by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“There’s been this weird pulling back and forth in the way our environments have influenced us over the years,” says Animal Collective’s Avey Tare, aka David Portner.

When not wedged into a studio or practice space, or crossing countries and continents on tour, Tare and his bandmates Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) are scattered between NYC, where he and Deakin live, Washington, D.C., Geologist’s workplace, and Lisbon, Portugal, where Panda Bear and his family reside (bereft as it is of wild bamboo).

The quartet grew up together in sprawling, suburban Baltimore County, then dispersed for brief bouts of college (only Geologist graduated), and finally reunited in the Big Apple at the top of the decade to hone their weird, wild craft.

“It’s hard to think of us as a New York band because our childhood in Maryland was so important in [terms of] learning about music,” says Tare, referring to the arts-oriented alternative schools they attended. “That’s when we first got into listening to music a certain way and playing music a certain way, and even though we really took a giant step forward in New York, somehow the outdoor atmosphere, the woods, the openness, the physical freedom that we had in Maryland has definitely affected us all the way through.”

Much has been made of the band’s childlike, nature-loving, near-pagan inclinations, the way they work field recordings (literally) into their music, the way they litter song and album titles with spirits, grass, campfires, rabbits and manatees, not to mention their label (Paw Tracks) and vaguely woolly stage names—Avey Tare, a name Portner dreamt up while gardening, is Davey without the ‘D,’ and Tare as in “tear my name apart”; Lennox took Panda Bear from his two-tone childhood drawings on mix-tape covers; Deakin is derived from Dibb’s school pastime, writing absurd Romantic letters signed Conrad Deacon; Weitz was dubbed Geologist because he’s a science guy, though his area is actually ocean conservation.

Animal Collective’s earlier records are replete with earthy ambience—especially 2003’s Campfire Songs, a 41-minute set recorded in one take on a porch in rural Maryland—and that idea has stuck, despite the urban sounds that snake through their more recent material.

“It took me a really long time to feel comfortable in New York, so most of the chaos, darkness, noisiness that’s in Danse Manatee [2001], Here Comes the Indian [2003]—to me, that’s all New York,” says Tare. “Sung Tongs [2004] is a city record. There’s samples in it that are from all over the city, yet people still see it as this weird kids-dancing-around-in-the-forest record.”

Wood for the trees

Of course, Animal Collective aren’t knocking the forest. To ensure perfect harmony between their green and grey influences, the band gathered in Seattle to record their seventh album, their latest offering of experimental, electrified, ebbing and flowing pop music, Feels.

“When we finished recording and did the initial mixes, we just took the record out into one of the parks there and we all had a Discman and went off on our own just to see how it worked in an environment like that,” says Tare.

Although Feels was written on one coast and recorded on the other, Tare and Bear’s minds were often elsewhere, the latter with his family in Lisbon, the former with his girlfriend in Reykjavik. Being separated from their long-distance lady friends (Geologist is attached too), and reunited as a band, produced a giddiness that made its way into the album, a new feature amid Animal Collective’s often moody overtones and ominous undercurrents.

“It just seemed like a really special time for all of us,” says Tare. “Being in a long-distance relationship, and dealing with a lot of the emotions through letters, has made me think about all this stuff in a word-oriented way.”

As the band’s chief lyricist, Tare remarks that raw emotion used to get lost in poetic abstraction, that their songs were sometimes too unhinged and unfocused in the past, something that has changed with Sung Tongs and Feels.

“We’re at a point where we’re able to pinpoint feelings and be a little more introspective,” he says, “but it’s still free and wild. I don’t think you should always put your vision in somebody else’s head. What I thought was really cool about noise music growing up is that it put itself in your head and you could make it into whatever you wanted. It had that freedom.”

Behind the horror

In the beginning, before noise (and college), Tare preferred the pleasant melodies and skewed sounds of pop psychedelia (Love and early Pink Floyd) and the banging and screeching and chilling (not to mention slicing, dicing and mincing) of horror movies and their soundtracks (The Shining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

“When we were 15 and 16, we would turn on a strobe light in my basement and plug in all these mics and delay units and just scream or generate feedback with our amps,” he says. “We didn’t know much about experimental music or musique concrete or anything like that, so we’d send tapes out to labels and they’d be like, ‘You should really become a lot more aware of this kind of music or that kind of music,’ so that started opening our eyes to what was actually a history of sound-oriented music.”

While Tare and Geologist explored noise and contemporary classical music, Panda Bear and Deakin delved into ambient techno and post-rock, and with musical creativity and recording savvy ingrained in them since childhood, each began recording (and sometimes releasing) solo material in the late ’90s.

The band name was derived from their own indie imprint, Animal, which released their earliest records, among them a largely solo effort by Tare that is regarded as the first Animal Collective LP, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. Only three Animal Collective releases feature all four members, namely Here Comes the Indian (the flagship release on their Paw Tracks label) and 2005’s Prospect Hummer EP and Feels, and each member has dabbled in either solo work or collaborations with artists such as David Grubbs and Black Dice. This truly “collective” structure would strain other bands, but Animal Collective’s friendship and affinity for experimentation has made it fun, if not always easy, to put the pieces together.

“We came into writing music from a recording standpoint and that in itself shapes the way we work,” says Tare. “So many boundaries can be broken. I just think it’s cool when somebody actually goes out on a limb trying to do something that’s kinda personal rather than worrying about fitting in to certain styles, or who’s gonna like it,” he adds, naming Paw Tracks artist Ariel Pink (interviewed elsewhere in this issue of the Mirror) as a contemporary inspiration in that department. Innovative modern hip hop and R&B have also influenced Animal Collective, even if you can’t quite hear it over the hand claps, bird calls and bubbling brooks.

Like the natural landscape of their old stomping ground in Maryland, the band’s avant-garde allegiances and influences will always remain, but so will their taste for sepia-toned psychedelia—yet Tare is conflicted about the two terms most often used to describe his band: “experimental” and “pop.”

“In a way, you’re experimenting the most when you can push that music into a popular realm in a way that itself is experimental, rather than forcing yourself into some out-there way of approaching sound,” he says. As for pop, “Melody is important to us, but it’s not like we’re setting out to make hit songs. We want to make music that is an environment. Not a specific environment that you can actually be in, like the woods, but something that’s somewhere else, somewhere foreign.”

With First Nation and Barr at la Tulipe on Feb. 22, 9 p.m., $15

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