Collected Animals

In another unorthodox move, Animal Collective eschew sequencing in favour of triggering their samples live, in an effort to lend their electronic elements a looser, more human feel. "That was the game plan from the get‑go,” says Allen. "For me, that was so challenging technically. They're all playing samples and sequences and recorded material with no synchronisation protocol between any of their machines whatsoever. They've created all these loops on their little samplers and they play them just like a guitar player would play in time with a drummer.

"So we would start by figuring out what was the most rhythmic layer of the song. Each guy would play their parts down once — and there might be seven minutes of this — so everything in that sense was recorded live. We wouldn't put a loop into the computer and then copy it in Pro Tools. However many samples were in each machine, that's how many passes we would have to do. And they're the synchronisers. It just happened to be that they're playing loops.”

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Elsewhere, if a specific sound from an original demo sketch was considered too tricky to recreate, it would be spun into the master recording. "The acoustic guitar on 'In The Flowers' was the original recording that Dave did into his Roland [VS]1680 in New York,” Allen recalls. "We imported it off of his machine. I tried to talk them out of that as much as possible, but sometimes they're really particular about the way things sound. They really like the sounds they've already gotten and getting them away from that could be difficult sometimes, for better or for worse.”