Panda Bear on Myspace

MP3: Bros

Video by Patrick O’Dell and Sam Salganik: Comfy in Nautica

Video by John Fell Ryan (Excepter): Bros

Pitchfork Media have just named Panda Bear # 1 of their Top 50 Albums of 2007!

To quote: “With its bright harmonies, loops that veer from lulling to ecstatic, and reverb that lends each sound a hazy twinkle, Person Pitch feels friendly and conversational, if beautifully streaked with psychedelic disorientation. But mostly, it just feels overwhelmingly positive and unfailingly generous.”

We couldn’t say it better… congratulations Noah!

From Cyclic Defrost 17:
Panda Bear interview by Emmy Hennings

In May 2007, founding Animal Collective member Panda Bear released Person Pitch, his third solo album, igniting a rare level of both listener passion and critical praise. Magazines were filled with wonder and the blogosphere lit up like an oversized Christmas tree. People adore this record.

Those familiar with the work of Animal Collective – especially those who have witnessed their astonishingly loose, instinctual live performances – will not be entirely surprised by the spirit that moves through Person Pitch, swooping and bending, shifting tempos and displacing harmonies with a flicker. Panda Bear, known more prosaically as Noah Lennox, incorporates a medley of influences from Basic Channel to Black Dice (both name-checked in the album’s liner notes) without ever sounding contrived. The arrangements are complex but not formidable, built upon semi-porous vocal layers, and samples that echo and melt as if they had been sucked out from damp tunnels. At work is a tension between the oceanic and the airbourne, the half-submerged and the sun-kissed. It’s best expressed on the glorious ‘Take Pills’, which begins with several obtuse, competing rhythms and a lysergic, reverb-drenched vocal melody. So far, so freak-folk, but at precisely the halfway point the entire song comes bubbling up (quite literally, with a sample), shaking itself dry with a celebratory, looped chorus – I don’t want for us to take pills/take pills/take pills – and a foot-tapping beat that any decent 60s pop group would have been proud to call its own.

Many of the songs from Person Pitch were initially released as a series of 12 inches, and for an album that was recorded over an extended period of time (in Lisbon, where Noah currently lives with his wife and young daughter) Person Pitch has an assurance that’s almost eerie. As an artistic statement it’s fully resolved, and yet as Noah explains below it’s far from perfect, and all the better for it.

Firstly, how have you felt about the reaction to the album so far? Everyone is just in love with it.

It’s pretty mind blowing, I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like it at all. That’s not to say that I thought the album was shitty – I mean, I was happy with it, but I didn’t think it was anything extra special. I’m really glad that people have liked it.

Does it make you a bit nervous that everyone has taken it to heart so quickly? Or is it just exciting?

It’s more that I know that I’ll probably get slapped pretty hard the next time around. You can’t keep these things going for more than a brief period of time: looking back at history, that’s the way these things work. So I’m bracing myself to get seriously slammed.

Do you feel like that’s ever happened with Animal Collective, that you’ve been praised one record and then slammed the next?

Actually, I kind of feel like we’ve gotten some sort of special treatment. Well, we have and we haven’t. On the critical side I feel like we’ve always been pretty well treated. It’s always been a natural progression [for us] – upwards, if you like – but we also get so excited about changing around so much, doing something different every time, that I feel like with every album we lose a whole section of our fans because they’re so pissed off that we’re not doing the kind of things that they liked about us before. Which is okay.

Well, it’s a way of side-stepping people’s expectations. People can never second-guess what you’re going to do if you keep doing something different.

Yeah, we keep people on their toes.

How does this apply to your solo albums? Do you view them quite separately or do you think there’s something that ties them together?

Well, I think the approach I’ve taken for everything I’ve ever done is that I always like the music to be an accurate representation of who I am at that time: the kind of things I’m thinking about, the kind of things I care about. And that’s never changed, really. Obviously with Young Prayer it was written after a significant death. I tried to be as positive as I could about the experience of making the album. Whereas with this one it was a mixture of making a conscious decision to try and do something that was way more casual - that didn’t take itself quite so seriously, I guess – and also wanting to reflect what’s happened to me in the past couple of years. I feel like I’m a much happier person, much more positive. And the environment I live in is a super, super sunny place, so I think that it would be impossible for that not to come out somehow.

Do you think that Lisbon was the place you were trying to evoke on the record, or was it some place different? Because there’s the place where you record an album, which obviously has an impact on the sound, but then there’s the place that you’re trying to evoke.

I don’t know that that’s what I set out to do; I wasn’t really trying to capture this place. But at the same time I was referencing experiences and thoughts that I’ve had while I’ve been here, so I was trying to represent this place in a roundabout way.

For me as a listener there might be a real space, but there’s also a totally dream-like, fantastic space that the record has as well. And that comes through visually.

I feel like a lot of my favourite music is music that takes the edge off reality in some ways, and again that’s not something that I consciously set out to do, but I feel like it’s my sensibility with music and with sound, to try and make it feel like I’m dreaming or – it sounds cheesy – like some kind of alternate reality.

How did it feel to make? Was it an enjoyable, energetic process to make the record?

Yeah, totally. When I was done working with Animal Collective or touring with Animal Collective and I had free time, I’d work on it. I never really had any agenda or schedule with it: I was without deadlines. I didn’t have to be doing it if I didn’t want to be, so I was only making music when I wanted to be making music.

And it took a couple of years to put together, is that right?

Yeah, I only did it a song at a time. One of the reasons is that I never really had a large chunk of time when I could be working on it, but also I figured that if I worked on it a song at a time, and put out one single at a time, then all the songs would be as strong as each other.

Was there a point when you were putting out the singles where you realised that it was going to be an album? Or was it always going to be an album from the start?

I kind of knew that it was going to be an album from the beginning. The first song, which was ‘Search For Delicious’, came out with a magazine, and I wasn’t sure at the time that I was going to use that song, but everything after that I knew for sure. And that song became something where I was like: “I don’t really have any other song that sounds quite like this one on the album, and I feel like it would be good to put on there as a departure from all the other stuff.” After a while I felt like it fit with the rest of the songs.

Was it hard to sequence the album, once you had all these individual tracks, or did it feel like the whole thing worked together?

It was a little bit difficult. I feel like I stumbled upon the sequencing in a really lucky way, and for me it worked really well once I felt like I’d got it. I tried to be symmetrical about it, in terms of the lengths of the songs, and that’s ultimately how I put it together. ‘I’m Not’ is at the centre of it, and then long songs like ‘Good Girl/Carrots’ and ‘Bros’. Then medium-length songs, and you keep going out to tracks like ‘Take Pills’ and ‘Search for Delicious’, which are the shorter songs. I had it in my head visually like that. It’s really technical and stupid, but it’s true.

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that’s so true. Each half is like a mirror image.

I don’t know if you’ve got the artwork for the album, but that was the inspiration for the artwork, that we were trying to make it symmetrical like that.

The artwork is incredibly elaborate. And when I was reading some other interviews with you, you were talking about the fact that you don’t necessarily listen to music all the time –

Yeah –

So I was wondering about other influences on the record, visual influences and things that are non-musical, which you were drawing on?

It’s mostly – almost exclusively I think – my relationships with people and things around me that are the most influential, as far as making stuff goes. It’s hard to point out specific examples, but I guess the point is that for me it’s not really art-type stuff that has an impact. My family is definitely a major inspiration and an influence on me.

And this goes back to what you were talking about before, that you think of each record you make as a reflection of where you’re at, at the time. Does that make it easier to go back to each record once a few years have passed, or do they start to feel distant?

I hardly ever listen to them after they’re done. But I think that also has to do with the fact that you spend so much time writing the songs, practicing the songs, playing the songs live, recording the songs and then mixing the songs that by the end of the process you’re sick of it. By living through the material so much you’ve actually distanced yourself from it. Person Pitch is kind of an exception to that, in that even though I spent a whole lot of time doing each song, I had space in between each of the single releases so that when I came back to listen to it again it still had some sort of fresh quality for me. I may find myself listening to this one more.

Have you played much of the album yet?

As I was going along [recording], I’d play a show every once in a while, and play all the songs that I was writing. Just recently I’ve been putting in the effort to do what I guess are “official” Person Pitch shows. I’ve taken a lot of the songs plus a couple of newer things and jumbled it up. Songs like ‘Take Pills’ and ‘Bros’, I’ve split them up and arranged them differently, to try and keep it new. It’s kind of hard.

And how are you doing that live, are you using sampling?

Yeah, I have two samplers and a microphone. It’s quite a bit more stripped down than the album sounds: it’s similar, but I feel like it’s a little more aggressive and a little more esoteric. I feel like the album is easier to follow than a lot of the shows are, for better or worse.

Are people dancing at the live shows?

There were a couple of people who were dancing the other night. I don’t really lift up my eyes too much when I’m playing, and if I do I don’t really notice what’s going on.

I ask because it’s such a danceable record in so many ways -

Oh, thanks.

It is, and every time I listen to it, especially with a song like ‘Carrots’, I have a vision of it being blasted through an enormous sound system.

That was totally my dream for it when it was released, that it would be played in a club or something.

Did you find with any of the 12 inches you put out that they were getting any club play?

I don’t know, I kind of I doubt it. I guess somewhere in the world it’s being played on a club system, and hopefully people are dancing [laughs], not just leaving.

Well it’s certainly a context that I’ve been imagining it in. And a few people have talked about it in terms of dance music, for instance the Basic Channel connection?

With something like Basic Channel I definitely want to move around to that kind of stuff, but it’s not easily danceable in any way. There’s such a dream-like sweetness to it, I definitely want to move but I don’t want to get too hectic about it, do you know what I mean? There’s something private about that music, when you’re dancing to it, it’s a private, personal experience. Maybe that’s just me.

I think that’s true, and that’s maybe because a lot of it is so sparse? Whereas with Person Pitch it feels so – and maybe you see this another way – there are so many parts to it, and with your vocals being multi-tracked it sounds crowded, and it makes me think that everyone should be up and dancing, like it was a tribal thing? Whereas with Basic Channel, it’s much more stripped back.

I see what you mean. Thinking about it now there’s some kind of raucousness [to the album], very subdued but still raucous. I’m thinking about the latter part of ‘Take Pills’ where the parts are bouncing off each other and it sounds like a crowd.

I wanted to ask about the list of influences, like Basic Channel, that appear on the inside of the album cover. It’s always really exciting to hear something that you like and then to start tracing back the influences on it, so I wanted to ask whether that had ever happened to you, whether you’ve ever heard something that you really liked and then started to trace where it’s come from?

Yeah, for sure. Two things spring to mind immediately. One is The Orb. I think I can safely say that they were the first electronic music that I ever heard. I was about 17 and I moved into this kid’s room, and he had left a whole bunch of music behind, and it just blew my mind. I sort of had a vague sense of what techno was and what house music sounded like, but it was from there that I went backwards into the world of electronic music. And something like Daft Punk worked in the same way, where I really liked the sound of it. I think there’s a song of theirs with a voice booming out “Carl Craig”, a list of all these names, things like Underworld.

And where did you end up, when you started tracing back from The Orb to early house music?

It happened over a couple of years and it was really awesome for me because I was living in New York and I was hearing all the original tracks, all the original Chicago house, in clubs, and it really hit home for me. Because that was the experience it was supposed to be, in that environment. I feel like you’re supposed to experience that music with lots of other people and you’re really supposed to feel it in your body. There was a period of five or six years where I was learning about that.

I was interested to read that you found a lot of the samples for the album on iTunes and stuff like that, just grabbing bits from different places. Was it fun or was it frustrating to trawl through a source as big as the Internet, trying to find the sounds that you wanted?

I think that I didn’t really know what I wanted: it was more that I took what I got and then tried to make something that I liked out of it. Otherwise I would have been totally disappointed, it would have been a wild goose chase trying to get what was in my head. Whereas the other way around, no matter what I was doing I always found something.

In pre-internet days were you a crate-digger, searching through old records?

I really wasn’t at all. As soon as I got the sampler that was my instinct – I guess because I don’t play many records – to go to the Internet for what I was after. About halfway through the process of making Person Pitch I got really psyched about the album being this Internet age thing, and that’s what initially influenced my decision to release it only on CD. It’s only because I got a massive amount of emails that I decided to do the vinyl, and also because I got excited about the artwork being big. But it’s supposed to be experienced on CD.

And why is that?

Well, all the samples were made on a digital sampler, a really shitty piece of equipment. It was recorded on to a computer, it was multi-tracked on a computer, there was absolutely no analogue part of the process. And particularly because it leaked on the Internet and I felt like a lot of people were experiencing it on that level, rather than getting pissed off about it I decided to embrace it. I wish that there had been a way to let people steal the artwork, too. I really wish that I could distribute music for free on a website, but that there was a place where you could print off the artwork for yourself if you actually wanted it.

That’s conceivable. I was wondering if that would be the next logical step for you, to ditch the object altogether, to ditch the CD and just go for a download?

I think I might try it. In some ways I feel like that’s where everybody is headed. For people these days, the younger generations, a CD copy or a physical copy doesn’t mean anything. All their music is in their iPods. For people who are our age or people who are older than us who are super-keen on vinyl, that [other format] is what you’re used to. That’s what music is to you and you take it for granted, you know what I mean? I feel like you have to respect the way someone experiences music. That’s why I’d like to make it so that if you wanted your own physical copy of the album, then you could have it.

As we’re talking about the different ways of listening to the album the thought occurs to me that there’s a contrast. Your experience of Person Pitch might be to download it and to listen to it on your computer or on your iPod, which is quite an individual way of listening to music, and then there’s what we were talking about before, which is people listening to it en masse, in a club.

[Enthusiastically, as if the thought has just occurred to him] I like to think that you could listen to a release of a new album somewhere like a movie theatre, so you get that crowd atmosphere, and a visual element to it. I probably won’t be doing that, but it seems like a really nice idea right now.

Even though the album was recorded entirely digitally, a lot of people have comparing it to things which are completely analogue. Does it surprise you at all that people have been talking about it that way?

Well, I was going to bring up the Beach Boys/Brian Wilson thing. I don’t know if I was naïve or stupid, but I wasn’t expecting that at all. I mean, Animal Collective has gotten it a little bit, especially with Sung Tongs, because of the multi-tracked vocals and the multi-part harmonies and that kind of stuff. I assumed that I’d get a lot of dub references [from critics] and maybe a little bit of Buddy Holly and that ’50s, early ’60s pop-rock, but definitely not the Beach Boys, specifically. It makes me feel a little bit disappointed in myself, more than anything, either that I didn’t notice that and nip it in the bud, or that I didn’t do something that was totally mine.

You say that you’re disappointed in yourself for not picking up on it earlier, but it would be impossible to approach making a record in a way where, all the time, you were trying to second-guess what other people might think of it.

It’s also interesting that if it comes off that way – like the Beach Boys – to people listening, when the basis of all the songs is a really repetitive two seconds of sound, then that’s totally the opposite to how people back then were making music. It’s kind of crazy to me that people can have the same feelings about two very different kinds of music.

I think that for me, there’s a tension between the fact that it’s a sample-based record and quite methodically constructed in that way, very repetitious, yet at the same time there’s all these free-wheeling harmonies.

I think that I was scared of feeling too robotic about the methods that I using. The way that it was mixed was all about using the mouse, volume lines and stuff like that. I started rebelling against that. With all the songs I wanted to make sure that I could pay them live before I recorded them, and if I couldn’t play it live then I wasn’t going to try and record it. I wanted all the songs to be based a performance vibe, and I think that helped the album to feel natural, on some level, despite it being methodical. There are a lot of little imperfections in terms of how I played it.

In terms of the multi-tracked vocals, I was intrigued to read you talking elsewhere about the fact that you used to sing in classical choirs as a kid. More than the Brian Wilson/Beach Boys thing that’s what the vocals have evoked for me: that polyphonic texture, quite a liturgical, church-based sound.

There are a lot of interesting things about that. One is that a lot of people get bummed out that they can’t understand the words to Person Pitch, and how that takes away from the emotional strength of the record for them. But when I listen to a lot of choral music I can’t understand what they’re saying: the nature of how it sounds in a church is that when you have forty people singing the pronunciation doesn’t really come across, but there’s an atmosphere. So it’s not a problem for me that people can’t understand the words. But at the same time it made me think about the fact that some people were saying: “I don’t like this album because I don’t understand what he’s talking about”, and I thought: “Why don’t I want people to know what I’m talking about, am I afraid of that?” So eventually I put the words up on the Myspace page.

But in terms singing during school in choirs and stuff, I feel like I developed the way I sing because of that, because you don’t want a voice that sticks out too much, you want to really blend in with everybody’s voices. So I’ve hardwired this way of singing into my brain where I try not to put too much character into my voice, I try to keep it like another instrument.

To go back to that idea of listening to choral music, you do attribute meaning to the vocals, but it’s coming out of things like the texture of the voice and the sound of different syllables.

It’s like you feel it more than you understand it, or more than you think about it.

Yes, and you start to create your own narrative or meaning to go with it. You mentioned the fact that you let imperfections into the recording, and I’ve been thinking about the fact that the title, Person Pitch, suggests imperfection. I was thinking about the title with regards to polyphony, and the fact that in the really early days of church music there was no such thing as a written system of pitch or intonation. The album is imperfect, it slides here and there, so even though it’s built from various pieces of new technology it doesn’t sound codified, if you know what I mean?

It’s like imperfection is the natural state of things. That’s really interesting. There’s a Zen aesthetic called wabi-sabi which I think is exactly that, and it’s something I really believe in though I can’t often articulate it. It’s like these old potters who’ll be making a pot for years at a time and make it totally perfect, but as it’s drying they’ll take the top off it so it’s got this imperfection to it, because that’s actually more perfect than perfection. And it’s also interesting in that the title of the album was originally going to be Perfect Pitch.

Oh, really?!

I was totally fascinated by people who have perfect pitch. I don’t think that I have it. I can tune a piano pretty good, but if you ask me to sing a C flat, I can’t do it. Some people have that natural ability, they know where the note is [in isolation], and that’s so awesome to me, I wish that I had that ability. I was thinking about using the word ‘perfect’ for a title but then I thought: “No, no. That sounds really arrogant.” I don’t want people to think I have that attitude to music. And then I came out with Person Pitch as I was writing the album and thinking about it, and that rang true for me a lot more than Perfect Pitch did.

That is interesting, because in a way perfect pitch is what you get when you can start tying sounds into a system of notes, but person pitch is what you get when you don’t have that.

I feel like I’m really good at knowing whether something is in tune or not, I can listen to the harmonics and the vibrations, but this instinctual knowledge of knowing where a single pitch is in the scale, I have no idea. I don’t understand how it’s possible. It seems like a miracle.

From The Brag, Sydney
Interview by Richard MacFarlane

Person Pitch took a reasonable amount of time to make. Have you been reading many reviews of it?

Yeah, I’ve seen a bunch of them. There’s a lot of stuff online that I’ve been reading.

Did any of these surprise you much?

The whole level of attention the album received was really super surprising to me. That’s not to say that I thought the album was bad, but what I expected was that I thought it would do just a little bit better than Young Prayer. But I certainly didn’t expect it to get a whole lot of attention.

Do you think it is doing better than Young Prayer because of the whole happier tone of it?

It’s definitely a lot easier to swallow than Young Prayer was, I guess that’s why I thought it would do a little bit better.

It all sounds quite carefree to me; and I find that big thing that comes through is a sense of instinctiveness. I was wondering just how naturally the album came in the making to you?

It was pretty natural, as you say. I think it helped that I was only working in little bits, just in my free time, and I didn’t have any deadlines or anything. So it was always kind of a relaxed atmosphere, I was working from home so there was always a mellow vibe going on. I should also say that after the last one which was so intense, and where the subject matter was so serious, it was definitely a conscious decision on my part to try and do something that I felt was way more casual and didn’t take itself too seriously. Overall, and on the most basic level, I just wanted the music to be just positive on any level, for somebody when they were listening to it, and for me making it too.

I think the change in sounds from Young Prayer to Person Pitch is at least a little bit reflective of what I’ve gone through the past couple of years. I feel like I’ve bee a much happier person overall and its something I’ve definitely worked on. I guess I’m always working on being a happier person; I suppose everyone is in different ways.

So was the whole album recorded in Lisbon? I feel weird knowing all this stuff like how you got married and had a child.

[laughs] Yeah it was all recorded in Lisbon.

From what I hear it’s a pretty chilled out place. It’s funny how the whole idea of the ‘casual’ in your music seems so apt. Even though there are so many sounds going on in the record it still just sounds so laid back. There’s a certain rhythmic spontaneity that comes through for me. I was listening to this record by The Field just before I came here, this techno record, and one of the tracks really reminded me of one of the tracks on Person Pitch; ‘Bros’ maybe. Have you heard that record?

Yeah for sure. I’ve heard a lot of those jams. I feel like dance music on the production side of things, as well as dub music (which kind of has its own place in the lineage of dance production); those were the two most influential things for me when I was thinking about it, and in terms of the production of the album.

I was wondering what it was in particular what you liked about dance music and DJ culture?

I think the biggest thing is I get really psyched on being in a club with lots of people dancing and the music sounding really loud and feeling the bass really heavy and in yr body. It’s a special way to experience music and I really like that sort of environment a lot. I guess my dream for the album was that it would be played in that sort of environment. I don’t really think it will be, but that was what I really wanted.

It’s funny, because I find it a very uplifting record to hear. I think it’s the rhythmic element of the record that makes me want to move around or dance.

Yeah, well it’s funny that you say that because I have that sensation too, like when I was making it I wanted to kind of move around. It’s the rhythms of it or something about that, but it’s like, my body can’t do that; I cant move that way!

It’s this urge to dance but yeah, I don’t know how yr meant to move to that sound.

In terms of dance music and how it relates to that, I think it’s the repetitions of everything and how monotonous the loops are in a way. To me, it harkens back to that sort of music, dance music and that sort of format.

You put a couple of tracks out on 12″ single, is that to do with that too?

Yeah that was definitely a direct influence of dance culture, the way things are produced.

Are you much of a dancer yourself?

I’m not, no, unless I’m in a room by myself at home. I’m not much of a public dancer, I should say. But every once in a while, if I’m drunk enough [laughs]

I’m glad you feel the sensation of that as well, though. Because there was one time in Sydney when the Animal Collective played and me and my friend couldn’t contain ourselves and danced fairly ridiculously during the whole set and then this guy was like ‘DUDE CAN YOU GUYZ STAY STILL I’M JUST TRYING TO WATCH THE BAND; GOSH. And I was like (in my head) ‘DUDE YR NOT GETTIN’ IT’.

I want everybody to have a good time; I mean I can sort of see his point of view but I’m kind of bummed out that he wasn’t in to it in that way. I’m always kind of dancing in my own weird way up on stage, I must look like a moron for sure.

Do you still play most of the drums in Animal Collective now?

Yeah, that’s still my main role in the band by default.

A lot of articles and music press say that you’re the most melodic member of the group. Would you say that’s fair enough?

I wouldn’t really agree with that actually. I mean Dave certainly writes most of the songs and I feel like his is the strongest voice in the band by far. So I don’t think its accurate to say that im like the melodic or the pop side of the band at all. More recently I’ve written more songs for the band but still I feel like the bulk of it is his jams.

Right. But with your solo stuff, have you been playing much of that live?

Yeah, I have, here and there over the past two years. I did one small European tour with Ariel Pink and then I’ve played maybe about five times in the past couple of years here in Lisbon. I played twice in the UK about a month ago. I did this one here recently that was at this like African disco, and that was so sweet; I had a really good time at that one. And also a couple of days ago I played at my wife’s fashion show. It was on the roof of this mall, it was really intense.

What sort of stuff does she design?

She’s a designer who makes pieces that are all unique. She really cranks it out, too. It’s pretty surreal and weird on a certain level. I think her stuff is unique because it’s kind of casual and comfortable but weird at the same time. It’s like something that yr not used to seeing.

It’s funny that yr describing these clothes like that because you could probably say that exact thing about Person Pitch.

Totally. It’s weird; we talk a lot about our places in our respective fields and there are so many similarities in our own places in terms of what everyone else is doing. Or how we feel like we fit in, or don’t fit in to things.

Did it all work at this fashion show, yr music?

Yeah I think it really worked well, and she seemed to think so as well. It felt good to me. We spent a while picking the different songs I would use. I took a lot of the songs off Person Pitch and cut them up and put them together with other songs. They were all mainly the more subdued jams. It’s nice to play in the fashion show setting; I’d done it a couple of times previously. It’s nice not to be the focus of attention in a way.

So how do you react to playing solo and just being up there on your own?

It’s kind of nerve racking really, because if I make any kind of mistake it’s really obvious, because there’s no one else making sound except for me. The system I’ve got is just two samplers and singing; if I hit the button at the wrong time its really noticeable. I practice pretty heavily to limit those events. I guess I do pretty good with it, but it’s definitely something I get more nervous about compared to the Animal Collective shows.

Were you nervous about releasing yr album?

Not really. Maybe I would’ve been if I thought people wre going to care about it. At the time though, it was sort of the leak on the internet that made people pay attention to it. Before that, though, I thought it would do just a little bit better than Young Prayer.

Are you planning on staying in Lisbon for the near future?

Yeah, I should say that my wife and I are totally happy here. I was definitely concerned about how it was going to work but its turned out in a really positive way. It hasn’t really seemed to be a problem so far. At least for now, I think we’re totally satisfied and happy being here.

You were just in Arizona recording with Animal Collective. Did you find that the way you made music there was a lot different to making it in Lisbon?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we had written all the songs and we knew pretty much exactly what we were going to do before we got there; there wasn’t much of a songwriting process going on. It was so much more of a formal experience in terms of recording. It was way more organized with the band. And it followed a more strict path, whereas on my own I could just do whatever I want, I didn’t have any deadlines, it was kind of more…well, to use the word casual again.

I was about to mention that word again myself. But its strange, because it all sounds so dense as well, you can tell that a lot of work has gone into it. I was wondering where you dug up all the samples from.

They’re all off the Internet. Almost all of them, something like 95% I just got from free sound FX sites and things like that. I’m kind of psyched about it being this real digital, internet age sort of album. And at first, I was like, ‘I’m definitely not going to release this on vinyl’. But now lots of people have been asking about it’s vinyl release so we probably will.

From Beat magazine:

Shane Moritz chats to the person behind the Panda about the Feel Good Album of the Year

Music writers with premature adulation problems tend to toss out the feel-good-album-of-the-year cliché at the same rate Winona Ryder beds rockers with melodic impotency problems. Person Pitch by Panda Bear — an adorable seven-song shuffle of hypnotic electronic clatter — not only feels good; it makes rather fine anxiety medication. The person behind Person Pitch is Noah Lennox, a dope dude and member of Animal Collective (furry freaks). Panda Bear is his superior side project.

Filtered through a low fidelity hiss atop a repetitive beat buttered in bliss, Person Pitch finds harmony in Noah’s chants that echo out cathedral-style amongst swathes of extraneous street noise (jets taking off, cars skidding, girls giggling, babies bawling, guys grunting, fish jumping, etc.) assembled like a thousand piece puzzle of otherworldly-earthly found sounds. These samples provide much of the Panda magic. “The salt and pepper of the album is what I like to call them,” Noah says, on the phone from Lisbon. “There were parts where I would kind of lose my focus and thought I needed something to occupy my mind for a second while the song was going to where it needed to go and that’s where I would insert some kind of sound. If the repetition got too monotonous I would always feel like I needed something to grab my attention kind of like a palate cleanser.”

Noah lives in Lisbon with his wife and kid. He likes it there. “Suits my sensibility, I guess. My music job happens in other places so when I’m home it’s kind of like vacation time.” His wife designs clothes, rad stuff he tries to pinch sometimes. “Every once in a while I’ll see a piece of hers and I’ll be like I really want this, and she’ll be like okay take it. There’s this one sweatshirt that’s black with this weird splatter-like bleach pattern on it. It’s really simple, but kind of subtle. I wear it all the time.”

If Person Pitch is a teeter-totter than Bros is its base. Consisting of two, magnificent six-minute parts, Bros was recorded during a life-changing time for Noah. “The first part was written before my daughter was born. The song is about moving here. Moving away from your family and all your friends. Sort of everything you’ve worked your whole life for - you’re kind of leaving it behind. I guess the first part I’m trying to talk to all those people and all those things I’m moving away from, trying to explain that I am not going to forget them. I am doing what I think is best for me and trying to do what I want to do. I’m not trying to fuck them over, you know. And then the second part is my defence and I get a little hyped up about it. I get way more aggressive. Those kind of feelings didn’t last forever, but I am glad I sort of captured them in that moment.”

Noah grew up in Pennsylvania to parents who are defined in this story by what they played in their car. “My mother was super into ballets, we listened to classical music in her car and in my Dad’s there was always The Cars, The Pretenders, all the hits.” Noah was a hoopster. “I used to play basketball everyday. I was a point guard or a shooting guard. I was a scorer. My senior year we won the title and that was kind of a big deal because where I went to high school it was farm country. We were just these longhairs. It was a bit like Hoosiers. We were always the nice guy team but my senior year we were the dicks. But we won. There was a celebration in the hall at lunchtime.”

After high school, Noah spent three years at Boston University studying Religion. Why religion? “I recognised the power that it had on people’s lives and I was trying to understand what that was all about. I got three quarters of the way through it before losing my mind a little bit. In my life I have kind of been led along a path and shown the way to go and if I haven’t been looking out I am always given signs in a weird way and that was one of the times that I wasn’t really reading the signs so eventually whoever or whatever was watching over me kind of said all right that’s enough we’re going to have to force him out of the situation, so I kind of broke down a little bit and I went home to recover and wound up spending the summer in New York with my girlfriend at the time and never went back and the music side of my life kind of took over.”

From the Sydney Morning Herald (four stars):

There is a line from a UK review of this album by Noah Lennox, who usually plays in the band Animal Collective but today at least is calling himself Panda Bear, that I have to shamelessly borrow. Person Pitch is what you imagine the result would have been if the Beach Boys had joined the Hare Krishnas. There are harmonies and quasi-religious chanting, unadulterated pop and a determined fervour, and everything basking in sunshine. Scared yet? No need to be. There is something both childlike and joyous about the songs on this album, which is mostly comprised of Lennox’s voice in almost endless layers and thin, chattering percussion which shakes, tinkles, rings and percolates. While there are breakout bits of twitchy, skittish electronica, the prevailing wind here is warm and elevating. Sure, there is a strong suspicion that if you scratch the surface you might find more than a hint of madness, but hey, it would be the throw arms around you and cuddle kind of madness so why not go with it?

- Bernard Zuel

From The Australian newspaper (four and a half stars):

OPENING with handclapping and a mantra to “try to remember always, just to have a good time”, the third solo album from Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) sets itself up like a lost Beach Boys experiment made at the height of Brian Wilson’s creativity and LSD intake. Using only a guitar and scavenged audio samples, Panda Bear composes exquisite pop melodies to which he adds sweet vocals and multilayered harmonies. Bros, one of two 12-minute masterpieces, starts with owl hoots and 1950s guitar that grow into a galaxy of astounding hooks and dance-inducing rhythms. Later songs such as Search for Delicious, with its Wolfgang Voight influence, certainly make things freakier, but Panda never forfeits his sense of joy and celebration. Familiar, yet crammed with originality, Person Pitch is the kind of record your kids will find in 20 years and come to you with mouths agape. Then you’ll smile and say, “Ah, you’ve found Panda Bear. Good. Enjoy.”

- Sean Rabin

Pitchfork’s 9.4 rated review:

Inside the booklet included with Panda Bear’s third solo album, Person Pitch, is a list of artists. The first four named are microhouse artists Basic Channel, Luomo, Dettinger, and Wolfgang Voigt. Maybe Noah Lennox, the man behind the Panda Bear, began this influence-naming exercise in a minimal techno state of mind. On the other hand, the inclusion of these four at the top could be significant. We always knew that the guys from his main band, Animal Collective, had an ear out for electronic music, but with Panda Bear, the impact of the DJ seems to run deeper. The music on Person Pitch sounds nothing like proper dance music, but the basic structure– the use of dynamics, and above all, the sense of repetition– draws heavily from that context. Which is particularly interesting considering what else is going on.

The Beach Boys always come up when talking about Panda Bear, and not just because he shares their fondness for certain melodic turns: When he allows the reverb to blanch his voice, Lennox can sound uncannily like Brian Wilson. This tunefulness gives Person Pitch an appeal that extends beyond just Animal Collective fans, but the way the songs are put together also gives them an unusual twist. Producers in Brian Wilson’s era never worked like this, sampling old songs and instruments and spinning them in wheels of sound that seem like they could go forever. Most of this record consists of intricately constructed, heavily layered, and highly repetitive loops on top of which Lennox sings oddly familiar and touching melodies. But despite its grounding in guitar pop, Person Pitch isn’t likely to be mistaken for the work of a band. It sounds like what it is: one guy alone in his bedroom trolling through music history, picking and choosing bits to make something deeply personal and all his own.

The repetition of the music here, though probably engendered by computer, has a strange analog quality. You can almost see the turntables rotating on the opening Comfy in Nautica, which loops Lennox’s sung “ah”’s and handclaps to evoke ritual campfire music, while the deep reverb on his voice puts us in the same liturgical headspace found on his very different acoustic record Young Prayer from 2004. Take Pills repeats a tambourine and twangy guitar during its slower opening section while industrial samples that sound like car parts being followed down an assembly line fill in the vast spaces. The field recordings take an aquatic turn on the track’s second half, as Lennox picks up his acoustic guitar and moves the party to the beach, singing “I don’t want for us to take pills anymore” to the kind of effortlessly melodic line that once expressed thoughts like “da doo ron ron.”

Given the presence of such tremendously catchy pop moments on Person Pitch, the record’s indulgences feel completely earned. The flurry of tabla that opens the extended Good Girl/Carrots sticks out at first but makes sense once Lennox gets the hectic dub chaos out of his system and settles into the second section’s hypnotic tune. When the song edges become wispy and shapeless on I’m Not, which blends Lennox’s voice with an indistinct droning synth, the mood and thrust of the album gives the track the appropriate context. Search for Delicious, reminiscent of the glowing ambient drift of Lennox’s side project Jane, won’t leave the drone alone, repeatedly knocking Lennox’s singing off track like a clumsy but well-meaning drunk. Music of such warped processing would be a specialist’s item, but as a breather here, before the simple and childlike music-box closer Ponytail, it feels right.

I still haven’t talked about the 12-and-a-half-minute Bros, the astonishing track that serves as the album’s centerpiece. It’s here that Person Pitch’s repetition and DJ’s sense of timing are most apparent, while Lennox’s songwriting hits a melodic peak. The first few bars turn to the golden age of 60s and 70s radio, with some rattling percussion chipped from Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and a chiming acoustic guitar that could be pulled from the Beach Boys’ Girl Don’t Tell Me. But as the loops pass on Bros, the song begins to seem like a glorious travelogue, a journey along a path where all the music’s influences are visible along the roadside: the Wilson Brothers in their pinstripe shirts, or the queasy phasing and random sound effects– a subway, people on a roller coaster, a baby crying– of Lee “Scratch” Perry. When Panda begins to chant halfway through, we hear an echo of his main band, and when the neo-Latin piano comes in during the latter portion, transforming the track from internally-focused meditation to outwardly-beaming celebration, we get an image of Derrick May’s classic house anthem Strings of Life busting into a techno set to make everyone go crazy.

Person Pitch as a whole– and Bros in particular– evokes the sunshine of Lennox’s adopted Lisbon, Portugal home. But it’s the kind of light best experienced with eyes closed– with the rays filtered through eyelids, turning the world into various shades of red and orange. You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music and see abstractions of its inspirations– that whole long list and more– as they cycle around again and again and again. Five of these seven songs have been released in various forms on singles and 12″s previously, so the exceptionally high quality of this music isn’t a surprise to those who have been following Panda Bear closely. Still, hearing it all together in one place and listening to it all at one time is both overwhelming and inspirational.

-Mark Richardson, March 22, 2007

Panda Bear’s Person Pitch reviewed in The Guardian:

Simon Reynolds is bewitched by Animal Collective’s singing drummer who, now he’s a father, has rediscovered his inner child

The artwork of Panda Bear’s third solo album is full of clues. The front sleeve is a paddling pool fantastically packed with children and animals (tiger, seal, gorilla, leopard, koala and, yes, panda). Inside the booklet, there are further brightly coloured photographs: kids on stilts facing a sky mad with fruit bats and flying foxes, a boy in a kilt and a crocodile head-dress dancing a jig, a pigtailed girl riding a gondola through a sky swirling with feathers. These images set you up for music that’s tribal, ecstatic yet eerie, brimming with child-like wonder. And that’s exactly what Person Pitch delivers.

In Animal Collective, Panda Bear (real name, Noah Lennox) plays drums and sings. Here, he builds a unique and refreshing sound almost entirely out of percussion and his own multi-tracked voice, influenced by teenage years singing in a high school choir. Opener ‘Comfy in Nautica’ sounds like the Beach Boys if they’d joined Hari Krishna. A billowing vocal roundelay interwoven with looped bell-chimes, ‘Bros’ starts as a mellow canter, then plunges into a spangled surge of acoustic guitars. The song sustains its rhapsodic pitch for 12-and-a-half minutes that leave the listener drained and dizzy. ‘Good Girl/Carrots’, another 12-minute tour de force, kicks off with bubbling tablas and baby talk, moves into a section where Lennox gently upbraids some uptight, know-it-all adversary, then skanks out under cascades of glistening sonic confetti. ‘I’m Not’, a skyscape of sighs and shivers, and ‘Search For Delicious’, braided from wobbled vocals and found sounds, both merge experimentalism and euphony. Like Animal Collective, Lennox pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.

Lennox’s previous album, Young Prayer, was a eulogy to his father, a literally glowing tribute recorded in the room where Lennox Snr passed away. It doesn’t take much of a leap of insight to twig that Person Pitch is inspired by love and (re)birth: Lennox married a Portuguese woman, moved to that country (’a European California,’ he says, laid-back and sun-kissed) and had a daughter. It’s actually quite hard to imagine Lennox as a dad, though, because he looks and sounds so young. There’s a boyish buoyancy to the sound of Person Pitch, a pure-hearted nobility. The album’s core emotions - awe, curiosity, rejoicing, tenderness - are precisely the things that age and experience tends to erode.

At once Sixties-redolent (specifically Dylan’s ‘I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now’ and ‘he not busy being born is busy dying’) yet timeless and perennially applicable, the album’s open-hearted spirit is crystallised in the chorus to ‘Ponytail’. Lennox sings: ‘When my soul starts growing, it gets so hungry/ I wish it never would, never would, never would stop growing.’ Sunday March 18, 2007

From Drowned In Sound:

How? That’s the question Person Pitch asks. It’s a broad question, and with it comes the looking towards distant rolling hills and thinking you could probably climb them. Then, when you’re climbing them and you’re near the top, looking back down and seeing that it was kind of really far. These hills, though, they’re all different colours; everything’s incredibly vibrant. You can see a long way from here.

It’s staggering that Panda Bear is a real person. Noah Lennox, also of Animal Collective, is fucking ambitious. These psychedelic hymns and schizophrenic nursery rhymes sound unreal, otherworldly. It’s strange, then, that it all makes so much sense; that it sounds so human, so real and in touch. The title of Person Pitch is apt. It sounds like the work of one hundred men, but at the same time just the efforts of one.

Person Pitch opens with a revised version of the title track from the old Comfy In Nautica EP. It’s a summation of what’s to come, and of Panda Bear’s sound and ethos: it’s an inspired sound, hopeful, joyous and multifaceted. ‘I’m Not’ (the flipside from said EP) is here too, later in the album; it’s right at home in such ethereal surroundings. This is a record that sets out to do lots of things.

Next, ‘Take Pills’ eases from his slower, signature blissed-out chants into buoyant and, somehow, danceable beat-driven material. Animal Collective has always been about tribal-style beats, propelling their pop along riotously and always blissfully, and here it works perfectly, with numerous styles mingling. Lennox tries out lots of genres with all the fervor and excitement of hearing them for the first time, and it’s just so seamless! It can be background music and at the same time the most engaging thing you’ve ever heard.

‘Good Girl/Carrots’ is over 12 minutes long and begins with tribal drums and screaming and Young Prayer/Animal Collective-style chanting before chilling out. Lennox’s vocals are serene, his lyrics abstracted and echoing underneath textural found-sounds and piano loops. It’s incredibly enchanting. Then loops fade, textures subside and a transition takes place… into dub! It’s completely unexpected, and Lennox chants on: “And all I want to do is take it easy”. Wind-chimes resonate against this echo-ridden backdrop; birds chirp and Fennesz-esque ambience floats from the speakers as the track changes into ‘Search for Delicious’. It’s transcendent.

‘Bros’ you might’ve heard before – it’s been released as a single. It’s freaky and distant and the 12 minutes it spans, in mesmerizing fashion, speed by. It could either be one great big serene lullaby or an extended dance mix.

Person Pitch has an extreme amount of production; lots of layers and a lot of manipulation. It’s all masterful: the vocation that must have gone into making this is audible, but it all sounds so effortless. Animal Collective’s beats are tribal and infectious; they mine something instinctive. Here, Panda Bear builds upon those ideas in a new tangent, one very much his own. His is an incredible voice, booming and strident. - Richard MacFarlane

Rating: 9/10

AUSTRALIAN REVIEWS of PERSON PITCH:

Four star review in The Age newspaper:

Before Animal Collective there was Panda Bear. The first solo record for Noah Lennox arrived before he and his friends had ever committed their experimental racket to tape, back in 1998; though its subdued collection of abstract electro programming and soft singing was rarely heard at the time.

Lennox didn’t return to his solo guise for another five years, until the death of his father compelled Panda Bear to step out of the menagerie: his grieving producing the whisper-quiet acoustic-guitar meditation Young Prayer.

In the three years since, Animal Collective have gone from New Yorker obscurity to globe-trotting popularity; their music going from ramshackle to precise, from weirdly introspective to outwardly joyous. That sense of unrestrained joy is inherent in Person Pitch, the third Panda Bear record and first to feel directly connected to Animal Collective.

For fans of the band’s jams, there’s much to love here: Lennox building unlikely, ecstatic pop epics out of layers upon delay-draped layers of high-pitched vocals, nimble guitar lines, organ drone and lustily shaken hand percussion.

- Anthony Carew

From Cyclic Defrost magazine:

Best known as chief warbler for those odd experimental folk pop weirdoes Animal Collective, Panda Bear demonstrates his deep love of Americana pop history on Person Pitch. It’s a sound that has occasionally crept into the Animal Collective repertoire, though usually in a much more fragmented and twisted form, via multiple part vocal harmonies, and in recent times gentle acoustic guitar. And like Animal Collective it’s Panda Bear’s highly melodic vocal style that provides the links to the Beach Boys and their ilk, as there’s none of those other foolish folks to jump in scream and wail to ruin everything. That said his instrumentation and compositions are eclectic as ever and his vocals, well they’re still a little strange. Where his previous solo album 2004’s Young Prayer, a reaction to his father’s passing, consisted mainly of strange drawn out repetitive acoustic guitar and wailing, on Person Pitch he’s utilized electronics and real words. His vocals are almost without fail heavily reverbed, which provides a more dreamy timeless quality and gives them added strength in the mix where they can unify above some of the strange music. Part music, part musique concrete his instrumentation is quite odd and also quite lo fi. There’s everything from extended percussive djembe workouts to quite respectful electronics. Though despite his experimentation there’s no denying his pop hooks, never letting the weirdness get in the way of his own demented pop vision – this is singer songwriting damnit. But don’t for one moment think this is normal, Panda Bear has really offered up something from way out of left field, the thing is its so good that you’ll be more than happy to follow him back out there. ~ Bob Baker Fish

from mX newspaper (Melbourne & Sydney):