Animal Collective’s Oddsac

There are few bands that define the indie aesthetic of the last decade as consistently, and successfully, as Animal Collective, whose ‘visual album’ Oddsac is released next month on DVD after premiering at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Their neo-psychedelic pop – frantic, hazy, sinister and ecstatic – has always been informed by noise, trance techno and traditional music, to name but a few influences; this eclecticism, along with a strong but non-specific sense of nostalgia, speaks to an audience both confident with and highly anxious about their place in an increasingly atomized culture.

A similar anxiety about the future – alongside an embrace of the new: media, technology, drugs, ideas – characterized the original psychedelic movements of the 1960s and early ’70s, an era that also spawned meetings of music and film, from pop movies such as Head (1968) and Help (1965) to Tony Conrad’s visual compositions. Since then, the music video and MTV has made music and image inseparable, but Oddsac – which is billed as a film rather than a collection of song videos, and will not be released as an album – appears at a time when a number of experimental rock and pop artists are working beyond the album format, using visual material as an central part of their work, and aligning with other art forms. As we increasingly receive music via computers and other screen devices – and YouTube allows for a myriad DIY visualizations of any and every song – it’s possible that musicians and listeners see less distinction between audio and visual perception. More pragmatically, perhaps there’s a sense that a record is no longer ‘enough’, and needs supplementary content to entice listeners.

A precursor to Animal Collective’s film is Gang Gang Dance’s 2007 DVD Retina Riddim, which blends shot footage and trance-like digital effects with Gang Gang’s similarly hypnotic rhythms. Next month, Swedish duo The Knife perform Tomorrow, In A Year, an electro opera written in collaboration with Danish multimedia theatre company Hotel Pro Forma, at the Barbican, London.

Further underground, video as a medium takes on an almost shamanic quality in the work of noise artist James Ferraro, whose Demon Channels video (2010) uses both the sound and visual content of trash TV and surveillance footage.

DEMON CHANNELS from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Director Danny Perez, who created Oddsac with Animal Collective, cites ’60s ‘surrealist romps’ as an inspiration, and indeed some of the film’s live action sequences – which feature fire dancers, masked monsters and outdoor drummers, and which culminate in an ecstatic food fight – have the vibrant, hallucinatory absurdity of films of that era such as Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda’s The Trip (1967) or even the early 1970s films of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

But, equally, Oddsac could only have been made now: its mash-up of ‘classic’ head-movie tropes with ’80s horror vids, Burning Man-style rave visuals, Lynchian suspense and pastoral whimsy is, much like the alternately searing and sublime music that accompanies it, a very modern syncretism. Everything is unexpected, but nothing is quite surprising. The film is, however, integrated impressively with the band’s sound. Perez has worked with Animal Collective since early in their career, and band and director achieve a near-synaesthesiac rapport in Oddsac’s striking opening sequence, in which a troupe of fire jugglers processes through the dark towards an isolated house, intercut with interior shots of a girl peeling wallpaper from a wall. Gloopy black matter oozes from beneath the paper, slowly at first, then faster; we share the girl’s panic as she tries to stem the flow and the masked fire-bearers draw nearer, the swoosh of their flames woven into crunching polyrhythms and strobing, looped vocals.

These live sequences are interspersed with more abstract ones, in which fractal patterns in bright test-card colours pulsate with heavy bass and distorted voices – it’s notable that, as an album, Oddsac is much more noise-driven than anything Animal Collective have released in recent years. The band have always been best when hinting at a thrumming panic beneath the harmonies and twinkling synths, and cinema is the perfect medium for conveying their more intense aspects – when amplified both visually and aurally, repetitive beauty can soon take on a menacing quality. Diegetic sound is skilfully woven into the mix, sounds of fire, water and stone enhancing the electronic textures. The chaotic, layered music pauses for a more vocal-led number about half-way through, as a cascading, hymnal vocal melody follows a robed creature rowing a boat through the night. (The splash of oars in water around the soft harmonies is, oddly, one of my abiding impressions of this highly saturated film.)

The spell is then broken by a lengthy ‘horror’ sequence: the creature from the boat, a Nosferatu-like vampire, descends upon a family camping in the woods, attacking a child, while the parents grapple with malevolent toasted marshmallows that stick to their hands and faces like spider webs. The monster escapes, only to perish (steam and blue paint emitting from his head) as the sun rises. The problem is not that it’s absurd – of course it is – but that suddenly the music becomes secondary to the visuals; neither quite fit, so we mentally tune one element out. It’s also, crucially, ineffectual as horror: Animal Collective are clearly horror fans (it’s almost a given in noise musicians), but neither they nor Perez are horror directors. Critics of the band take Animal Collective to task for being mannered, twee and hipster-ish, yet I rarely hear this in their music – the songwriting and textural awareness are too singular and intricate for that. But watching these parts of Oddsac, it’s occasionally as if one can see those criticisms made manifest on the screen. It would have been bolder to stick with the abstract or more impressionistic imagery that takes up the rest of the film, which suggests the same themes – fear of the unknown, childhood nightmares, death, confusion – without enunciating them so clearly.

In a culture that affords primacy to vision over sound as a matter of course, music’s particular magic is its status as a non-visual medium. That’s not to say that bands should not make films, or that Oddsac detracts from the charm of Animal Collective’s music; more that, for me, much of that charm has always lain in its suggestiveness and its sense of what’s unseen.