Open Up Your Throat

Years ago, when I lived in Baltimore, I worked with a woman who was taking a year off between high school and college. I was working in the AV department of a college library where the summers are typically dreadfully slow, except when the horrid Montessori student teachers would descend on us for their multi-week training session. It was great having her around because she was pretty out of the loop when it came to pop culture so I got to introduce her to masterpieces like the final episode of Freaks and Geeks and this insanely bizarre collection of Survival Research Labs videos that we had in our collection. She repaid this cultural education by telling me interesting stories about going to a Waldorf school where they banned tvs and did knitting as part of their course work. Coming from my media-saturated suburban upbringing, this was a world I never knew existed and I love hearing about it.

Our conversations eventually turned to music and she told me about her brother who went by the name Panda Bear and recorded odd, experimental music that she respected but didn't really get. There was a local bookstore which featured avant garde musicians every once in a while and one night her brother and some friends put on a show there that got them banned from the performance space for good. Something involving fake blood and/or chicken feathers leading to a horrible mess in the bathroom. At the time, I was obsessed with experimental music and I wanted to know more about this guy but she soon left for college in Vermont, he went back to Brooklyn and I went back to managing boring student workers and helping the jocks fulfill their Spanish video requirements.

Years later I met up with her again and by this time, her brother's group Animal Collective was starting to get a bunch of good press and become a pretty big deal in some music circles. Sung Tongs and its surprising melodicism had brought them a whole new audience. She gave me a copy of Feels saying that she still didn't fully understand where it all came from but it was her favorite so far. I found, and still find, this fascinating. To have a sibling who you are close with but who creates music that puzzles you and causes you to wonder, at some level, who is this person? By making this music, it allowed her to see a part of her brother she was not privy to otherwise. Listening to songs someone wrote is always a way of peeking into that person's soul but to have such a close realtionship with the author adds a whole other level that intrigues me as you are no longer simply a passive observer but someone with a more intimate knowledge of the creator which colors the whole experience.

Listening to their albums, I can only imagine what it must be like for her to hear this musicas it is so personal and mysterious and emotional and unlike anything else out there. Animal Collective just released their latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, and it's stunning and brilliant and makes me love them even more. So who are these guys making these insane albums full of whimisical madness and crushing joy? They seem perfectly normal in interviews but they certainly have touched on something otherworldly and ethereal. Animal Collective's songs are strangely timeless and timelessly strange and right now they are one of my favorite things in this world.

Brother Sport.mp3 - Animal Collective