Animal Collective: “We’ve been around longer than most of my favourite bands”
Animal Collective, more surprisingly, buy into the idea of traditional song structures more than ever before. “It’s about the nature of skewed perspective, and looking at things from lots of different directions at the same time,” says Avey, aka Dave Portner. “With the traditional pop song you might have two verses, a chorus, another verse,” adds Panda Bear. “Those elements are here quite a bit, but distorted in weird, perhaps unconventional ways.”
“In the same way, there’s an aspect of Dadaism where you take something familiar and turn it into art. Maybe it’s something else, out of context,” says Avey, referencing the art movement which inspired ‘FloriDada’’s title, and, it turns out, much of the record. A movement built on putting urinals on display in snotty-nosed art galleries, and writing nonsense poems out of randomly jumbled words, Animal Collective directly borrowed Dada’s love of surprise. And, combining samples from dinosaur documentaries with burglars, and recordings of childrens’ paddling pools, very little is off limits in this particular collage.
“We were using collage, which is something that a lot of Dadaists did, like Duchamp,” Avey Tare goes on, referencing the unofficial lead artist of Dada. “We’d take a sample from a popular television show or song, or a court case, and we’d use it as an instrument.” Though the band agree they’ve always been interested in the idea, it has never been as pronounced as on ‘Painting With’. “I don’t know that it has ever had such a purpose before,” concludes Noah. “On ‘Centipede Hz.’ all the collages that I made were usually in between the songs as a segue to space out to,” Brian adds. “On this, it’s more like cutting something and pasting it straight into the middle of a song.”