Panda Bear, aka Noah Lennox, tells Sinéad Gleeson why he’s ditching the samplers (well, almost) for his new solo run outside of Animal Collective
RANDOMLY, in the middle of interviewing Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear aka Animal Collective’s frontman, we start talking about laptops, samplers and live performance. Lennox is not a fan of their limitations, but knows performers must do what they can when it’s just them on stage. “I’m not into the idea of a laptop as a performance instrument. I used to use to samplers, but now I’ve downgraded – or upgraded, depending on your perspective – to just one sampler, a guitar and this weird sequencer machine.”
I’m reminded of a Four Tet gig in Dublin some years back – watching someone who makes amazing albums, with their head stuck in a laptop, barely glancing at their audience – being dreary. “Some people can pull it off and make it sound interesting.” We agree on Kraftwerk and Hot Chip. “They don’t use laptops, but they’re at their station and there’s so much energy to their shows, which I really like.”
The same could be said about Animal Collective, who, thanks to last year's massively lauded Merriweather Post Pavilion, are one of the most revered bands on the planet. Performing together in various line-ups since their teens, the band released their first album a decade ago. Lennox's own output stretches further back, with a self-titled release when he was 20. Young Prayer, its follow-up, showcased his sonic experiments, but it was single Comfy in Nauticaand 2007's Person Pitchalbum that finally launched his solo career.
Listening to both albums, there is a definite sense of Lennox consolidating a sound while constantly moving forward. “It’s about trying to push myself into a different place, because it’s more exciting. It’s more interesting to try to work with new instruments, ways of singing or writing songs. It yields more interesting results. Even if it’s a total failure, that’s more of an interesting thing for an audience to see and for me to experience.”
Person Pitchwas crammed with sounds, samples and styles. Much of it feels surreal, as if the sounds were recorded underwater. "It just came out that way because it was very influenced by the instrumentation I was using. Repetitions and loops would create this hypnotic sound, and I'd try to build melodies on top of it – but the foundation still feels very trance-like. The new songs still have that, but there's something different about them, something a little more serious."
These new songs ("somewhere between nine and 11 tracks") will make up a new album, provisionally titled Tomboy, due for release in September. At the time we're speaking, Lennox is about to start recording and admits a level of fear about it. "I'm right on the cliff looking down on that and I'm a little intimidated by it."
Samples have featured widely in his work, but this time, Lennox wanted to do something different. “For the last album, every song was built upon samples. It was a very conscious decision to try to not use any samples on the initial parts of these songs. I wanted to write songs that had lots of chord changes; more movement melodically speaking. So I dropped the whole samples thing on this record.”
Instead, Lennox wanted to create a lot of the sounds himself, either by making them up or going out and recording them. “A bunch of pigeons used to congregate on the street I used to live on. In the mornings when I walked out, they would all take off at the same time – I love that ‘woo-woo-woo’ sound so I recorded it and used it.”
For the past six years, Lennox has lived in Portugal. The distance from his bandmates may suit his solo record, but it can present problems, not least because the Collective all very good friends. “We’re all still in touch on a daily basis. When you’re touring, you’re around each other every second, so I feel the distance has been a really positive thing. But when the real work [of Animal Collective] starts, we all have to physically get together, but as soon as we’re all in the same room together, stuff gets done really quickly because weve been playing together for 10 years.”
I wonder if he has ever asked the guys to contribute to his solo work, or would he fear too much overlap between the two projects? “It’s a good question, because that’s never occurred to me. I’ve thought about it in live terms, as I can’t play everything myself, but it would have to be a case of me asking them to write something themselves – I couldn’t start telling them to just ‘play this’.”
However, Lennox admits that before working on new material, he makes a conscious decision as to whether it’s for Panda Bear or Animal Collective. “It’s a decision I feel I have to make before I even start. When I’m making something for the band, it has to be really basic and simple so that there’s space in song for the other guys to put themselves in there. With the solo stuff, I just have to get from point A to the finish line and produce and arrange it as much as I like.”
The success of Merriweatherprovides a very visible platform from which to launch this album. The flipside is that it's a daunting work to follow-up. Does he feel that? "Oh yeah, this record is bit like a musical guinea pig in a way. When an album is liked as much as Merriweatherwas, you feel they're waiting to bring the hammer down on what comes next. I'm preparing myself for that. I feel I'm in the bullseye. For me, music is like golf, in that Im always competing, but I'm only competing with myself. If you're not nervous about putting out an album or playing a show, that's a bad thing."
Panda Bear may be his solo project, but Lennox also funnels personal themes into his work with Animal Collective. The song My Girlsrefers to his wife and daughter, and he talks about her love of singing, admitting his music is "a little too in the clouds" for his four-year-old. "Naturally, what I like to write about is quite self-centred – I know that sounds bad – but if I start with something that's personal and important to me, it gives me the juice to work on the songs. If it's not important to me, I often run out of steam. Sometimes I'll start with something that's almost so personal to me that it makes me uncomfortable singing about it. I like lyrics that are opaque, and I have a constant battle with that. Of course, I wrote the songs for people to understand what's going on, but at the same time when people attach their own meaning to a song, that's a powerful thing."
- Panda Bear plays Vicar Street tonight
