Avey Tare
You remember how it was, don’t you, back in the Spring of 2020? Knowing so little about what any of us should do, so many of us crawled inside our quarters to find new obsessions or indulge the familiar ones, unencumbered by anything else we could do. At home in the woods on the eastern edge of Asheville, N.C., Avey Tare took the latter path, sequestering himself in his small home studio to sort the songs he’d written and recorded with friends in the instantly distant before times — Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, of course, their astonishing document of communal creativity a quarter-century into the enterprise. He often worked there for 12 hours a day, tweaking mixes alone, save the birds and bears and his girlfriend, Madelyn. By Fall, though, it was done, so what next? How else should Avey now occupy himself in his cozy little room? The answer became 7s, his fourth solo album (and first in four years), an enchanting romp through the playground of his head. He wasn’t, however, going to do it alone.
During the first week of January 2021, Avey began making regular drives to his friend Adam McDaniel’s Drop of Sun Studios to give guts and flesh and color to the skeletal demos he’d made at home. They turned first to “Hey Bog,” a tune Avey had been tinkering with since he wrote it to have new material for a rare live performance years earlier. The inquisitive electronic meditation — all tiny percussive pops and surrealist textures at first — slowly morphs into a gem about surrendering cynicism and accepting the world a bit more readily, the call buttressed by trunk-rattling bass and spectral guitar. It feels like a lifetime map for new possibilities, encapsulated in nine absorbing minutes. The plot for 7s, then, was set: trusting, intuitive, exploratory collaboration among friends, after a Winter without it. These songs are like overstuffed jelly jars, cracking so that the sweetness oozes out into unexpected shapes. Still, the sweetness — that is, Avey’s compulsory hooks — remains at the center, the joy inside these Rorschach blots.
If Animal Collective has forever been defined by its charming inscrutability, Avey surrenders to a new intimacy and candor with 7s. Take “The Musical,” a bouncing ball of rubbery synths and wah-wah guitars that contemplates what draws someone to sound and how turning that calling into a profession can alter the source. “I can hear the mountains singing,” he counters with an audible smile wiped across his face, painting a postcard of his home amid one of the United States’ folk hubs, “and I do believe they could do that forever.” Obligations aside, this is a self-renewing love, he realizes, the source as captivating as it was the first time. “Have you ever felt a thing and known that’s how you felt about it all along?” he ends this guileless love song for everything.
Geologist
As Animal Collective’s resident sound manipulator, Brian “Geologist” Weitz has played an integral role in one of the most innovative bands of the 21st century. Weitz’s earliest musical forays were with fellow Animal Collective members Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Josh “Deakin” Dibb as Auto Mine, a high school indie rock project that predated the formative jam sessions with Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox a couple years later. The quartet formed Animal Collective in NYC in 2000, with Weitz joining Portner and Lennox for live shows and first contributing to the band’s recorded catalog on 2001’s Danse Manatee. He split time in the early 00’s between playing in Animal Collective and working in environmental policy, getting his degree in the latter while studying at the Biosphere 2 Center in Oracle, AZ. After completing an ocean policy fellowship with the US Senate in 2005, he turned his attention to Animal Collective full time.
You can hear his love of sound collage and horror film soundtracks in the band’s creaking-door ambience, and his appreciation for natural soundscapes in their use of field recordings. He’s performed internationally as a solo artist, and released the Live in the Land of the Sky cassette, and the New Psycho Actives Vol.1 split release with Portner. He has scored Coral Morphologic’s short film Man O War, as well as sound installations at Desert Daze in 2017 and Iceland’s List i Ljosi festival in 2018 with visual artist and director Danny Perez. In 2018 he collaborated with artist Kyle Simon on The Sirens, a live performance/art installation at Joshua Tree’s Integratron, in which the duo converted moonlight into sound through Geologist’s modular synthesizer. Weitz’s collaboration with Coral Morphologic, as well as his own background in ocean conservation and environmental policy, played a role in Animal Collective’s latest album, 2018’s Tangerine Reef, an audiovisual collaboration with Coral Morphologic that drew attention to coral reef preservation. He also drew inspiration from his environmental studies while creating the original score to Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s film Crestone, using his time at the Biosphere and the sensory memories of the Sonoran Desert to guide the sounds.
Deakin
Josh “Deakin” Dibb has explored a variety of sounds in his work as part of Animal Collective and in his own solo material—shaping the band’s directional shifts he’s been a part of and consistently contributing a unique flavor to their boundary-breaking career. Growing up in Baltimore with future bandmate Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, the pair began writing and recording songs together in middle school. In high school, Dibb met Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Brian “Geologist” Weitz, later joining the pair’s band Automine. By the end of high school, Dibb had connected Lennox to Portner and Weitz and the foursome began to collaborate. By 2000, Dibb was running the band’s record label, Animal, which released their first album Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. He first appeared musically on the band’s 2003 releasesCampfire Songs and Ark; his guitar-centric approach played a pivotal role in the freaked-out rock of 2005’s Feels and the experimental pop of Strawberry Jam in 2007. While sitting out the Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) album and touring cycle following the sudden death of his father, Dibb stayed involved in studio projects (Water Curses, 2008) and the development, filming, music, and sound design of the band’s first visual album ODDSAC (2010). In 2010, Dibb began playing his first solo shows, worked with Portner to engineer and produce three albums (Avey Tare’s Down There, Tickley Feather’s 123, Prince Rama’s Shadow Temple), and was involved in the band’s collaborative performance with Danny Perez at the Guggenheim, which lead to the 2012 release of Transverse Temporal Gyrus. After a temporary stent away from the band, Dibb returned to begin writing and touring for Centipede Hz (2012) before stepping back again to focus on his solo album Sleep Cycle (2016), a meditative collection of experimental pop songs and his first solo effort since contributing to the band’s Keep cassette mixtape in 2011. Along with mixing and production work on solo albums from Lennox (Young Prayer) and Portner (Down There, Eucalyptus, Conference of Birds EP), and contributing a variety of remixes to artists ranging from M83 and Phoenix to Tinariwen, Steve Spacek, and Goldfrapp, Dibb’s recent projects as part of Animal Collective include 2018’s Tangerine Reef, an audiovisual collaboration with Coral Morphologic that drew attention to coral reef preservation, a 2018 performance at the Music Box Village in New Orleans which inspired the music the band is currently making, and last year’s Bridge to Quiet EP, a selection of improvisations from 2019 and 2020 that the band remixed, collaged and built into songs. Most recently, Dibb and
Weitz scored Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s debut film and documentary Crestone (2021).
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