Animal Collective
Animal Collective is an American experimental pop band formed in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its members consist of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin. The band's work is characterized by an eclectic exploration of styles, including psychedelia, freak folk, noise, and electronica, with the use of elements such as loops, drones, sampling, vocal harmonies, and sound collage. AllMusic's Fred Thomas suggests that the group "defined the face of independent experimental rock during the 2000s and 2010s."
The band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age. In 1999, they established the record label Paw Tracks, issuing what is now considered their debut album, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, as well as work by other artists. The band's 2007 album Strawberry Jam was their first to chart on the Billboard 200. Their 2009 follow-up Merriweather Post Pavilion was the band's most commercially successful album, reaching No. 13 on the US chart; its reverb-heavy psychedelic pop sound proved highly influential to independent music of the subsequent decade.
Records released under the name "Animal Collective" may include contributions from any or all of its members. Evolving from early collaborations between Lennox and Portner, the collective was not officially established until all four members came together for the 2003 album currently titled Ark. Most prior collaborations between the band members were then retroactively classified under Animal Collective's discography. In the case of Dibb, who often takes breaks from recording and performing with the band, his time off does not constitute full leave.
History
Origins and early influences
Animal Collective grew out of childhood friendships in Baltimore County. Noah Lennox and Josh Dibb met in the second grade at the Waldorf School of Baltimore and became good friends. After the eighth grade, Lennox went away to a Waldorf high school in Pennsylvania, while Dibb enrolled at The Park School of Baltimore, where David Portner had studied since grade school. In 1993, Brian Weitz moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore County and began attending Park as well, becoming friends with Portner. According to Lennox, they attended "progressive" schools that emphasized creativity, imagination and artistic self-expression as part of "a complete kind of education". Weitz and Portner started playing music together at the age of fifteen because of their shared love of the band Pavement and horror movies. Their musical range included cover songs by Pavement and The Cure as well as the songs "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe and "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks.When Portner and Weitz met Dibb later in high school, they started an indie rock band called Automine with schoolmates Brendan Fowler and David Shpritz, being the only ones they knew who wrote their own songs. "We set up a show with four bands—bands that were different formations of us", Portner remembered in an interview with Baltimore City Paper. At that time, the group did not have any contact with the music scene in Baltimore and "was more about the back porch." In 1995, Automine self-released their first and only record, the 7-inch-single Paddington Band. Around that time, they also had their first experiences with psychedelic drugs like LSD and started to improvise while playing music.
The four started to discover psychedelic rock bands like Can and Silver Apples, as well as local experimental groups such as Climax Golden Twins and Noggin. Meanwhile, Dibb had introduced Lennox to Portner and Weitz, and the four of them began playing music in different group lineups, producing several home recordings and swapping them and sharing ideas. Using a drum machine for the first time, Weitz and Portner started a duo named Wendy Darling, whose sound was inspired by soundtracks of horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Shining, especially György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki.
In 1997, Lennox and Dibb both went off to college in the Boston area, and Portner and Weitz attended schools in New York City. Lennox and Dibb assembled Lennox's debut album, Panda Bear, during this time from the multitude of recordings Lennox had made in the previous years and established the label Soccer Star Records to release it.
2000–2009
''Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished''
Abhorring the new life as a student at NYU, Portner, along with Weitz, returned to Maryland every summer to meet Lennox and Dibb and play music together. At that time Portner was also working on a record, which eventually became Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished. Portner asked Lennox to play drums on the record and they recorded them along with piano and acoustic guitars in the summer of 1999. The rest of the year, Portner returned to Maryland on weekends to record overdubs and finish the mixing. It was finally released in the following summer under the name Avey Tare and Panda Bear. Soccer Star morphed into the Animal label, with the intention of putting out music that came from the four musicians.In parallel with his environmental policy and marine biology studies, Weitz hosted a noise show at WKCR, Columbia's college radio station. On weekends, he and Portner borrowed avant-garde music records and listened to them all night at Weitz's dorm room which rapidly broadened their musical horizon.
In the summer of 2000, the four friends spent several months at Portner's apartment in downtown New York City intensely playing music together using antiquated synthesizers, acoustic guitars, and household objects. According to Lennox, in this summer the basis for all of Animal Collective's later music was created. However, all recordings of this period were stolen when Portner changed apartments and packed up the car the night before he moved.
While studying, Dave Portner organized shows at New York University for a while. In class, he met and became friends with Eric Copeland, and Portner organized a show for Copeland's band Black Dice. In 2000, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished was finished, Lennox and Dibb left school in Boston and moved to New York, and the group's music became much more collaborative in nature. After introducing Lennox to Copeland, Portner and Lennox played their first show together in New York at The Cooler with Dogg and Pony, The Rapture and Black Dice in late summer of 2000.
This was also the first time they wore makeup and masks, which later became a prominent characteristic of the group's live performances. From there on, Portner wore a mask for the first two years of the group performing. Lennox wore a panda hood on his head and later put face paint on; throughout the Europe tour in early 2004 he wore a white wig and went by the name Edgar. Dibb performed masked during the Here Comes the Indian tour. On the Australia tour in November 2006 and inspired by Halloween, they wore masks for the last time. According to Portner, the reason for disguising was to "help us be more relaxed and find an easier place in that other world we wanted people to join us in." They eventually stopped because they felt like it could become "too gimmicky" and distract from the music, although Weitz still sports a head lamp at live performances, as he did from the beginning.
''Danse Manatee'', ''Campfire Songs'', and ''Here Comes the Indian''
After Portner and Lennox had played clubs around New York in twos, Weitz came on board in the end of 2000 and began performing with them. Much of the live material from this time eventually was on Danse Manatee. Danse Manatee was released in 2001 under the name of Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist. The trio would also occasionally use the name Forest Children when performing live during this period.Notably, the close friendship with Black Dice has been a major influence throughout the group's career. In the summer of 2001, Black Dice took them as support on their first tour, which was captured on the 2002 live album Hollinndagain. It was released by St. Ives, a boutique label run by Secretly Canadian which releases limited edition vinyl only records. Limited to 300 copies, each of which featured a one-of-a-kind handmade cover, Hollinndagain is among the rarest of Animal Collective artifacts. It was re-released, both on CD and vinyl, on October 31, 2006, through the Paw Tracks label.
At this point, Dibb began to perform with the group. The next album to be released was Campfire Songs, again working with Catsup Plate in 2003. The Campfire Songs concept and some of the material dated back to the earliest Avey Tare and Panda Bear shows in New York. Recorded live in 2001 on Portner's aunt's screened-in porch in Monkton, Maryland, the record is one take of five songs played straight through. Attempting to make a record as warm and inviting as a campfire, the band recorded their performance straight to minidisc, with one recorder outside to grab the ambient sound of the environment. Field recordings of the surrounding area were also added. The original album is out of print but Paw Tracks reissued it on January 26, 2010.
After this recording session, they began to work on new material that was later released on Here Comes the Indian. It was at this time when they began to face serious problems within the group. In early 2002, they went on their first big tour which took them to the South of the US. Of this time, Portner said, "We all lost our minds on that tour". Right before their next tour in summer, Weitz got the message that he was accepted to his first choice graduate school in Arizona. After three chaotic days on the road with their tour van breaking down, equipment getting damaged, struggles with a lack of money, the tour was about to be cancelled. On the Collected Animals message board, Weitz wrote, "At that point we all knew we'd get back from tour, record the songs, and then we needed space from each other, and we still had more than 2 weeks left on the road".
Worrying that Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin and Geologist would be too long-winded a moniker, and with record companies advising that a unifying name would be necessary for the marketplace, the group decided to adopt a catch-all name. Using their old label of Animal as inspiration, they picked "Animal Collective". This formation was intended to be different from a straightforward band, giving the musicians the freedom to work in combinations of two to four, as dictated by the project at hand or their mood. Their first entry under this name was Here Comes the Indian, which was released in 2003 by their newly formed record label, Paw Tracks, formed with Carpark Records' Todd Hyman. Animal Collective makes decisions on what Paw Tracks is to release, while Hyman runs the day-to-day operations. The Animal label was abandoned upon the formation of Paw Tracks. Here Comes the Indian was the first record to feature all four of Animal Collective.
After the two releases in 2003 attracted attention, Black Dice introduced the group to the Fat Cat Records label. The first Fat Cat release from Animal Collective was a double disc package of Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished and ''Danse Manatee.''