Through a series of capacity-controlled listening previews, withheld promos, minor leaks and live performances administering an almost shamanistic sway, talk of Merriweather Post Pavilion garnered the kind of high-pitched, cartoonish mania usually reserved for an airtight trailer of helium huffers.The creative process, however, turns out to not be nearly as rabid as the anticipation it reaps, though is equally revealing as any message board’s frothing at the mouth.
“Recording Merriweather Post Pavilion was extremely focused and sustained, in that we just went constantly for 12 hours [a day] breaking only for lunch, and there wasn’t a moment I wasn’t sitting and recording, which is really nice,” recalls audio engineer Ben H. Allen, who holds the “Recorded & Mixed By” credit on the album. “They were all business, which was very refreshing.”
Animal Collective emerged a self-produced project of childhood friends in 2000 (though in the mid-1990s in Baltimore, MD, they’d been swapping home recordings in the shambolic indie spirit of Pavement before starting to manifest influences of Can, the Incredible String Band, the Beach Boys, Love, Silver Apples, Captain Beefheart and more).
Once mislabeled as “prophets of rural nature boy music,” as lamented by band member Brian “Geologist”Weitz circa 2005, Animal Collective continued through the new millennium’s brief blog affair with “freak folk.” It was with 2003’s Sung Tongs that Animal Collective members (in this case David “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox) first worked with a producer (Rusty Santos), and slowly started replacing askew feedback loops and field recordings.While it was on 2005’s Feels and 2007’s Strawberry Jam, both recorded with Scott Colburn, that Animal Collective (which also includes at times Josh “Deakin” Dibb) exhibited a tremendous step forward in terms of melody and arrangement.With Merriweather Park Pavilion, Animal Collective took its machinations in an even less fevered direction, being organic and instinctual but less impetuous.
And Allen helped capture the group’s controlling of machines in a most humanistic way, maintaining the ritualistic dynamics of a live performance without the sprawl, and the density without the pressure.
“I think that what they were going for and what we ultimately achieved was to have the low-end represented on the album,” says Allen, whose Atlanta, GA-based sessions mixing crunk bangers and the electro-harmonic pop project Constellations (including Cee-Lo), plus songs commissioned for Christina Aguilera and a late-1990s stint for P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records, gave him a solid base for bass. “They didn’t want a hip-hop record’s aggressive percussion, but they wanted it to have the impact.”
Establishing their initial compatibility via Skype sessions (necessarily as the members of Animal Collective live spread across several continents), Allen and Animal Collective convened in Oxford, Miss., to remain sequestered for several weeks at Dennis Herring’s Sweet Tea Recording Studio. It had been suggested that tracking take place any number of exotic places—Jamaica being a top contender—but Allen felt the isolated live room and 24-track analog control room in Mississippi would best suit the group.
It’s not that Allen needs a half-million dollar console for a job. Quite the contrary, he takes pride in the fact that one of his most high-profile gigs, as engineer during the Gnarls Barkley sessions that spawned “Crazy,” was built on top of good ideas and execution, not embellishments and amenities.
The island studios just might not have been the best in terms of processing power considering Animal Collective’s hand-woven, faderrockin’ recording sessions followed by an application of profuse vocal overdubs. Free of guitar freak-outs or hot pick-ups of most sorts, Animal Collective’s multi-track triggers—flushed, blissful oscillations re-amped through a variety of vintage gear to capture a live room ambiance—still ring of fringe shifting into an increasingly rhythmic sway. “Every blip from Animal Collective they press a button to create it,” reveals Allen. “It’s a psychedelic electronic orchestra happening in real time, and I come from a world where the computer tells the sequencer where beat one is and it all comes together. But it’s not that way with Animal Collective. So it’s just like a band, it’s not a laptop telling the bass guitar where the downbeat is.” The way the transatlantic media have lauded Merriweather Post Pavilion’s serotonin chorale, you’d think American indie rock was about to enter its own Madchester-like era. Really, though, Animal Collective’s influences reach back much farther. Amid mentions of exchanging tapes with the band full of Thin Lizzy and early Pink Floyd, Allen notes their fascination with New York mutant disco pioneer Arthur Russell. And it makes sense, as cellist-turned-club maestro Russell was the first to recognize the polyrhythmic and polymorphic potential of aqueous disco as an ambidextrous vehicle for minimalist drone mantras, the rapture at its center slowly sublimating into longing at the edges, further blurring the continuity. Animal Collective manages to get bleary with total focus.
“It used to be about letting magic happen, and now everyone tries to make magic happen,” reflects Allen on the music industry. “For me professionally what I drew out of the process [with Animal Collective] was that when you have talented created people and they have the resources to do what they do then really great things can still happen.”
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Animal Collective
Jan. 20, Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, 311 W. 34th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-307-7171; 8, $28. Also Jan. 21 at Bowery Ballroom.a
Sinibaldi
