WHEEL ME OUT - Animal Collective

Animal Collective’s visual album ODDSAC drips like a sacrificial lamb from the unfettered mind of long-time visual collaborator and filmmaker, Danny Perez. Humming with unsettling primordial gravitas, this vampiric bakkheia is not without its own preposterous sense of humour. It is a labour of pure indulgence; a mesmeric foray into the dynamics between sound and visuals. It’s also a bit of fun. Wheel caught up with Dave Portner (AKA Avey Tare) of Animal Collective at his home in Brooklyn to discuss.

By Melissa Osborne

It took four years to make ODDSAC. Did your creative intentions waiver along the way? It was frustrating to have to step away from it all the time because we have other things going on – we made two other records in the time that it took to make ODDSAC. So there were definitely times when we got scared that it wasn’t going to happen. But really our intention was just to make something that we were really psyched on and that we’d want to watch.

Does ODDSAC stand on its own in relation to other Animal Collective albums? Totally. I feel like so much of it is influenced by Danny’s work. Some of it is a shared vision that we talked about, but I feel that all the music is inspired by the visuals – most of what you see comes from Danny’s head. I don’t even delve into a lot of what he’s really trying to say. I know at certain points he’s attempting to subvert ‘normal’ associations that people might have of Animal Collective – childlike fantasies and that kind of thing. But I think the rest of it is really just subconscious outpouring.

Is music always a visual experience for you? Not always. In terms of listening, if I put on an early garage or Beatles track like ‘Love Me Do’, it doesn’t exactly give me a strong visual. But there’s certain music, like the psychedelic music I listened to when I was younger, that definitely gave me a sense of visualising stuff and creating little worlds.

It seems like you all share an interest in the idea of recontextualised abstraction, like collage... This project was a lot like collage. Danny didn’t even know from the beginning what order everything would go in and none of it was ever really played live. We recorded a lot of the sounds in our home studios and pieced it together by sending bits and pieces to each other.

"The Shining was always a big influence for me: making music for its soundtrack, the narrative and the visuals."

Do you think that will inform any future ways of working together? Yeah, well, we did a little bit of that for [2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion], just in terms of demos. And we always record our own sounds at home and take them to the studio... Maybe inform in the sense that we’ve been talking about NOT doing that for the next thing! It would be nice to write when we’re all together in the same place for a while.

I noticed Annie Sachs from Tickley Feather in one of the scenes. Were all the other characters played by friends? That was a scenario that allowed us to meet Annie. She’s a friend of Danny’s from around Philadelphia. Some people are actors that Danny cast, but otherwise they’re all his friends.

Where do you take your influences from and what are you listening to at the moment? Oh, God, all over the place really. The Shining was always a big influence for me: making music for its soundtrack, and just the narrative and the visuals, really. Musically it’s all over the place... Pavement was the reason I started making music. Bands like early Pink Floyd, early Syd Barrett and The Incredible String Band... At the moment I’m listening to a lot of Catherine Ribeiro, a French Prog singer, plus the band Alpes - they did a few albums together... a band called Teengirl Fantasy, they’re a more recent band from Ohio, electronic housey stuff...

What are you up to now? I’m recording some stuff of my own with [Deacon from AC] and hoping to put something out in the fall. The past couple of years with Animal Collective have been pretty intense: going back and forth between writing, recording and touring. It’s the most touring we’ve ever done. WMO

ODDSAC will be available on DVD in the UK 9 August

www.oddsac.com

You can pre-order it here

www.plexi.co.uk