[utensilvirus]

This isn't an interview per say...more of a brief history, but I came across this chapter about Animal Collective in the book Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop and wasn't sure where to post it. Here it is if anyone is interested: https://books.google.com/books?id=CcNHQ ... &lpg=PA365

[post]

A few interviews here

[Fovrodi]

Thanks Post! That Sound on Sound one is probably my favorite from [s]the MPP[/s] any era, really in depth*. I'll get these in the op soon.

*I'd say easily the most in depth they go about recording than in any other interview.

[Fovrodi]

Ive never felt more personally attacked by someone I like

wrote:

BYT- Do you watch TV?

JD- I watch a lot of sports. And I’ve gotten into watching series’ on Netflix. I did Lost recently.

Good?

(Pause) I wouldn’t say it was good. It was addictive. I felt dirty when I was finally done. And I literally watched all six seasons in the space of three months.

Why dirty? Just from spending so much time doing one thing? It’s not like you were watching Sex and the City or something.

It’s the kind of thing that’s intriguing enough to be interesting on some level. It’s into alternative figures and a lot of weird, out-there ideas, which is cool. But I feel like it’s on a level where it’s not actually significant. So I feel I got sucked in for those reasons, and then it kind of left me being like, “I didn’t learn anything. It’s really just a soap opera.”

Your expectations for television watching are too high, I think.

Now I’m doing Twin Peaks, which I’d never seen before either. It’s the same thing. Twin Peaks is totally a soap opera.

https://brightestyoungthings.com/articl ... collective

[Chubby_Dork]

Anyone remember which interview it was where they mentioned how they came across an abandoned asylum in the woods? I can't find which interview it was in.

[Fovrodi]

Hmmm, it strikes me as something they would’ve mentioned during Feels era interviews but I can’t find it. I’ll keep looking, it certainly seems familiar

[jetski]

Haven't listened yet but someone on the fb group found an audio interview with Avey and Deakin from 2004. It was on waybackmachine but I re uploaded the file here https://picosong.com/wmRjw/

idk any info about it except it was recorded in Montreal and interview's name is Eric Theriault

edit: actually it might be from 2006 not 2004, not sure

[tulis]

haven't read, don't know if any interviews in it, but

https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/1/ ... -avey-tare

[valar602]

tulis wrote:

haven't read, don't know if any interviews in it, but

https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/1/ ... -avey-tare

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

at the end:

"As for the group’s future, members plan on getting back together sometime in 2019 to work on new material based around a couple of live shows done in New Orleans last year. “We wanted to do something swampy and jazzy,” Weitz said."

[asparagusthelesser]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjT8VNwSf8M

Panda Bear Bouys interview with Double J, full audio recording no longer available on website unfortunately.

[ingenue]

Interview with Sonny DiPerri in the Feb/Mar 2019, Issue No. 129 of Tape Op... some excerpts about working with Animal Collective:

When you produced Animal Collective, you would take a song, deconstruct it, and re-record it with different instruments and arrangements.

I had never worked with an artist like them before. We would record something, let it sit for a few days, and then bring it back up and start to do different versions of it. One version where there's no drums, a version where the guitar is now the keyboard, the bass is now a Moog instead of a Hofner, or vice versa. We called it doing "inversions." It became really, really important to me, and I had never worked like that before. Before the sessions for Painting With, I'd get together with Dave [Portner] and he showed me demos that sounded totally different from where we ended up. They went and jammed those songs on their own, reworked them, and relearned them with all new instruments. They showed those to me; when we got to the studio, we did even more. That turned into doing versions of the songs until we found the right ones.

Can you remember a particular song on that record that changed drastically because of this process?

Oh, yeah. For the first single, "FloriDada," the original version was slower, if I remember correctly. It was almost like a cheapish drum machine with a guitar. If you listen to that song now, it's four-on-the-floor drums with a massive two and four clacking of the backbeat, and it's way faster and way brighter. I remember thinking that I never thought that we would go there with that. A funny fact about the majority of that record that most people don't know is that it's live. They all had these workstations, and the fundamental takes are totally live.

[Fovrodi]

Whoa! What the heck. Wonder if any guitar parts stayed in these songs? Thought there wasn’t any!

[roopn]

That's crazy they're built off live takes

[ingenue]

Man I hope we get to hear the demos or these so-called “inversions” on a 10th anniversary reissue or something. I have days where I think Painting With is their best record. It is hands-down my favorite live era of the band. Those shows blew my pea brain.

[utensilvirus]

New Aussie PB audio interview
https://2ser.com/theres-a-panda-bear-in-there/

[utensilvirus]

Audio interview with Avey and Deakin during the Cows tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sEgikD2uaA

[thebackdrifter]

Avey talking about marijuana

https://www.leafly.com/news/podcasts/an ... ongwriting

[Fovrodi]

Thanks all! Can't wait to listen and I promise I will give a good update to the OP soon.

Dug these up looking for Keep shoes stuff. Haven't seen 'em before. Didn't know this snippet before: "underwater field recordings [...] have made their way into Animal Collective's music for sure. They're all over our Strawberry Jam album" Cool

https://www.sportdiver.com/animalcollective
https://web.archive.org/web/20120521202 ... parid=6060

[denjanenna]

http://songexploder.net/panda-bear

cool feature about 'dolphin'
they play part of the demo and talks about inspiration, recording, etc.....

[Fovrodi]

Oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Basically hear the stems and shiz right?

[baconwizard]

denjanenna wrote:

http://songexploder.net/panda-bear

cool feature about 'dolphin'
they play part of the demo and talks about inspiration, recording, etc.....

Playing “Tezeta (Nostalgia)” and “Dolphin” at the same time sounds good. Someone better than me should mix those songs together.

[Fovrodi]

Bump, came across an interesting MPP breakdown I hadn't seen before.

[speen]

https://reflectivesurfacemag.com/on-the ... avey-tare/

My buddy got a chance to interview Avey after a show! It's a brief interview, but has some interesting insights. check it out

[thebackdrifter]

great little writeup. thanks for sharing

[Tesla]

Does anybody know what interview it was where they were talking about Dave having a fight with Josh as they walked down the street, because Josh hadn’t been practicing, then Dave just yells at Josh, “What do you even do?”

That was a classic and I can’t find it now. This is very early in the bands history fwiw, like pre-Indian I think.

[roopn]

That does not sound real

[Tesla]

I'd definitely read it before, but I'm not sure if it's a real interview. It wasn't framed in a troll-like way, it was framed as a "We went through shitty times together" way, which made it sound real in context.

[Fovrodi]

Sounds more like Black Dice

“I remember I was hanging out with Eric and I think he might have been feeling me out to see if I wanted to be in the band or something. We drank some 40s by the East River and he was just like, ‘what do you want to do with music?’ And I was like ‘Nothing. Like I don’t want to be in a band at all, I’m done with it.’” – Aaron Warren in a 2019 interview with Know Wave

[Hellomark]

No I definitely remember the interview that Tesla is talking about, feel like it might have been a centipede era interview but I'm not sure.

[Stanshant]

I remember making up an apocryphal story like that

[dio]

lol

[dud]

yeah i definitely remember something very similar but it could be a different thing, it was an avey interview from just within the past few years, it was that avey and panda got into a huge fight, not josh, and the reason i believe it was the same instance is that i distinctly remember him saying the fight occurred on the street and it was at the end of the hcti era. avey said noah wrote him some scathing letter which prompted the fight, forget what the letter was regarding, and the fight they got into was so bad that avey thought at the time "whelp there goes the band, we're done." so the fight on the street detail and it being hcti era makes me think that that is what you are thinking of grimes. also vaguely remember something else about josh not showing up to practices, maybe you are combining the two things into one. lemme search the forum for it cause i def saw it on here and not the subreddit

edit: found what i was thinking of, goes to show how shitty my memory is lol whoops i was pretty off, maybe i'm the one combining two things in my head??? i def remember something about people shouting at each other on the street....

thebackdrifter wrote:

Link to the full story: http://floodmagazine.com/63365/animal-c ... orphology/
Never heard about this part:

wrote:

Lennox himself admits that, from the years 2002 to 2009—a time period that practically encompasses the band’s initial rise—he was unsure of AnCo’s longevity. “The band kind of fell apart a number of times,” Portner states, recalling an emotionally charged letter Lennox wrote to him at “a crucial point in our friendship. I remember a big falling-out in our practice space with Noah throwing drumsticks—that was a point where I was like, ‘Oh, it’s over.’”

[Fovrodi]

Never read this before. Goes in depth on his self doubts during SJ & MPP time off

https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/ ... story.html

[asparagusthelesser]

Tesla wrote:

Does anybody know what interview it was where they were talking about Dave having a fight with Josh as they walked down the street, because Josh hadn’t been practicing, then Dave just yells at Josh, “What do you even do?”

That was a classic and I can’t find it now. This is very early in the bands history fwiw, like pre-Indian I think.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=gC ... &q&f=false

might this be what u r on about?

[Fovrodi]

Hell of a find, nicely done!

[thebackdrifter]

New Geo/Flyers feature (not fully animal collective related) I guess Brian has been tracking stats for past Flyer games during quarantine and getting super nerdy about it

https://theathletic.com/1887371/2020/06 ... g-project/


Full article below:

Spoiler: show

Animal Collective’s Brian Weitz lends a helping hand on Flyers tracking project
By Charlie O'Connor Jun 24, 2020

It was November 2017, just a few months after I had accepted a job covering the Flyers for The Athletic. One morning, I noticed an email in my inbox with a generous but unfortunately timed offer: If I was planning to start a full-scale tracking project, a fan named Brian said he would be happy to help.

I’m good for now, I responded. Nothing was in the works, as I was still finding my footing as a beat writer. But I promised him if a large project came up, he’d be the first to know.

The following summer, with the 2017-18 season in the books, I resorted to my favorite time-waster when there’s no Flyers hockey to watch: tweeting random music thoughts. On this occasion, I mentioned my inability to truly click with the music of Animal Collective, one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed indie rock bands of the previous decade.

Not even a week later, Brian responded to the months-old email thread: After my offer to spend some downtime on tour tracking hockey games, he joked, you trash my band on Twitter?

“Brian,” as it turned out, was diehard Flyers fan Brian Weitz, also known as Geologist, electronic sound manipulator for (and one of the four core members of) Animal Collective.

“I just assumed (that) there’s (not) a lot of crossover between hockey fans and Animal Collective fans,” he said in a phone interview this month, explaining why he didn’t reveal his identity from the start. “It didn’t seem worth it.”

We struck up an occasional email correspondence in the aftermath of the amusing misunderstanding. So when the NHL season was paused because of the coronavirus pandemic, and I made the decision to launch an in-depth tracking project centered on the Flyers’ forecheck, Weitz was logically the first person I asked to participate. As it turned out, Weitz was just as excited to try it as he had been in late 2017.

“I was just curious — what would I learn from actually doing the tracking?” he said. “Would I see things differently when I watched the games? It just seemed like a good use of time and a way to learn.”

Animal Collective, for the less musically inclined, is one of the indie rock community’s best-known bands of the past 20 years. The four primary members met in Baltimore County in high school and, after years of working together on various projects, officially constituted the group in the early 2000s.

They quickly earned a growing fan base and critical acclaim for their sound, which spanned multiple styles but often was placed into the catch-all genres of psychedelia and experimental pop. By the mid-to-late 2000s, they were one of the biggest indie rock bands in the world. Their commercial peak, the 2009 album “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” hit No. 13 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, topped numerous “best-of” lists and even ranked 14th on influential webzine Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the 2000s list.

To date, Animal Collective has released 11 albums under its moniker, with Weitz part of the active personnel for eight of them. But long before Weitz adopted the Geologist nickname, and long before his family moved to Baltimore County and he met his future bandmates, he was already a hardcore Flyers fan.

It was the goalie position that first intrigued Weitz. Ron Hextall, in part because of his unique ability to score goals despite being stationed at the opposite end of the rink, was an early favorite. By third-grade summer camp, Weitz was playing street hockey, and by the 1988-89 season, his family and two others were splitting Flyers season tickets. In his younger days, Weitz played at the Bucks County Ice Sports Center (then called The Face Off Circle) in Warminster, Pa. Hockey had hooked him, so much so that after his family relocated in 1993 after his eighth-grade year and he could no longer catch Flyers games on television, Weitz would check the box scores every morning to keep tabs on the Orange & Black during the early Eric Lindros years.

Weitz’s fandom held up as he entered adulthood and dove into a career as a full-time musician. He even wrote briefly for Sports Illustrated about the intersection between hockey and music. But it wasn’t until he appeared on a May 2016 episode of the “Puck Soup” podcast — then hosted by Greg Wyshynski (now of ESPN) and Dave Lozo — that he resolved to start paying attention to the sport’s burgeoning analytics movement. Off-air, the topic of advanced stats and Corsi came up. Weitz joked that he didn’t know what those words meant, and that he had considered diving deeper but probably was just going to stick with plus/minus.

“Those two guys, who are both older than me by a couple years, I think, and I expected were old-school hockey fans that grew up watching in the ’80s like I did, they just laughed at me,” he recalled, laughing. “They were just like, ‘Get the fuck out of here, you serious? Plus/minus?’ And I was just embarrassed.

“I was like, ‘I never want to be around hockey people again where this comes up and I can’t at least hang in the conversation,’ and I get laughed out of the room for saying I still believe in plus/minus. So that was a watershed moment, where I (said), ‘All right, I’m just going to go home and look up these words.’”

Weitz began to pick up the concepts, largely through Flyers-centric, advanced-stats-filled articles on Broad Street Hockey written by one Charlie O’Connor. Which was why, after subscribing to The Athletic and seeing a comment of mine saying that certain questions about players and teams could be answered only through time-intensive tracking projects, Weitz offered his services via email.

Three years later, Weitz remained interested. As his knowledge of advanced stats had expanded, so did his curiosity about the tactical side of the game, as he explored writers such as Justin Bourne, who in between writing gigs had worked for two years as a video coach for the Toronto Marlies.

“Just in a weird alternate-life story in my head, I thought, what would it have been like (to be a hockey video coach)?” Weitz said. “Maybe you have to play hockey (at a high level) to do that. But that’s an interesting job. I would like to do that for a year. I’ve bounced around to different careers in my life, and it just sounded like a fun one.

“And when you offered the tracking project, it sorta sounds like what I imagined a video coach does. Let’s live that life during the pandemic.”

Weitz started in late March and quickly took to the tracking project. Originally given the option to merely record the times of each Flyers dump-in during his assigned set of games, Weitz ultimately chose to track every data point in the project. He discovered it was an ambitious undertaking.

“(There were) those moments when you see an event, but you say, ‘Oh, but I didn’t catch who F3 was, I have to rewatch it,’” he recalled. “I made some system with my hands; my left hand tracked shots and my right hand tracked failed exits. My wife would just see me moving my fingers around, and I would have to pause it with my elbow and look at my fingers.”

In addition, tracking games wasn’t Weitz’s only duty during the pandemic-driven lockdown. Weitz lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children, a fourth-grader and a kindergartner. During the lockdown, Weitz’s wife — a schoolteacher — spent the bulk of her days teaching students remotely. That left Weitz tasked with guiding the remote schooling of his two children.

“I’m a terrible teacher,” he said, laughing. “It’s such an irony that my kids had to be homeschooled, and my wife is an incredible teacher and she couldn’t teach them at all. They just had to be left with me.”

Music, of course, remained a focus. But with all four band members confined to their homes, practicing in the same space was impossible, as was recording Animal Collective’s planned 12th full-length album in the studio. As a result, music productivity was limited to composing in isolation, long-distance collaborations and virtual improvisation sessions.

Tracking hockey games, strangely enough, filled a glaring void for Weitz as a de-stressor, which was especially important during a stressful time.

“My wife had a phrase for it, (that) I felt very present but also very turned off at the same time (while tracking),” he explained. “I meditate every day, (or) I tried to when my family was out of the house and I was just working from home before the pandemic. And I haven’t been able to do it since the quarantine, and I really missed it. And this almost (replaced) my meditation practice.”

Weitz also eventually found a tracking system that worked for him. At the start, he felt obligated to set daily goals for himself — such as tracking an entire game. But soon he discovered a healthier and more efficient way of completing the project: He’d use tracking as a way to decompress after a draining teaching session with his kids or a frustrating music session.

“There were moments when I would work (on music) for an hour and I would hate everything I did, and be really down on myself, and, in the past, I would go in the backyard and pace around or something,” Weitz said. “But I found that the tracking was super helpful in resetting my brain — my creative side of my brain.

“Instead of getting upset with myself, I would just be like, ‘All right, just go track. Just do a period. And then come back to music.’”

By the project’s conclusion in late May, Weitz’s sense of earned accomplishment belied a strange feeling of sadness that the tracking had ended.

“It was very meditative. … It really helped replace the practice of breathing and trying to be present,” he said. “Tracking hockey is insanely calming for me.”

With the project complete, Weitz is back to serving as a long-distance musician and, with homeschooling finished (for now), summer father.

But he believes he has a better understanding of the team he loves, and potentially, the game as a whole. Over time, previously under-the-radar players began to stand out to Weitz as impact contributors to the Flyers’ success on the forecheck.

“(Nicolas Aubé-Kubel) was in all the time, and just relentless,” he said. “And he’s a great forechecker. If you’re just watching on TV while you’re also looking at your phone or something, you may miss that. I also spent most of the season not really noticing Tyler Pitlick, and he was hard not to notice during this tracking project.”


That said, Weitz acknowledged the inherent limitations of an outside tracking project — namely, odd camera angles, and the knowledge gap that exists between the tracker and the tactical directives of a team’s coaching staff.

“To me, it seems like the positioning of a forward based on where the puck is and where his teammates are and the kind of support he has to give — you can’t always see that from the feed that we’re watching,” he said. “Because I felt like, yes, I would notice a lot of the little things — or, I’m trying to see the little things, and it’s really hard to do with the angle that I’m seeing a lot of times.

“And I think I just need to be more educated, too, on what the coaches are looking for. (I’ve asked), ‘What qualifies as a successful forecheck?’ I’m still not really sure. A goal, great. Shot attempts, great. A lot of zone time, great. But how does that relate to the forecheck? I don’t really know. And I assume it’s related to some kind of system that the coach puts in place. If the puck’s here, F2 does this, F3 does this. But I’m ignorant of those things, at least at the present.”

But don’t take that frank admission as frustration with tracking projects. Not only could Weitz see himself working on another in the future, but he’d also be excited to work on them regularly, with writers in the public sphere or even for teams.

“I love this,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a second career or anything, but I like having my mind focused on different things throughout the day. (It’s) definitely something I would like to focus more on.”

[jfw7]

lol that owns

[tuvin diesel]

Bandcamp published A Brief Guide to Animal Collective, which despite the name, is actually a quasi-interview of sorts: the band members provide the blurbs for each album, which typically veer into their creative process, praising each other's song writing, or other anecdotes. Nothing revelatory but it's a fun read.

[Stanshant]

I love that, nothing necessarily revelatory but it's always a delight to hear them talk about their music. No matter which recordings push my buttons more or less, I have unending respect for their creative approach and their integrity. It's taken me about ten years to reach this point but I love almost everything they've done in its own way.

[Tropic]

Noah is a man of few words. Cool that they got the idea for CHz from a dj set in Belfast, norn iron