In the build up to the release of their ninth studio album Centipede Hz, Animal Collective started dropping references to the Cantina Band in Star Wars and alien radio broadcasts bouncing around space, you knew it was probably going to be a wild enough ride. Add to that the readdition of guitarist Josh Dibb (a.k.a. Deakin) and the return of Panda Bear to the drum-kit he had vacated several years previous and the prospect of Animal Collective creating something that sounded in any way like the spacious, kaleidoscopic love jams of 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion were pretty much extinct. Instead the band honed the songs together in Baltimore, where the for the most part grew up in the 80s and 90s before decamping to West Texas with producer Ben Allen again to create one of this years most exotic, eclectic and erratic aural delights, channeling foreign prog and world pop and all kinds of alien treats. Totally Dublin picked the brains of Brian Weitz aka Geologist on the workings of the strange world on Animal Collective.
You wrote the record working in the same room together this time, as opposed to remotely?
It took little while for me to get used to especially with my role in the band – coming up with samples, things that take a bit more tweaking in-the-box – it’s not something where you can just pick up an instrument and come up with it live. Rehearsals, for me, were doing things more as placeholders, maybe in the rhythm that I wanted to do something in but then having to go back and still work on that song at the end of the day or on the weekends. Working remotely, for someone who does more sound design stuff like me is pretty easy: working on my own time, always with headphones, always having a demo to work off as opposed to coming up with something in real-time if I was playing the drums or the guitar or something.
It was definitely fun and it brought back a lot of energy into the songwriting process. The songs turned out to have a bit more visceral energy than maybe they had when we were writing remotely just because of the nature of us all being together and competing with volume and being able to feel drums or the bass frequencies – I feel like the songwriting was definitely influenced by that. Any time that it’s four of us on the record, it usually a denser affair for sure.
I think it’s a really dense record! It’s like there’s very little space on the record – it seems really chaotic in the middle. Would you have any specific characterization of the record yourself?
It definitely is exactly that, what you just said. We always set out to make more minimal and more spacious records than we ever end up doing. Something like Merriweather had a lot more space on it, just cos there was a lot more reverb, even though it was natural reverb, but we didn’t want to have a very reverby record this time. We wanted stuff to sound like it was in a small contained room. I guess it’s a bad habit of ours! We talk about leaving a lot of open space, we talk a lot about the Silver Apples’ record [their eponymous 1968 debut] that’s always propulsive and never-a-dull-moment, but it’s really just two instruments and a voice the entire time. Something like that could be a model, but for some reason when we are making music and somebody hears an open space, everybody playing just fills it. It’s just the way it goes.
I don’t know if I’m leaping to conclusions here with the Silver Apples reference but I’d seen that mentioned before and I guess because Dave is playing an electronic organ all the time that that might have been a big influence on the record?
Well [i.e. not really], we’ve been fans of that record for 15 years or more. I think it was more the sound of that record – like I said, something that’s propulsive and energetic and electronic but also has live drums and very few instruments – that’s where it really came from. I guess there are a lot of similiarities in terms of the organ, and I play foot-pedal bass on [the record] but those were more circumstantial [things] or coincidences with the Silver Apples record – we didn’t really use that record as an aesthetic.
I had this preconception in my head of it being an album of four guys in a room jamming and basically it doesn’t sound anything like that. I don’t know if you’re incapable of doing something normal…
Maybe, I dunno! [laughs] I mean even when it’s just the four of us in a room, Noah’s drum-kit will have the live drum kit but then we put contact mics on everything and put those through effects in the speakers. All my samples can take up as much space or as little space as I want them to, even Josh’s keyboards and guitars are often routed through multiple effects chains that go to separate speakers. Maybe we are just incapable of going minimal. That’s always the goal, we’ll keep striving for it, one day we’ll make a minimal record.
Do you think you’ll stick with the set-up you used this time, where you wrote together in the same room do you think you’ll stick with that next time and develop it? With the prior two records together, Strawberry Jam and Merriweather, they seemed to be written remotely and based on samples and there was a distinct growth of that methodology.
I think it’s too soon to tell. I actually think that Strawberry Jam was closer to this [Centipede Hertz] than it was to Merriweather. Strawberry Jam had a lot of people working at home, but I don’t anyone ever sent around a track like a demo and said “Here, write parts to this” – it was more like everybody worked individually without really any kinda communication and then we would get together for these short bursts at our rehearsal space in New York or in Lisbon and everybody would play each other what they had been working on and then we would piece it together in the space. You know there was a bit more of working the Strawberry Jam songs out live in the practice space, even to be honest on Merriweather. I feel like the “working remotely” thing has become a storyline in the album bio, it’s really not [like that]. The majority of the time stuff was not written by people sending around demos and us adding overdub on top of overdub. It wasn’t really like that at all, I think there were three songs that were written that way – Bluish, Lion In A Coma and something else, I can’t remember. Most of Merriweather was the same, people worked a lot at home and then Dave and Noah and I got together and we had this, this, this and this so let’s fit these things together. And if there’s pieces that don’t fit together we’ll just make new ones right now, here together, live. The difference really would be more like, then Dave would be like “Here’s an entire song that I wrote and here’s what I’m gonna play on it” and someone would have to match that decision that was already made. With Centipede Hertz, none of that had been made. It was more like “Here’s a vocal melody, I think I’ll play keyboards but what do you guys think?” The differences between them were not as extreme as the press bio makes it out to be.
You guys have a habit of having an album and then a complementary EP at some point of other material that’s in the same universe but not the same record. Are you going to do the same thing with Centipede Hertz?
Well we already put those songs out, you know there was a seven inch that came out beforehand [Honeycomb b/w Gotham] and there was one other track that didn’t make the record but we’ll probably just use that on a future single or something. We thought about splitting it up into an album and an EP this time as well. In the past with Strawberry Jam and Water Curses we went into the studio knowing that we were doing both of those projects in the same thing, we had the idea for an album and an EP and we mostly knew which songs were gonna go on which. For Merriweather and Fall Be Kind it was a similar thing, there were two or three that we just didn’t finish working on at the studio but we knew during tracking that they’re not going to go on the record and then we went back and recorded new songs for it, like What Would I Want? Sky was brand new and Bleed was written after we recorded Merriweather. So this time, maybe if people write, if there’s new songs written that we want to work on maybe we’ll release an EP but as it stands now, [with] the extra stuff we thought, there are only three extra tracks and we didn’t think that the three of them would make a cohesive EP listen from start to finish so we talked about other ways we could release them and we’ve always wanted to a pre-album 45 in the same way that the Beatles did, they would put out, like they would record a couple of songs in a session, like Paperback Writer or something.
Did Merriweather Post Pavilion feel relatively like a big success to get your music heard by a lot more people or does that not really play a role in the band’s day-to-running?
I think Merriweather was definitely a success. In some sense I think you could say it was definitely a big change, it definitely changed our lives, we’re able to make a living as professional musicians more easily than we used to. We used to ahve to go on tour regularly every year be really like working musicians as much as we could, with Merriweather, we can afford to take a year off and do something like ODDSAC or the Guggenheim Project [Transverse Temporal Gyrus] – y’know we don’t make any money off those kinda things, those are essentially just art projects that we end up spending our own money on to make – put in tons of our own money to make them and those things, before Merriweather, probably couldn’t have happened. So it definitely changed things to that extent. And then people were texting me saying that they were playing ‘My Girls’ in the Olympic Stadium this weekend, and things like that are certainly “woah” that’s quite a change from five years ago but at the same time I largely go through my day-to-day life as a largely normal human being, it didn’t make us rockstars or millionaires or anything like that, it just seemed like a manageable step up from where we had been before, nothing too crazy.
I assume that because America is such a much bigger market than even Britain, let alone Ireland, that you can make a living (from music) without necessarily even making a dent on what is mainstream.
Yeah, you can do that in America. But I think sometimes we seem bigger than we are, even to us. Even just the other day, I saw this memo from Domino Records comparing various records that have sold in England – not even other Domino records, but us versus certain other bands like Vampire Weekend or Fleet Foxes, bands that people would sort of assume that we are on the same level as – and we’ve probably sold 10% of the records that those bands sold, like they’ve easily sold 10 times more than us. And I was like “Woah, I didn’t realise that we didn’t sell that many records… sometimes on the internet, it seems like we do!”
You guys are still pretty weird though, realistically.
It makes sense to me, but the way people talk about Merriweather as this “cross-over” album, it seems like it can stand alongside a standard rock or folk act then you see these things and you’re sorta reminded that as popular as Merriweather was, or a song like My Girls was, it’s still a pretty weird record for a lot of people for the mainstream to digest.
Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz is available on Domino now. They play Vicar Street on the 6th November. You’ll probably want to be there. Foggy Notions have kindly given us two pairs of tickets for two pairs of TD readers. To win them, Youtube link us to your favourite animal-themed song not by Animal Collective below, with your full name, by the 24th September. Gushie!
