BrightestYoungThings: Live Review + Interview: Avey Tare @ U Hall

review and interview by: Paula Mejia

Despite the tour coming a year after his solo album Down There dropped, anyone who was at U Street Music Hall this past Wednesday for Avey Tare’s set was in for a true treat of both epic and bizarre proportions.

Even if it’s your first time listening to Avey Tare, you know it’s something else when the music is impossible to describe. After all, the prolific songwriter is an integral part of the elusive, wildly experimental group Animal Collective, one of the few bands today with a careful sensibility for nightmarish visuals, a melange of influences and oscillating sound loops that become permanently lodged in your brain.

I still remember how mindblowing of an experience it was the first time I heard Peacebone from Strawberry Jam back in early high school. And for me at least, it’s incredible to see a band gain recognition for crafting music that’s altogether astonishing, gorgeous and really fucking out there.

Melding together sampling, shrill vocals and sounds ranging from sirens to whistles to the gloppy, oozing soundtrack from a swamp, Avey Tare thrusts you into this surreal world that he and the other members of Animal Collective have created, one that skirts the thin divide between the terrifying and the simultaneously beautiful (read: ODDSAC).

With a table lined with glittering tablecloths, a few colorful skulls and a skeleton with a Yoda head behind the stage, Avey Tare began his set with a series of rapidly rising sounds that reminded me of a trippier opening to Portishead’s “Mysterons” from their timeless album Dummy.

I’ve always been intrigued by musicians that use stage names, as well as where the differentiation lies between their born identity and what happens when they take the stage. And I realized, it’s when he’s at the microphone that David Portner of Baltimore transforms into Avey Tare. An intense focus overtakes his features as he nurses the keys, his face contorting from true sadness to fierce anger to a confident snarl. Neck muscles jutting and body almost seizing with sound, his guttural drawl used parts of his voice that I didn’t even know were possible. His distinctive vocals wash over the sampling with the awesome force of thrashing waves, characterized by echoes and spine-chilling yelps.

The set then shifted into a series of glitchy beats slightly reminiscent of Black Moth Super Rainbow. But add to that slow, dripping sounds embodying the swamp aesthetic from Down There. As quickly as it arrived, the sounds morphed into dancier tracks. With a steady bass and a methodical fixation on tribal sounds, it differed from any traditional electronic music if for one reason: the accompaniment of indistinguishable noise that I can best describe as the sound of someone breaking a chandelier with a sledgehammer, then taking the clinking shards and crunching them together, hands bleeding and everything.

It’s crowds like the one Avey Tare drew that make me proud to be a component of the DC concert scene. I’m sick of people yelling at DJs and musicians, demanding more bass and heavy brostep drops at electronic shows. Here was a crowd clad in fuzzy animal masks and top hats. Shaking hips were the least of concerns, as the everyone collectively looked on amidst heavy experimentation and unconventional sampling, simply taking everything in with awe and amazement.

But where does the separation lie between Animal Collective and Avey Tare? The truth is, you can’t completely separate the two. Avey Tare’s yelps skating over samples and sequences have fragments of Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective, with an emphasis on words like “dream” and “try.” I suppose the difference is that Avey Tare’s narrative comes from a darker and more remote place, the range of emotions entwined with laser noises, synthesizers and drum machines.

As if going to the show wasn’t awesome enough, I was able to sit down with David Portner aka Avey Tare before the show and have a few words about Animal Collective’s new album in the works, aimless driving, fictional characters from 80s sci-fi films and (what else?) spirit animals:

BYT: Not going to lie, I have no idea what to expect tonight. And that’s awesome.
DP: (laughs) Yeah. That’s kind of how we like to do things with Animal Collective, in a way.

BYT: Sweet. You’ve been cited as Animal Collective’s principal songwriter. Where do you draw the inspiration?
DP: I guess a lot of places. Observing things around me, stuff I experienced through music and film. Growing up in a lot of nature and connecting music with it. Also, driving, a lot. Especially growing up driving around the country in Maryland and connecting music with my surroundings has definitely influenced me.

BYT: What comes first, lyrics or melodies?
DP: Usually the melodies come to me first. But then I feel like I definitely have to have lyrics to attach the emotion, I couldn’t just sing about nothing. So with all of Animal Collective’s stuff we do melodies first and the lyrics come after. Sometimes the lyrics come fast, like I’ll have a lyrical idea that’ll just come along with the melody. But sometimes it doesn’t, and what I want the final lyric to be won’t come until a lot later.

BYT: How much of it is improvisation?
DP: We got together for three months at the beginning of the year and it was the first time the four of us had played together live in a while. And there is a lot of jamming at that stage, to just to get loose and to find the sound we’re looking for. We’re always trying to move into a new world. Improvisation informs the next step sometimes, but when it comes to actually writing songs it’s all written down. In the live set there’s usually transitions from one song to another that are improvised.

BYT: You’ve seen a tremendous shift of genres in your work with both Animal Collective and solo. Is this conscious?
DP: It’s conscious to try lots of different things out. I like so many different types of music so it’s hard to just fit into one frame of mind because there will always be sounds from many different places that will inspire. And with Animal Collective I feel like it happens even more so because we’re coming from such different places.

BYT: How do you work to translate what’s on the record to the live show?
DP: Well, with what I’m playing as of late I got into a certain style of writing stuff for myself that involve these sequencers that I use...

BYT: What are those, exactly?
DP: They’re these boxes. I have one made by this company called Electron and it’s called a mono machine. I got it at the beginning of 2009 or something like that, I just started messing around with it. Basically you can create patterns with different sounds oscillating. And the first time I really used it was when we made our film ODDSAC during the first song. We call it Mr. Fingers but it’s just a fire spinning sequence kind of thing. I use it to create oscillators within the melodies. I just like the idea of doing all of these little loops and turning them into songs, like these little collages. So in terms of playing live, I kind of have to use this equipment because that’s basically what I wrote the record on and because I want to play new songs, I had to fit it altogether that way. You know? And with Animal Collective there’s an underlying layer, the first layer, which is the live aspect. Because we usually tour first, then record. We’ll always be thinking about these other ideas that we can add to it. It depends though. For these new songs we’re working on now that we’re going to record soon, we kind of don’t want to add a lot to, we want it to be more of a live thing. There will be a little embellishment but hopefully there won’t be much orchestration or anything like that.

BYT: Is it strange having other musicians and songwriters cite you as an influence?
DP: (laughs) Yeah it’s definitely weird to see your band’s name referenced in magazines and the like. But it’s cool, it makes all of us happy.

BYT: What is the new Animal Collective record shaping up to be like sound-wise?
DP: More traditional live band-sounding, take that as you will. I hesitate to say anything like rock music, because it’s not. It veers more towards that than electronic music although that influences us so much. It’s heavier live music than, say, Merriweather Post Pavilion.

BYT: Why did you decide to tour just now for your solo album Down There, despite the release being a year ago?
DP: I think after the summer ended when I recorded it, I knew Animal Collective was going to start up again writing things and I had a very small window to tour. We did ODDSAC, and we wanted that to go around. I had aspirations to do something with it, but nothing came of it until now. And it’s not really a tour promoting this album, I’m just doing a tour.

BYT: It may be too early to tell, but any idea when the new record is expected to release?
DP: Probably not until the end of the end of next year, sometime in the autumn I’d say.

BYT: What have you been listening to lately?
DP: I’ve been listening to a lot of Eric’s music, who is playing with me, and his band Black Dice. Still, I listen to a lot of old psychedelic music from the late 60s and early 70s. There’s been some really great comps of Indonesian psychedelic that came out this year, as well as Japanese psych rock. I really like Colin Stetson’s record as well.

BYT: Your sister Abbey Portner has been instrumental in creating t-shirts, merchandise, several album covers and stage setups for a few shows in New York this past summer. How does this conceptualization work? Do you go to her with ideas, does she listen to the album and has free range of creating something?
DP: Mostly it’s me talking to her. If the other guys have ideas that definitely gets implemented too, but it’s mostly me explaining ideas I have. For example, the cover of Sung Tongs. I had this idea in my head of these skeleton kids, these teens, dead wearing band-shirt things. So what she came up with was almost exactly what was in my head. We all like to be involved in the visual element in the group, so it’s definitely good to talk to people that are helping you create that.

BYT: If you could be any fictional character from film, literature, etc, who would you be and why?
DP: Any fictional character? That’s a heavy question. But I’d probably say Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China.

BYT: I’m not familiar with the character, do elaborate!
DP: It’s a weird kind of sci-fi film by John Carpenter from the 80s I think. Just what he gets to go through in that movie- I would enjoy that. I can’t really see myself being an action hero very much but just to see what goes on in that movie would be cool. He just gets involved in this...yeah, you should just see the movie.

BYT: I definitely will. Finally, what would you pick to be your spirit animal? Keep in mind it doesn’t have to be one singular animal. You can be a hybrid, like with the head of an eagle and the body of an alligator or something.
DP: I would definitely be an otter. Because they can swim, they’re mammals and they just seemed psyched.