Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist explain how they went about making their strange, delightful new album Painting With.
Hisham Bharoocha / Abby Portner
Animal Collective have been an unconventional and idiosyncratic band since the late '90s, when a collaboration between Dave "Avey Tare" Portner and Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox evolved into a larger group including Brian "Geologist" Weitz and Josh "Deakin" Dibb. The band's membership is in a state of permanent flux, with the core four members working in various permutations depending on the project. Painting With, the group's 10th studio album, was made by Portner, Lennox, and Weitz — the same lineup that created their widely acclaimed 2009 breakthrough album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. In this interview conducted in December of 2015, the group explains how they reinvented their distinct sound all over again by setting aside guitars, singing unusual syncopated harmonies, and deciding to only write short, snappy songs.
The impression I've had from you guys is that you always start with a set of constraints when you go into a new record. How did you arrive at the elements to focus on with this new album?
Dave Portner: It's a little bit of constraints, but it's also guidelines too. It's the best of both worlds. I think with this album in particular we wanted to have more constraints than we ever really had before, so we set limits. We wanted it to be more minimal than anything we'd done. Whenever we make a record, or at least the past couple, we talk a lot about whose responsibility it is to do certain things, like cover the low end.
Going into writing the songs I wrote, I just wrote everything over one bass line or melodic line and left the space open for these guys to do the parts that weren't there.
Noah Lennox: We wanted something really crude, rhythmically speaking. That was a target which sorta dictated some of the rules.
There's no guitar on this?
DP: Yeah, this is the first record we've done that has no guitar on it.
Brian Weitz: Not even sampled guitar.
DP: There's some santur on it; that's the closest thing. It's like a Persian dulcimer.
Is that part of why Josh Dibb isn't on the record, since he mainly plays guitar?
BW: No, that wasn't really one of our guidelines. Maybe at some point we realized that it was guitar-less and that was cool, but it wasn't because of him.
NL: It was not a reaction to him not being on the record.
BW: The lineup was kinda set before we started working on material.
DP: Noah hasn't really used guitar for a song in a long time.
NL: Well, there was the Tomboy stuff.
DP: Oh, yeah. For me it was just like, I had just done a pretty heavy guitar record with the Slasher Flicks thing and there was enough of it on Centipede Hz that I was ready for a change. You just do something for a while and need a break from it. This time we didn't really decide to be more electronic, it was just the most practical way of achieving these types of songs.
NL: A lot of these songs seem more rock to me.
Did you want to make a more minimalist record as a reaction to Centipede Hz, since that record has a very thick sound?
DP: Yeah. I think even with Centipede Hz we wanted it to be this live-sounding thing, but then it just became something else when we went in the studio. So this time it was like, let's make sure it's what we originally wanted.
BW: We actually wanted Centipede Hz to be minimal, where Noah is just gonna play drums, Dave will play keyboards, Josh will play guitar, and I'll play samples. Going in, we thought it'd be that minimal, like a garage band. But we all love effects and playing so much that it didn't turn out that way. The overdub process is very seductive for us.
And you intentionally wanted the songs to be shorter, right. What guided you toward that?
DP: I think it was easier to do because we didn't do the songs live, and when we start with it as a live thing, it's a lit