Natural habitat

>> Animal Collective’s Deakin discusses the band’s ever-changing environment, and why he’s
staying home for the foreseeable future

JAM BAND: Animal Collective

By LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I was pretty much homeless for three years,” says Animal Collective guitarist Josh Dibb, aka Deakin, “so I could never come home to anything. I was always living out of a bag—even when I was in New York, I’d stay on friends’ couches. That was really great at times and then there were times when it was just like, ‘Where do I go?’”

The answer to that question, for now, is nowhere. Dibb’s been travelling for most of the summer, and now intends to stay put in his new New York digs and work on music while the rest of Animal Collective crosses the continent on tour. He hasn’t quit, he’s just sitting this one out, and he was happy to tell the Mirror about the ways in which the merry melodies, garbled electronics and swampy SFX on the band’s latest album, Strawberry Jam, were influenced by their diverse environments—NYC is essentially their homebase, but one band member lives in Lisbon, another recently stayed in Paris for a stretch, and the album was recorded in Tucson, Arizona.

Mirror: Had you guys been out in the desert much prior to recording this album?

Josh Dibb: Brian [Weitz, aka Geologist] actually went to school in Tucson for about a year and a half, so he was familiar with that terrain, and we’ve spent a lot of time touring through it. A few times, we’ve gotten out and gone for hikes through the desert or in sand dunes. We all really love it.

M: Are you into psychedelics?

JD: I have no idea what you’re talking about (laughs). Well, it’s different for each of us. I’m certainly not one of these psychedelic warriors that spends the summer in Joshua Tree eating mushrooms 24 hours a day, but I smoked this thing there called salvia, which you can still get legally, though I’m not promoting it for everybody ’cause it’s really intense. It’s not for the faint of heart. Basically, the first experience is like coming to in an environment where you have no idea where you are, who you are, what you are or why you’re there, and it takes a little while to figure out what’s going on. It’s not always a fun experience. But that played into it too.

I spent a lot of nights out on the porch after recording sessions, and I would spend hours just looking up at the skies and the clouds and the way the moon… and this isn’t even under the influence of drugs, it was just a really amazing thing. There were wild javelinas and coyotes that you could hear all the time, and sometimes see.

M: I read that you can often smell a javelina before you see it.

JD: I didn’t notice that, but it was pretty cold so I guess the smell didn’t carry. One night, after we got out of the studio, it actually snowed three inches. Apparently it happens once a decade, so it’s not common but it wasn’t a total freak of nature. But I’d never seen that before and it looked so strange, especially driving home that night with the headlights shining out on it. The desert’s already this great environment at night and then, on top of that, everything’s just glistening. It kind of looked like a crazy nuclear fallout, or a bizarre alien landscape. It was cool.

With Eric Copeland at le National
tonight, Thursday, Sept. 6,
9 p.m., $19