Even before the smallest parts become something like a song in Animal Collective, an atmosphere has to be filtered out. The band then works hard to orient themselves on this fluid basis, because the recording process turns out to be a creative chaos that is sometimes difficult to control for the collective, which has been experimenting with musical styles, textures and forms of expression since their formation in 1999.
“Each song has a different handwriting and comes from a different person,” says Josh Dibb aka Deakin in a Zoom conversation with colleague Noah Lennox (Panda Bear). “We approach our music very instinctively, but we orientate ourselves on a kind of guideline that has been set beforehand.” With four musicians who otherwise pursue demanding solo projects, the loose threads have to be held together as a team.
Introverted songs
This can also mean that a song is assembled from two, like “Prester John”, the first single from the new Animal Collective record. It consists of a track by David Portner, known by the stage name Avey Tare and responsible for the band’s pointed lyrics, and Panda Bear. Even though there has always been something to be heard from the sound-changing artists who were musically socialized in Baltimore, “Time Skiffs” is the first new album in half a decade. With its allusion to sailing, the title already indicates the travel movement that these nine meditative, mostly surprisingly introspective pieces make – and which reflect the maturation process of the musicians.
“These songs have become like time machines for us,” says Panda Bear, referring to the musicians having become “seasoned dudes” with family lives. This prevented the regular meeting in a very profane way, quite apart from the corona pandemic, which made the recording process for the new record more difficult. Nevertheless, most of the pieces had already been created before. But they draw their attraction from a live sound that has not yet been worked out with such clarity for Animal Collective, which almost pushes back the “digital sound” of the last albums.
The opener “Dragon Slayer” begins with bright bells, in “Walker” (an unusual nod to Scott Walker) a marimba seems to ring out, and in general the band put a lot of emphasis on percussive elements, even if the synthesizer only ends was made to imitate certain instruments. Deakin: “The whole album should have its own rhythm. That also gives the songs a very hopeful note and it shows how important music is to us as a means of conveying moods.”
Before the band met together in a house to jam for some time in the summer of 2020, many parts were put together over a distance and finally united into a very organic-sounding whole by the delicate producer Marta Salogni. Volume and the sound of the instruments played a major role, says Panda Bear. “We left everything synthetic behind to make it a little more earthy.”
The sound is once again crucial
A lot of value was placed on studio technology and the alignment of microphones. This can be heard clearly on “Strung With Everything” when the band seems to be glued to the mic together with pounding drums in the last third, singing themselves into ecstasy. This could have been a holdover from a Beatles “White Album” session.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with Dave over the years about the sound of ’60s jazz records,” says Deakin, explaining the inspiration for this style. And what contributes to these sequence pieces that still seem outrageous and now also sail in the direction of ambient? Panda Bear: “People hear so many origins that it’s hard to talk about. The truth is, if something sounds too much like a certain influence, it goes straight into the bin.”
Never before have the perfectionists from Animal Collective sounded so relaxed and at ease, perhaps never so amazed by themselves, as on this album.
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