Music interviews start to sound awfully repetitive once you’ve read enough of them. So tell me about the new album. Do you prefer playing live or working in the studio? How would you describe your music? Who are your influences? Zzzzzzz. Kudos, then, to The Fader, who acquiesced to Animal Collective’s request to be interviewed over email by LA comedian Aziz Ansari and then published the entire transcript as a kind of pseudo-Interview magazine style stream-of-consciousness conversation, only with HTML and plentiful embedded YouTube videos. And baby photos. Some of it is dull (endless discussions of WWF, in particular), but there’s some quality quotes to be had. Our edited highlights are after the jump.
Avey Tare’s theories on YouTube and mixtapes: “In some roundabout way YouTube is a new form of mixtape. I feel like we are probably a part of the last generation of people who made mixtapes for each other as a way of expression, you know? … Our friends send crazy YouTube shit to each other all the time too. I feel like if you start trading them enough with people then it starts to become sort of the same sort of expression (as mixtapes were in the past). It’s also a killer way to discover stuff.”
Tare’s bad experience with Vaseline: “We are working on this movie with our friend Danny and for one of the ‘scenes’ I had to wear a costume that involved me putting Vaseline and glitter on most of my upper body. What a bad idea. I must have spent three hours in the shower scraping all that shit off. I think I almost cried cause I thought it never would come off. There is probably something that easily removes it, but I don’t know what it is. So keep that in mind if you are ever thinking of putting Vaseline and glitter all over yourself.”
More random costume-related facts, this time from Panda Bear: “I haven’t dressed up for Halloween in a while – like 10 years or so now I would say. One time Josh and I and some other friends went as boxes and we just cut two armholes in the sides of cardboard boxes and went out. I thought it kind of ruled, but there were people who wouldn’t give us candy because they said we didn’t have proper costumes. A car drove by us late in the night and threw eggs at us but the boxes just absorbed the impact and they all bounced off.”
Yet more costume-related information, this time from Deakin, à propos of Geologist’s recent wedding: “The wedding was awesome. I had a bunch of friends down crashing at the Mom’s. Spent Saturday getting costumes together. I attached a photo.”
Here is said photo, which proves that an Animal Collective wedding isn’t quite like anyone else’s:
Best wedding dancefloor filler: “Poison” by Bell Bev Devoe, apparently. Eeek.
Best post-nuptial psychedelic kung fu horror movie: Deakin reveals that after the wedding, the band (sans Geologist, presumably), retired to watch… Spooky Encounters 2: Final Battle. “We were all pretty bent by that point.”
And finally… best Animal Collective baby photo: Now it becomes apparent why Geologist wears that headlamp… it’s to keep his hair down!