PANDA BEAR

The Animal Collective star chats Buoys

Last time we spoke, Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox had just finished his 2015 sampledelic opus, Panda Bear Meets the Grim

Reaper, which saw him use incongruous drum samples as a jumping off point for his infectious, melody-rich songs. The newest Panda Bear offering, Buoys, is, not for the first time, a horse of a very different colour. Where previous Panda Bear albums have been gloriously full sonic canvases,

Buoys sees Lennox strip away much of the gloss for a more intimate but equally wonderful result.

Written and recorded in his adopted home of Lisbon, Buoys is testament to the less-is-more adage with the emphasis this time around on the songs, the vocals and the sub-bass. Re-uniting with previous production collaborator, Rusty Santos, Lennox also enlisted the vocal skills of Chilean DJ/ singer Lizz and the trap/reggaeton savvy of local Lisbon musician Dino D’Santiago. Buoys also re-ignited Lennox and Santos’s interest in a piece of software we often take for granted, the semiubiquitous Auto-Tune.

FM caught up with Noah to chat about his studio, his Panda Bear methodology and how he was squeezing new ideas out of Auto-Tune.

Thanks for taking the time to talk today. You must be pretty fed up of doing interviews for the album?

“You know what? I’m just grateful people still wanna talk to me after 20 years in the game!”

Well, not many artists are still making such interesting music after 20 years. There’s a sparseness to this new album. Was that an intentional thing?

“I definitely wanted to make something a little… maybe I should rewind a bit further. There were a couple of techniques or aesthetics that I knew I didn’t want to continue on this album so I figured the new thing would be different when those were absent. As far as the sparseness goes, that’s just something that Rusty (Santos) and I found any time we’d pack the arrangements with lots of stuff, which was sort of the way I used to go about things: the sub-bass stuff wouldn’t really hit in the same way. So, sort of out of necessity to get those sub-bass things to really come through, we wanted to leave the arrangements pretty empty. We still wanted them really detailed, but in terms of the elements and the song, it’s a case of everything at the top then this huge, empty space at the bottom where the sub-bass can come in and out.”

It’s a brave technique to employ when you’re more used to filling as much of the audio spectrum as possible…

“Yeah, I figured there might be a chunk of the audience who might not be keen to go down this road but, I guess, solo and with the band, I’ve done a

couple of things like this before where we do something a little different from record to record. So I’m primed for that experience in a way.”

Are your solo outings the perfect opportunity to keep experimenting with new musical or production directions?

“What I find exciting – not just musically, but in most things – is that it’s cool to explore the places you haven’t previously explored. That’s when I learn the most or, at least, there’s usually something inherently interesting about the process. I don’t mean to knock not doing it that way, as there are plenty of bands I like who found their thing early on and maybe just refine that one thing. I dig that too, it’s just not a way of working that’s ever felt rewarding for me.”

We spoke when the Grim Reaper album came out and we wondered if your studio setup in Lisbon has changed much from then?

“Well, this album was a bit different from that previous album in that I didn’t really use a lot of the synths and things in my studio. This is the most ‘in the box’ album I’ve made… by a very wide margin. When I wrote the demos for the album, I’d have guitar and vocals with a basic drum-machine foundation, which was usually pretty crude. The routine was that I would quickly do the singing and guitar parts then the rest of the month was all about editing and engineering it in such a way that it was transformed through the editing process and the computer stuff we did to it after that. I’d never really made something where the performance part of it was such a small percentage of the final product. It was an interesting route.”

When you say ‘in the box’ what software was in said box?

“It’s all in Ableton. Both Rusty and I are Ableton users. I can use Logic and Pro Tools a little bit but I’m definitely fastest with Ableton and I guess I’ve had the most experience with it. They redid the audio engine of it, which is great as I didn’t used to like the sound of it so much, as I felt it sounded ‘narrower’ to me than Logic or Pro Tools, but I really like the way it sounds now. So it’s all in Ableton but we didn’t really use the main advantages of Ableton like looping, so much. There’s a fair amount of MIDI, I suppose, but we didn’t particularly harness a lot of the things that Ableton is known for.”

Users generally say it’s all about the workflow with Ableton. Do you agree?

“Yeah. I can’t remember if it’s the Arrangement or the Session view, the one with the themes of loops. But that’s really its secret weapon. It’s similar to Auto-Tune, as it’s everywhere in music.”

Which leads us on nicely to the next question: why did you choose to use Auto-Tune so prominently on the new album?

“Because I’d done so much stacking of vocals, harmonies and stuff like that, where my way of doing the vocals was to get it to sound like a fog or a cloud in the mix. I really wanted to make something that had a single, intimate feeling vocal. I’d tried that on Homies, the last thing I’d done, but I could never really find a way of doing it that felt really present or pleasing to my ears. Rusty’s first suggestion was to try Auto-Tune. It wasn’t really about the pitch correction, more about giving the vocal some thickness or texture. There’s a certain way that it sharpens my voice specifically that I really like.”

Did you have any set rules when you were using it on your vocals?

“Well, I didn’t want it to be super extreme, so we went back and forth on each song, dialling in the way that the Auto-Tune treated the vocal. That was the first bit of the vocal process as, after that, to get it to connect to the rest of the music; as it initially felt disparate to me, we started building something almost like a bed with the way the delay almost glues it to the track.”

Do you think Auto-Tune gets the best results when you don’t use it for tuning but more as an instrument in its own right?

“Yeah or more like a processing tool. I’m really not a very big fan of it as a pitch correction device but then when it’s used as something that colours the voice, I really like it. It almost becomes like a neo-reverb or something.”

You’ve also got some nice sounding delays sprinkled liberally over proceedings. Are they software too?

“Most of the delays on the vocals and guitars were done with the bundled delay in Ableton. We usually tuned them to quarter-notes or something rigid like that, then tweaked ever so slightly. I’m not a big fan of super-locked delays. I prefer things that either push or pull the timing of the song in slight ways. We also used this plugin called Endless Smile by [Swedish producer duo] Dada Life… that and their other VST, the Sausage Fattener, are kind of the sound of the record in some ways.”

When you do your vocals and guitars do you engineer yourself or does Rusty help?

“We tracked them live, with Rusty in the control room and me in the booth. The place we recorded them at is really a hip-hop/R&B studio, so I played guitar and sang in a tiny little vocal booth that I could barely fit the guitar in! Actually, that’s another thing about the Auto-Tune that’s really nice; you can track through it. So you can play with it a little and kind of fool it with your voice. Sometimes it’s not sure which note to bend it to. Especially if you sing with vibrato, you can really bug it out in a cool way.”

Any preferred microphones or mic techniques you like to use?

“We borrowed a Neumann U 87 from Estudio Namouche, which is the studio in Lisbon where we did the GrimReaper album. That’s the same mic I used on that album. We’d feed the Neumann through my Neve 1073 DPD mic-pre as that combo does seem to complement my specific voice pretty well. Tonally, I don’t have a lot of definition to my voice, so I feel like the Neve sort of frays the edges a little bit in ways that work.”

You mentioned earlier about stripping back the initial production, so were you singing to the sparse arrangement or the fuller sound?

“The demos themselves were super-minimal… even more so than the final tracks. I think Rusty would’ve preferred, at least for a while, to go a little more maximal with the arrangements but I guess after we figured out the vocal side of things, I was just sort of happy to keep it all really bare. It’s really something that’s felt more than it’s found. The more I try to think, ‘Is this sounding right?’, the more I get lost in the process!”

Do your arrangements stay pretty true to when you write the songs, or do you mess about with it all once it’s recorded?

“Because the demos were so minimal, we had to build the arrangements a bit as I didn’t really have a

“This is the most ‘in the box’ album I’ve made… by a very wide margin”

clear vision of what it would sound like at the end. So it was more a case of trial and error to see what fitted and what didn’t. Some of those suggestions would be Rusty’s and some also came from Lizz [Chilean DJ/vocalist who collaborated on Buoys] who did some additional arrangements. We went in waves with the songs; the initial wave was generally the vocal performance and the guitar performance, and the second wave would be all the tweaking and engineering things a bit more. It was Lizz’s idea to replace the hi-hat/snare on the track Dolphin with the sound of water drops, so we tried it and put an LFO on it, so the pitch is modulating the whole time just to make it sound a little bit more organic. So, it was usually about building on top of the demo arrangement although some of the demo stuff was scrapped entirely. A song like Crescendo initially had a much faster rhythmic section to it but after exploring it for a bit it started appearing to me like a reflection of trap production. The more I thought about that the more it struck me as some sort of extreme evolution of a dub sound. It’s all hi-hats with really deep stuff and the space of the production is kind of defined by the reverb. After noticing where we were going with stuff I just kept pushing towards that zone.”

So, keeping that sub strong was an important part of the production process?

“We figured that people would end up listening to the album on laptop speakers but, for me, that’s just half the story because there’s so much low-end stuff going on that laptop speakers can’t produce. The sub-bass stuff really colours the rest of the arrangement, to me, in that when I listen on a system that can push that sub stuff right out into the room, the arrangement sits on it like a pillow in a way that’s really satisfying to me.”

Does it frustrate you a little that you spend time crafting that sub-bass feel, and so many people won’t hear it because of the speakers they listen to the album on?

“No, I wouldn’t say it frustrates me. I’ve always felt a bit weird about being too cliquey in the mixing room as you never know how people will listen to your music and every room is different. You can make guesses at a sound that’ll be effective on most systems, but it’s such a crap-shoot, really. Ultimately, I think there’s something cool about the fact that a piece of music will sound different everywhere you listen to it.”

Any other favourite hardware you employed on the album?

“Yeah, for a bunch of the more electronic stuff I fed it into the Neve with an Elektron Analog Heat. It’s a great little black box that kinda fries things! They describe it as a device that lets you get similar results to feeding into an old Neve desk channel and cranking the gain. It colours things in ways that are definitely similar to that and produces overtones and resonances that are amplified by the box.”

Another really interesting product from Elektron, isn’t it?

“Yeah, I love their stuff and I use two of the Octatracks live. They’ve been my setup for a while now. In truth, I’ve used them in my setup for so long that I feel I maybe need to get away from them.”

We recall you had a lovely Moog Voyager and some other nice synths. Have any of them made their way onto the new album?

“No… my Voyager is actually broken, which is a bummer. I could send it to Spain to get fixed but it’s so expensive because of the weight. So, it was essentially my trusty Fender acoustic guitar and my laptop this time around. There were also a lot of 808 kicks and we just tuned them to the song. I’d say that 80% of the subs on the album have come from 808 kick samples.”

Are you touring this album?

“I’ll play it with the setup I mentioned, which is the two Octatracks, a mixer and various other boxes. That’s essentially the brain of the unit. It kind of exists in a space somewhere between DJing and live performance. I had the idea of doing it with a band, maybe a drummer and a bassist to give it a different look. But then, Animal Collective is gonna rev up again sometime this summer, so I don’t know that I’ll have time to get that together this year… maybe next year.”

Do you find that your solo outings allow you to go back to Animal Collective with fresh ideas and energy?

“For sure, and vice versa. That’s one of the things I like most about it, as it always wipes the slate clean and you’re forced into a different perspective. It keeps you on your toes.”

want to know more?

Buoys is available now via Domino. For more info, visit pandabearofficial.com