know about the band’s side-projects and extra-curricular activities, stretching from Noah Lennox’s acclaimed Panda Bear albums to Dave Portner’s Avey Tare releases. Another addition to their bow came in 2010 when the band were invited by the Guggenheim Museum in New York to perform in the space. This being Animal Collective, it turned out to be a performance with a twist.
“For the first time in 50 years, they’d emptied out the main space of the museum with the spiral staircase,” explains Dibb. “They asked us to play a show and we went to them and said we wanted to do a show but not in the way they wanted us to perform.”
Working with longtime visual collaborator Danny Perez, Animal Collective came up with an art sound installation called Transverse Temporal Gyrus.
“Danny designed costumes which me, Dave and Brian wore as we stood as human statues in the main area of the building,” explains Dibb. “We also made a bunch of tracks and worked with a sound design artist to randomly play the music on 36 speakers which stood on the museum’s steps.”
Such projects, says Dibb, are more about profile than profit. “The Guggenheim budget was really high but all the money went into the project and we didn’t make a dime from it. We’re a successful band and we can support ourselves from touring, so we’re into the freedom that something like the Guggenheim project gives us. We don’t look at things like that and wonder how we can use it to bankroll future projects.”
“We got offers to do similar things after that, but our lives and schedules always seem pretty full,” adds Lennox. “We’re going to be doing a lot of touring this year and all the money from that will go into building the kind of stageshow we want to build. I feel we often overextend ourselves in that way. It’s exciting to be able to do it and we’re really blessed to be able to do these other things, but we want the focus to be on how cool they are rather than on how they can make money to pay the bills.”
