In the past, we knew about only three inevitabilities: our deaths, the passage of time and new episodes of Coronation Street. But now we figure that there’s only one true inevitability – the death of everything, time, space and Corrie included. As the universe creeps towards its maximum entropy, infinity and eternity will finally reach a state of cosmological nothingness. All ones tick down to a zero.
Our every action is a celebration of our eventual demise. In a temporally infinite life, nothing holds value. You know when you put the cheat codes into GTAV for invincibility and maximum money and all of a sudden everything gets boring? We find pleasure only in the finitude of the objects, the art, and the people that the Grim Reaper will confiscate from us at the end of everything.
One thing Death will find tough to prise from my cold, dead hands, however, is Young Prayer, a 2004 dedication to the passing of Animal Collective member Noah Lennox’s father. This most gorgeous collection of music flows through modes of anger, quietude, despair, joie de vivre, joie de mort in a language that is at once entirely personal and profoundly communicative.
Since then, Lennox, under his Panda Bear moniker, has continued to release music that is characterised by a playfulness with this strange, celestial language, meditations on the same plane as the swirl of Sikh ragas, church hymnals and transcendental pop. Person Pitch found patterns in disorder, suggestive of an eternal trance. Tomboy felt more like the work of a man tied to the earth, a map of cloud patterns and star alignments drawn with compass precision.
Where on previous albums, death was present as an external force, Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper seems to face up to future death of the ego, and the series of tiny deaths along the way to its eventual expiry. Lennox’s newest release feels like a document of the isolation we all feel when we consider a posthumous time, time after the disintegration of the self into its quietus. It is a nauseating, dreadful trance – on Tropic of Cancer, Lennox chants ‘It goes to show/What all things know/…You won’t come back/You can’t come back to it’. Over the burnt-out acid squelch of Boys Latin, his doe-eyed choral refrain calls ‘Dark clouds descended again’. The album is a danse macabre of these black thoughts, Lennox playing the eponymous Grim Reaper leading a procession towards the sublime. And what is a story without the advent of its ending?
*N.B., in the spirit of untimely death, this interview was truncated by a computer passing into coma.
Hello Noah. How’s Lisbon at Christmas?
Hey there. You know, because of the financial crisis the city had stopped putting up Christmas lights around town for the past few years, which was pretty gloomy. But now they’re back, and the city looks very beautiful.
I made the mistake of watching the Mr Noah video before bed last night. The way that video is constructed is like a lucid dream gone wrong – I think that nauseating feeling hits the same note as Grim Reaper does as a whole.
It is kind of like a nightmare. I didn’t really talk to the directors about it. It was my impulse as they sent me cuts was to move it towards the extreme, more overwhelming in that nauseating way. The song is like a caricature of myself. I felt like I could see the characters in the video as various representations of personal identity, and when I thought about the album, and how the songs are about painful transformation of elements of our self-identity, all these characters repeating all these same things, stuck in these cycles, made sense in the context of a lot of the songs that I had made.
Young Prayer seemed to be dealing with death as an external force – is Grim Reaper more about a subjective death?
Young Prayer was certainly more literally about death than this one. The title of this album works on a whole bunch of different levels for me, but in terms of the metaphor of the Grim Reaper and how it works within these songs, it’s more about how times in our lives when really intense things happen to us. Whether it’s a death of a family member, moving to a new place, going through a break-up in a relationship, having children – during all these events that are extreme in a way, we’ll have an image of ourselves, an image of how we fit into our perception of the universe. That image can be forced to transform via these events. The Reaper is meant to invoke that sort of process – the event is the Reaper that forces that change within us. There was something about the title that felt light-hearted. All the times in my life I’ve tried to resist that transformation it’s been pretty painful.
That’s a recurring theme in folklore (also, Final Destination), the metaphor of the character trying to outrun their predestination.
Right: you can run, but you can’t hide. One of the songs is about disease, being empathetic towards disease, or at least trying to lose that sheen of anger about disease. Disease is trying to survive and to propagate, just like any being in the universe. I was talking to somebody recently and he was like, ‘Is that a reference to ebola?’ I don’t mean to suggest we should lose the sense of loss and suffering that’s going on in the world right now, but perhaps losing that resentment of disease could be a healthy thing.
I know that you have a very open-ended process with your songwriting, both with solo work and with Animal Collective – your songs tend to gestate in live versions before an album is complete. So is there a sense of finality when you put them down on record? How do you know when their time has come?
I suppose there’s always a feeling that you’re gambling, you never really know when it’s finished and it’s going to rip in the studio. I just tend to sense that it’s the right time, and I get wary about losing objectivity, losing steam with a project. Usually it’s both a feeling and a logistical thing – I have these songs, I have enough to make an album, let’s do this.
Person Pitch was a very amorphous record, the songs seemed like they could go through infinite permutations. With Tomboy, though, I felt like things were more structured?
I would say that Tomboy features songs that have a more traditional set-up, in terms of the form of the songs. I don’t mean necessarily in terms of having verse-chorus structures (though some do have that), but moreso referring to a general narrative form throughout a lot of the songs. Grim Reaper is more quilty, it’s constructed like Lego blocks. I like playing around with forms of songs. The idea here was playing with the form of traditional pop songs, removing the verses and these extraneous, lull-y bits, so that you’re left with what I hope is a series of earworm hooks and choruses.
Does the technology you use have a creative impact on the form of your music?
Sometimes. There are times when I’ve tried to develop a relationship with parts of my gear that have not ended well. Then I have other things like my Korg M3 with which I have a love/hate relationship.
This time, I used a computer. The options are infinite, which is daunting at first. But the way I like to use a program like Ableton is very crude, caveman-like. I’m just looking at pieces of audio and dragging things around. Ultimately when we did the Pro Tools versions, there was more putting things on a grid. But originally, everything was very basic. I find the results when a computer does all the work for you to be less lively. I like to get my hands dirty.
Ableton, more than anything, has a knack for time-stamping the music made on it, I feel. I was listening to a bunch of stuff that I was into three or four years ago, and, now detached from it, could really sense the program within it.
Ableton has so many shortcuts – I understand the logic, but you have to be careful not to involve the program too much in what you’re doing. It starts to feel like the program is putting its stamp on what you make. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s an odd relationship.
The first interview I ever did was with Brian [Weitz, Animal Collective] back in 2007. I had the displeasure of reading over that piece while researching this interview. Given what you’ve been speaking about in terms of the transformation of identity over time, do you ever review music from your past and find someone unrecognizable?
I try to not do that. The self-titled album [Panda Bear, released in 1998] is really difficult for me to listen to. I feel like there’s a constant from Young Prayer up to this album that I can trace myself along, whereas the first one, I guess I was copying these various things I liked at the time without finding a way to express myself in a genuine fashion. It doesn’t even feel like me. I’m not even cringing at it, I’m just like ‘Who is this?’ There’s two instrumental tracks on it that I like, but otherwise it feels very odd.
Could you talk us through some of the samples on Grim Reaper?
Tropic of Cancer and Lonely Wanderer are very similar in construction to what I did on Person Pitch, which was to take a second-and-a-half loop of sound and build over that. Tropic of Cancer is a sample from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, and Lonely Wanderer is from a Debussy Arabesque. From a production end, I felt sort of like a failure because I was going back to the older ways, but lyrically and in terms of form, I felt like it was quite a bit different. There’s a Jungle Fever drumbreak in there. Ashley’s Roachclip by the Soul Searchers is on Crosswords. That’s a really storied drum break, it’s been used a thousand times. It is to hip-hop production what the Amen Break is to drum ‘n’ bass. What’s attractive about it is the swing of the rhythm. Certain rhythms, more than any other element of music, are, for me, immediately infectious and powerful. It’s just one of those rhythms that gives you instant life in a piece of music.
How does life look after Grim Reaper?
For me, I feel like I’ve done quite a bit of touring in the past two years. I’ll do a little bit, as it’s a different experience to play these songs out to people who know them, but I’m shifting creatively over to Animal Collective now. With AC, we’re still just starting to flesh out stuff. I’m sure Dave has written a bunch of songs, but I’m still really just thinking about it. We’ll start sending demos around in the next six months, then start spending some time together and improving pieces. Except on Centipede Hz we’ve always done work independently, and then gather the ideas for the songs and fit them together like a puzzle.
Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper is released through Domino Records on the 9th January but if you can’t wait til then, Domino are streaming the tracks from the album at various times this week – all the details are here.
Check out our review of Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper here.
Words: Daniel Gray
Photo: Tonje Thilesen
