Animal Imagination

The mention of the Brooklyn based indie art band, Animal Collective suggests the sounds of dripping arpeggios, celebratory, sporadic dance breakouts and digital jungle bird trills, especially coming off the heels of the wildly successful Merriweather Post Pavilion album. In addition to these soundscapes, the band referenced their murky drowned out tendencies from their humble beginnings with the presentation of their latest creative output.   

Oddsac, a film in which the group collaborated with video artist, Danny Perez, in the making for the past four years was screened at Sundance and premiered in New York earlier this week. The film has an unwavering ability to lock one in their seat, eyes to the screen, ears subject to an extreme sound attack that ranged from a calming hypnosis to festive resonance to an absurdly aggressive clamor. A couple of moments offered enough of a jolt to make one jump. Expecting to hear that the film simply followed some prerecorded music or vice versa, Avey Tare and Geologist described the process as a frame by frame, note by note, back and forth dialogue between the group and Perez. Thinking on that, there were a number of ‘scenes’ where it was impossible to recognize which came first, the sound or sight and that was truly the forceful brilliance of the work

This past Thursday in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, the band (minus Panda Bear) and again with Perez, created Transverse Temporal Gyrus, a site specific sound and visual installation inside the bare upward spiraling interior. The sound clips, drones, reverb, scratches and more blared out of 36 speakers around the space, completely enveloping it, at times effervescent and at others, just melting away. Video projections bounced off the stripped balconies, lustrous colours, erratic and dripping, sometimes halting long enough to form a raspberry sorbet sea change among the shadows. On the ground floor, the band members, dressed in dark monastic robes and Donnie Darkoesque rabbit masks were static, surrounding a crystal sculpture, seemingly all studying their curious audience. Maybe the performance part was expected of the attendees and some certainly delivered, recklessly rambling up the curved incline, other splattered in face paint and hybrid animal masks, while others still, lay on the ground, sprawled out, eyes closed, just taking it all in, maybe through osmosis. It was strange, otherworldly and suggestive of a 1960s sort of trippy happening and we can only hope a prelude to what the band will create next. 

By Anush Mirbegian 

Images courtesy of Luke Cometto

www.oddsac.com