Animal Collective release their long-awaited "visual album", ODDSAC, next Monday. The Baltimore post-tronic collective are riding a wave of popularity following universal acclaim for their most recent album, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion. But the ever-curious quartet of Dave "Avey Tare" Portner, Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox, Brian "Geologist" Weitz and Josh "Deakin" Dibb (back on board after his album off) make no apologies for taking the road less travelled to arrive at their follow-up.

ODDSAC is a DVD-only release knitting all-new music by Animal Collective with visuals directed by Danny Perez, whose work has graced recent live shows by Black Dice and Panda Bear and whose video promos for Animal Collective singles include Who Could Win A Rabbit and Summertime Clothes.

It's a strap-yourself-in experience, with some of AC's most wigged-out and most beatific musical detours joining visuals that veer between Blair Witch-style arboreal horror and op-art-esque psychedelic animation. There's a vampire in a canoe, Lennox in a long wig drumming in the middle of a dried-up river and a crazy food fight with some attractive women. All sorts of acid-fried freakiness, in other words.

MOJO persuaded ODDSAC director Danny Perez and AC representative Dave Portner to supply the lowdown.

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MOJO: What makes ODDSAC a "visual album", rather than, say, a film with a soundtrack?
Danny Perez (director): Well it's not like I gave Animal Collective a final cut to make music to; and it wasn't like a music video where the music already existed and I was cutting to that. There was a lot of back and forth between my editing and their editing and they were sending me demos and even just simple layers. And because there is no literal narrative or traditional structure there, I like to think the film kind of operates in the same way that music does, eliciting different emotional reactions every time you experience it. You don't go to the same space eternally in your head.

You've worked with Animal Collective before, making promos and stage projections. How do they inspire you as a visual artist?
Danny: I like the duality of their music, the combination of harshness and melody, the way they turn something on its side. They draw you into these moments that start off scary and then become prettier or more pastoral. I do feel like I'm more inspired by music than film, stuff from the '60s like The Millennium and The Ballroom where on the surface it's heavy sunshine pop, but look closer and there are these crazy acid undertones.

And Dave, were you surprised by some of the musical paths you took in response to the images?
Dave Portner (aka "Avey Tare"): Surprised in a good way. There's a scene where Brian [Weitz, aka "Geologist"] is kind of washing these orbs in a river, and we accompany that with a lot of strange, overdubbed alien voices. When we were in high school, Brian and I were really into horror films, and bands like [Phoenix experimental rockers] Sun City Girls and contemporary classical music by Ligeti and Penderecki. And we were really into the soundtrack to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That scene kinda brought that all back, and it turned into one of my favourite parts of the movie. So yeah, definitely surprised.

You explore extremes that you don't really touch in regular Animal Collective records. There's the section that's very much like a psychedelic lightshow, and the music is the glitchiest, most techno-y thing you've done. And at the other extreme there's the "canoe" section. That's one of your straightest pop songs.
Dave: Some of the visuals were so out there and had so much movement of their own, they suggested these more electronic, ambient parts. We spent a lot of time in the studio watching it over and over again thinking, "Oh, OK there's a colour shift there, we've gotta have a sound that shifts there, we've gotta bring out the bass there..."

You're well known for being unprejudiced about what kind of music you make as a group, but having a third party to serve - ie. the "visual album" - you must have thought even less about what kind of music was "expected" of you...
Dave: Definitely. Every record we do is kind of like a different band to us. We're always aware that we might alienate a certain part of our fan base and it might grab some other people who never really were into anything we've done before. I'm really psyched that this project fits in so naturally to that way of thinking.

Tell us something about the environment in which a lot of the live action was shot, because it's pretty spooky.
Danny: Well some people are scared of the woods. For some people it's peaceful but some people get paranoid. Nature is a blanker canvas - you bring more of your primal self to it as a viewer. And it's easier to turn into your own space. If I shot a scene in an apartment, it would already be loaded with information. "Oh I can see the picture frame, I can see what kind of phone they have in their house" - it makes it harder to create your own space.

I also enjoy taking these expansive natural scenes, and then injecting very stylized, designed elements, whether it's costumes or makeup or little sets. And that was something that allowed us to move quickly through lots of different moods. Like when you first see the "Vampire" character: it's all peaceful - in a boat in the water with elegant movements. Then when you see him again, in connection with the music, it becomes something very different. You could almost say that it's a theme in the movie - how we can take the same subject, but alter the context and the music and achieve a radically different feeling.

You built this mini-set, like a room in the woods, which creates this thin wall between what's interior and exterior. It's like what happens in dreams, when you move from inside to outside and back again. You're not really sure how you got there and how you get to the next place.
Danny: Yes, and in dreams you linger on a window or you struggle with a doorknob. But also it was just good fun, kinda tongue-in-cheek, when we finally reveal the set. It's us recognising and admitting the façade of film-making.

What was it like for the band, playing 'characters' in the film?
Dave: Well, for me, it was part amazing and part really frightening and disorienting. There's a character I play at the start where the costume meant I couldn't see; there were no eyeholes or anything in the mask I was wearing. I was in the centre of all these fire-spinners, kind of marching down this hill. There were people shouting "Stay left! Stay right!" It was scary to get too close to the spinners because that stuff can light you up pretty fast, wrap around you and give you a pretty nasty burn.

There was another part where I got to jam out on my autoharp. It was really cold and I wasn't wearing that much and the worst thing about it was that I decided I wanted to have glitter on me, and the best way to put it on and keep it on was with Vaseline. So I kind of covered my upper torso in Vaseline and applied the glitter on top of that, just caked it on. It took forever to get off. I was scraping at my skin in the shower afterwards, almost crying: "It's never going to come off!"

You've raised the bar in terms of doing unconventional things with music. After a "visual album", what next? A "feelie" perhaps, where you attach electrodes to yourself and the music creates tactile responses?
Dave: That would be amazing! I did this DJ set once where this guy set up this "brain machine". You hook these sensors up to your head and it projects visuals on the wall. And the visuals are all based on how your brain is reacting to the music. It would be pretty cool to do that with a whole album!

source: MOJO