Collected Animals

I forgot Water Curses. That record is a spring and summer record in a very wet and green environment in the midst of a city. It's so artificial by design but it's essence is organic and human, much like SJ. The time of day though changes with each song, for sure. For instance, "Water Curses"'s energy is early morning or around noon. It's so fluid and energized and lost in itself. But then "Street Flash" is contrastingly an evening song made for city walks. The sparseness of the mix, building mental chatter sounds, and slipperiness of the rhythm takes me back to lonely summers wandering around Wicker Park and the Loop in Chicago at the end of the day. All the bleeps and bloops sound just like what city lights and signs look like. It's almost as if "Street Flash" is recovering from the elated insanity of "Water Curses". "Cobwebs" is a song to walk to, like "Street Flash", and the ending makes me feel like I've finally reached my destination: a mental state that's a big watery natural oasis in the middle of a concrete city. Lastly, "Seal Eyeing" is perfect for right before/right after napping or just getting out of swimming in a pond. 'Tis a song made for cuddling, too.

AND HOW COULD I FORGET HCTI??? Totally totally a November/late October in the woodlands record. There's so much playfulness with natural space in the songs, which really compliments the abrasive eerie tones they create. It's perfect for being in a forest with bare trees and a squishy undergrowth. If you've never been in such a place, the silence in such a once lively area is completely creepy. It's a like a natural graveyard, and here comes AC luring spirits out of the trees and decaying mulch to haunt the place and play silly tricks on those who enter. I definitely hear a variety of times throughout the day on HCTI, but mostly it's an early morning to midday record, with clear bright skies and a chilly temperatures. Though some of the songs, like "Too Soon" and "Sails", feel like songs played in the winter when it gets dark really early. I used to go behind my old elementary school with a high school buddy whenever I was back in Texas visiting from college where there is a small forest and creek. I went there a lot as a kid, so going back to that place during Christmas break (December in Texas is like October in other places) and hanging in the spots that once held so much wonder and imagination really gave me the same haunting vibe that HCTI elicits.

Might as well touch upon what I call the "Gnome Collection", which is "Baby Day", "Must Be Treeman", and "Fickle Cyle". All of them are mixed similarly and share a vibe that reminds me of little gnomes showing you their quirky psychedelically fairytale world. Being in the woods at any time of the year at any time of day works well, though for me the environment is presented most clearly when I listen inside actively. Sometimes I'll throw in some Feels jams like "Loch Raven" or other songs that have similar trippy forest vibe like "Drone", "Friendship Bracelet" or Deakin's remix of Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero".


Solo and side projects:

Panda Bear's first record, like a lot of his work in my opinion, is a solitary album meant to listen to in isolation or in a time of contemplation. I never found a proper environment to listen it until this summer in Vermont. I was working on a farm (no pun intended) and I found that mid-May up north works fantastic with the record. In the middle of May in Vermont it can still be quite cold, but you'll occasionally get cold spells that make it feel like winter. In my first days I had off we had a snow storm that trapped me in my tiny cabin by myself for two days. I listened to that self-titled so much during that weekend. There's a naivety to those songs that I likened to me being a novice at working a rural lifestyle, but I think you can broaden that feeling to represent a naivety of trying anything new and the exhaustion that comes with it. It's pretty lo-fi, vocally intimate and acoustically driven yet is interspersed with a lot of electronic elements that make you think Noah was really utilizing everything he had available to him, much as how I felt learning to be completely sustainable in my physical and emotional life. There's something deeply personal about the record too that makes it feel like a series of journal entries - there's no specific aim or purpose, it's just a documentation of what's happening. His lyrics really exemplify that, I think. Overall, I believe Panda's self-titled works best on any day where the weather is completely abnormal.

I've always believed AC would make for good Hindus because the band embodies their myths in the way Hindus do in devotion. "Young Prayer" is the epitome of such an example. The record is a work of Nada Yoga, whether actualized or not, and it's the first time to me that an AC work was conspicuously spiritual. I found this record right when I was getting more in touch with my heart and my inner-processes, so I tend to hold it the cleansing light of soul-work. Go listen to Bhagavan Das' "AH" album if you like "Young Prayer" - I like to think of it as "Old Prayer" he he he. YP's album art perfectly captures its essence: it's airy, soft and compassionate, formless, and feminine in vocal performance and in theme. Even the girl on the cover resembles Noah actualizing his anima. The whole record is clean and white, so I like to listen to it in the middle of the day or at dusk after a good cry or getting out of the shower. It's a great autumn record for right when the leaves change, and also in the spring time when you have to let go of winter and start all over. I find YP intriguing too that its lamenting the loss of his father. There's something mythological about it. I believe just as you have to "kill the Buddha", one has to "kill their parents" in order to grow up and be their own person. YP seems to me like an assertion to the masculine figure (i.e. the father) of his own masculinity by showing his inner feminine, if that makes sense.

If YP takes after the Hindu's Nada, then Person Pitch is a take on Indian Ragas and mantra. It's really a record that works year round, but I find it most enjoyable in the early autumn, right when you the air begins to crisp overlapping with the golden haze of summer. I think I've written about my experiences with PP on the old board, but I'll recap a little here. I have a lot of synchronicities with Iceland through music, and one of the earliest ones was with PP. I bought PP at Best Buy my senior year of high school on a whim based off a passing recommendation from a teacher I had. That same teacher also got me into Sigur Rós, which eventually got me into Iceland. "Good Girl/Carrots" and "Comfy" became my jams in the morning before school, and I'd wake up extra early just to drive to school when there's no traffic so I could enjoy driving in the calm mix of autumn to those songs.
In college I would run on the path next to Lake Michigan in Chicago and watch the sun rise at the beach just south of Museum Campus with my buddy. We'd smoke a bowl after running and then welcome the day on the beach in silence. I started listen to music on some of those occasions, and man, PP is the most amazing music to welcome the sun on the beach! There's already strong surfer/zen/chilled out vibes on that record, so watching the sun rise over the water completely stoned made me feel so thankful for life and at one within myself.
Moving on to later in life, I found myself in Iceland. Jesse (Collages on the board) made a reference of the reverbs of PP being like the echoes in a large indoor swimming pools as a kid. Well, I realized this is so true reflecting back to my summer in Iceland last year. Pool culture is very strong in Iceland since they have a plethora of geothermal energy to heat their water, so you'll go to a town of 90 people and you'll have a community pool/sauna where everyone gathers. I worked on farm there and hitchhiked/camped the entirety of the country by my lonesome, and going to the pool was the cheapest way to shower and relax (not to mention I could get away from being outside!). Although I had no CD player or iPod with me, I began to think of the cover of PP while going to these pools. The cover is a National Geographic picture, manipulated obviously, from a story about Iceland in the '60s. I thought how fitting it was I'm now in a hot tub very similar to that album cover in Iceland reconnecting myself to my youth and my emotions and to feeling. There was a time after I waited 7 hours for a ride to the small northern town of Þórshöfn and when I finally got there I went to the pool, which was the biggest building in the town. The way the hot tub is set up is that you're up high looking out at a huge glass window, so while you float in the hot tub you feel like you're floating in viscus clouds. THAT is Person Pitch right there for you: floating in water nestled in the clouds. As I got back to the capital, Reykjavík, for my last week in the country, I'd kill time walking to the pool on the outskirts of downtown humming "Take Pills". The sky was so clean and blue there, so crisp and yet violently sunny, and my daily walk to the pool felt like a pilgrimage to cleanse myself. The repetition of that skateboard sound was my "OM MANI PADME HUM". Here I was rediscovering this record while I rediscovered myself. I felt like I was Person Pitch: a flawed person traveling without any contemporary technology scooping up the sounds of other cultures through passerby's at the farm and at hostels while being soaked in the clear blue glow of Iceland.

Relatable, Dave and Kría's record feels like a playful winter trapped indoors with your significant other. I must admit I've been waiting a couple of years now to listen to it in such a manner seeing how there is no SO in my life and hasn't been in a while . But, that's the way I hear the record: arts & crafts and family songs and meals with your loved one. Perhaps that'll change this winter. I mean, I live in Iceland now so I could at least find Kría here to reinact all of these things with me !

DOWN THERE. Yeah, so this album went perfectly for where I was in life when it was released. That and Sufjan Stevens' "Age of Adz": the two make a killer combo. Being as objective as I can, this is obviously a Halloween record to play at night whilst riding your bike. But for me, it works best from around August 26th to Halloween, when it's still too damn hot in the south. Right when this album was released, I had the biggest heartbreak of my life that made me utterly depressed and existentially anxiety ridden. I went to Louisiana, Shreveport to be exact, to visit a girl I was in love with. All signs were a go, but I left a defeated man. There's something eery that this record came out when it did. It's called "Down There", and here I was going "down there" to Louisiana, which is a lot of swamp land, from Chicago. And when I went down there, there was nothing but pain and loss and sorrow and crying and confusion. Looking at the sonic structure of Down There, while it's still fluid and gooey like it's predecessor MWPP, the synths used are rigid and quantized. This defragmentation from the organic and connected to the cheesy artificial programmed sounds of Down There is further relatable to me by what happened on October 28th, 2010. I dosed myself and another girl with a heroic size of mushrooms in an naive attempt to help myself with my depression, only to have my soul sucked out me and to go "down" to the underworld and be punished by the laughing Egyptian god of the underworld, Set. After that experience my world was shattered and broken, and my mind state was with the same dysfunctional and fragmented reality that Down There exhibits. DT only came out days prior to this event, and the comparisons of my experience with mushrooms and it are overwhelming. "Laughing Hieroglyphic" was it, man! That was Set strip-searching my soul! Nowadays things have calmed down, and Down There is something I only like to play to get into the Halloween spirit, although it still serves itself as a scarament to that love and reality lost. (On a related note, I have more to share with CHz that involves ayahuasca, which I might share if people are inclined to hear it)

Last one I have energy for: Tomboy. Totally a misty spring/autumn record for during the morning or at midnight. Preferably in a quiet place overlooking a city or near a graveyard (I'm looking at you, "Scheherazade"). This came out when I was still recovering from the story described above, and I was still having an emotional and identity crisis. I was schizophrenic: my inner reality and my outer reality did not match. Two competing realities, two competing minds. The theme of being a "tomboy", while directly not relatable for me, was relatable by symbol as I assume it is for most people. It's funny how these records play such a large zeitgeist in my life! I would have panic attacks walking outside my apartment in Chicago and felt like I was in the void. Somehow I hadn't moved on from my childhood, and now I was in this futuristic city with people controlled by iPads and shinny electronic devices. That's the aesthetic of Tomboy for me: so long Person Pitch portable Nagra recorder, hello Apple iPad. The conflict of duality further expands upon Down There's dialectical defragmenting of reality. Yet Tomboy is emotive while I hear Down There as a mental thing. Tomboy is fighting existentialism through competing energies of femininity and masculinity. Noah's songs and voice are so soft but they're wrapped in this punk rock and early '90s vengful Public Enemy hip hop aesthetic, and yet, it completely fails at evoking real masculinity - real power or force. And I think the music is aware of that, hence the cheesy cartoonish quality to the timbre of sounds used. So I tend to only listen to Tomboy when I'm in conflict with myself, or in an environment that is fighting itself. Foggy places offer confusion, and some large cities with green parts to them or modern southern towns with archaic ideals make for good Tomboy listenings.