Danse Manatee
Danse Manatee is the first collaborative studio album between Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, released in July 2001 on the label Catsup Plate. It was retroactively classified as the second studio album by experimental pop band Animal Collective. Only one thousand copies were made for the Catsup Plate release, but it was reissued as a double CD along with Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished in 2003 on FatCat Records. Band member Geologist, who joined Avey Tare and Panda Bear for the first time on this release, has said that this is his favorite Animal Collective album, despite its general lack of popularity among fans and critics; the album was recorded in many different locations, including Avey's parent's house, the house the band shared in Brooklyn Heights, Geologist's college dorm room and radio station. To create the sounds the group made use of guitar, synths and did percussion with whatever was lying around; the band's goal in the recording and production of the album was to experiment with extreme frequencies and how they were perceived by the listener.
This created a challenge during the mastering process, as they could not raise the volume of the whole mix without causing the sounds to digitally distort. Geologist had this to say about the recording of the album on the Collected Animals forum: For the Spirit/Danse reissue on FatCat Records, Danse Manatee was remastered by Sung Tongs producer Rusty Santos. All tracks written by Animal Collective. Avey Tare - guitar, synthesizers, percussion Panda Bear - singing, electronics, percussion Geologist - MiniDiscs, electronics, percussion
Doin' It Right
"Doin' It Right" is a song written and performed by French electronic music duo Daft Punk and American musician Panda Bear of the band Animal Collective. It is a track on Daft Punk's fourth studio album Random Access Memories, was the last to be recorded for the album; the song was distributed to American alternative radio stations on 3 September 2013 as the third single from Random Access Memories. Prior to this, it appeared on record charts in France, the United States and the United Kingdom due to digital downloads of the album. "Doin' It Right" received a positive critical reception, with some reviewers opining it as the group's best work out of the entire LP. "Doin' It Right" was the last song to be recorded for Random Access Memories. Noah Lennox, better known by his stage name Panda Bear, had first heard of Daft Punk through the music video of the song "Around the World", which introduced him to many aspects of electronic dance music, he asked the duo to remix an Animal Collective song, which they declined.
A request to remix a solo Panda Bear track was refused by Daft Punk as they no longer had interest in doing "that kind of thing". The duo however would keep Panda Bear in mind for a collaboration, invited him to the Random Access Memories sessions in Paris a year and a half later. Lennox's contribution was recorded within a three-day window, which went against his usual approach of gestating an idea over a long period, he recalled that after the microphones in the studio were prepared and tested for his voice, he was instructed to "do something good". He tried several ideas, none of which resonated with the group in the studio; the idea that became "Doin' It Right" came about late in the sessions on a whim, to which Daft Punk reacted positively. Lennox remarked that his intention was to make neither a Panda Bear track nor a Daft Punk song, but to "hit a target, in the middle of us. I felt like I was out of my comfort zone, but that's what the whole song is about." Daft Punk referred to "Doin' It Right" as the only purely electronic piece on the album, with a modern style.
Unlike the rest of Random Access Memories, the instrumental accompaniment was achieved without session musicians and consists of a modular synthesizer performed by Daft Punk. Jeremy Abbott of Mixmag noted that, "Light and airy synths are introduced half way through to make this a fantastic understated ballad." The song is in the key of E♭m, performs in common time at a tempo of 89 beats per minute. The vocals range two octaves; the chord progression of A♭sus2—A♭m—G♭/B♭—C♭sus2—C♭—D♭—E♭sus2—E♭m—D♭—C♭sus—C♭ is followed throughout."Doin' It Right" is a snare-and-vocoder-driven track with vocals by Panda Bear, a vocoder loop singing the lyric "Doing it right/everybody will be dancing/and we'll feeling it right/everybody will be dancing/and be doing it right/everybody will be dancing/and we'll feeling it right/everybody will be dancing tonight". The vocoder part stops when Panda Bear sings the lyric "If you lose your way tonight/ That's how you know the magic's right," which, according to Pitchfork Media, is "presumably for emphasis, we know that magic is important to Daft Punk.'
Regarding the musical style, a Clash review noted that the song has "a bit of an Afrika Bambaataa-proto-electro vibe" while Pitchfork called it "a terrifically uplifting bit of electro-pop." Critics have noted that the rhythmic structure resembles that of trap music. Pitchfork Media gave the song a positive review and designated it "Best New Music." GQ's Zach Baron described "Doin' It Right" as being a Panda Bear solo track that happened to be part of the album. NME noted that, "There's a Trojan Robot for a few seconds he opens his belly and out pops Panda Bear to sack the ancient city." Both Pitchfork and Paperblog considered the track the best out of the entire album, with Pitchfork calling the track the LP's "strongest statement of purpose, a moment where two artists with a focus on self-betterment align their chakras," and Paperblog calling it the "most highly-anticipated." Spin called Panda Bear's lyrics in the song "as lysergic and endearing as ever." Refinery29 wrote that, "for fans of Daft Punk, this is the kind of core track you're guaranteed to love.
The A. V. Club found the collaboration to be a "befitting and well-executed pairing." In contrast to the positive critical response, PopMatters called it the only letdown of the album, as they felt it went away from the LP's concept "entirely both in style and in production and feels like a guest production someone forcefully crammed into the tracklist." Promotional single"Doin' It Right" – 4:14 Credits adapted from Random Access Memories liner notes. Daft Punk – production, modular synthesizer Panda Bear – vocals In June 2013, an unofficial remix of "Doin’ It Right" was released by producer Nicolas Jaar and musician Dave Harrington of the band Darkside, as part of their remix album Daftside. Jaar had released remixes of tracks by Grizzly Bear and Brian Eno. In 2016, "Doin’ It Right" was remixed by K?d incorporating a mixture of various electronic music styles
Person Pitch
Person Pitch is the third solo album by American recording artist Noah Lennox under his alias Panda Bear, released on March 20, 2007 via Paw Tracks. Departing stylistically from his prior work as both a member of Animal Collective and a solo artist, the album was recorded using the Roland SP-303 sampler and is composed of manipulated samples and Lennox’s layered vocals, he described it as a collection of "super dubby and old sounding" songs inspired by his recent marriage and move to Portugal. The album was met with universal critical acclaim, ranked among various "top 10 albums of the 2000s" lists, it is noted for influencing a wide range of subsequent indie music, including the chillwave genre and numerous soundalike acts. Five of the album's seven tracks were issued as A-sided singles before the album's release: "I'm Not" and "Comfy in Nautica", "Bros", "Carrots" and "Take Pills". Lennox recorded Person Pitch over a two-year period, working because he lacked large stretches of time to dedicate to the material in between tours with Animal Collective.
In response to this, he entertained the idea of releasing a series of 12-inch singles over time which would eventually be compiled into a singles album, a practice inspired by techno producers such as Basic Channel. Lennox wanted to name it Perfect Pitch before settling on Person Pitch – "pitch being sound and person being a person with person pitch being a sound of a person." He attributed the brighter sound of the project to his move to Lisbon and recent familial developments, saying: A lot of the songs on Person Pitch are kind of sugary. It's mellow and sunny here and I feel like the album sounds like that to me; the stuff that's happened to me in the past two years, like getting married and having a kid and all that, has had a pretty profound impact on the kind of music I play and the kind of subjects I address. My approach to being a musician has drastically changed from being a provider; when Lennox moved to Lisbon, he was unable to bring his guitar into the country after it was held up in customs.
He was, able to bring a Roland SP-303 sampler which he had been experimenting with in previous months, inspired by the work of hip hop producer Madlib. As a result, the album is composed of samples. Lennox estimates that "it's like 96% samples, 10% of which I played," with most taken from songs heard on the radio or short recordings found on the Internet; when working with samples of other material, he "tried pretty hard to hide the stuff or make it my own in some way" by applying elements such as effects and EQ treatments, he developed melodies as he played these samples. Despite his previous drumming with Animal Collective, Lennox did not perform drums on the album. Person Pitch departs from the guitar-based sound and loosely rock-oriented format of Lennox's previous work, both as a member of Animal Collective and on his solo releases. Instead it is constructed out of "carefully mapped-out samples, minimal beats, endless layers of his own reverb-saturated vocal harmonies." The Sydney Morning Herald noted elements such as “watery electronics, washed-out samples and Beach Boys-y vocals,” while AllMusic characterized the album as a "patchwork" of "repurposed samples" and dense vocal layers."
Slant called attention to the influence of dance and electronic music production techniques on the album. Spin described it as "steeped in'60s-style harmony and post-rock noise," and "mash up traces of the Beach Boys with digital burbles, elevator chimes, something that sounds like bubble wrap being popped." Entertainment Weekly noted influences from the "sunny California sound of the Beach Boys/Mamas and the Papas era filtered through a playful avant-garde sieve." Critic Simon Reynolds described its style as "a unique and refreshing sound entirely out of percussion and his own multi-tracked voice," noting the influence of Lennox’s "teenage years singing in a high school choir."Lennox himself described the songs in advance as "super dubby and old sounding, like Motown or Buddy Holly just a little bit." He acknowledged the Beach Boys as a partial influence on his vocals, but stated that "I feel like if you do multi-part vocal harmonies you're gonna get that no matter what if you put a bunch of reverb on it or make it sound kind of spacey.
I don't want to sound like anybody else if I can." He invoked his time in a high school chamber choir as another influence. The artwork for Person Pitch and all of the related singles were done by Agnes Montgomery; the album cover artwork is a doctored version of a photo that appeared in an August 1969 issue of National Geographic. According to Lennox, "Initially I knew I wanted to do something, symmetrical; the album is kind of symmetrical in terms of how long the songs are, I wanted the album art to reflect that." Included in the artwork was a long list of artists who Lennox credited with influencing him. Five of the seven tracks on the album were released prior to the album, some of them with different mixing and/or lengths. "I'm Not" and "Comfy in Nautica" were released together as a double A-side single in 2005. "Bros" was released as a single on Fat Cat Records in late 2006. "Good Girl / Carrots" was released in early 2007 on a split 12" with the band Excepter via Animal Collective's own label Paw Tracks.
"Search for Delicious" was featured in 2005 on Volume 14 of music magazine Comes With a Smile's CD compilations. "Take Pills" was released as a 7" single on June 19, 2007. Despite Lennox's initial assertion that Person Pitch would be issued only on CD, it was announ
Panda Bear (album)
Panda Bear is the self-titled debut solo album by the Baltimore musician Noah Lennox who became a founding member of Animal Collective. The album was the first use of the Panda Bear moniker which he continued to use while performing with group, it was released on June 1999 shortly before his 21st birthday on the label Soccer Star Records. The label was formed by himself and fellow future Animal Collective member and childhood friend Deakin and was founded only to release this album; however the label morphed into Animal and the existing label Paw Tracks. This album marks the first Animal Collective related release, apart from the EP, "Paddington Band", a recording by the Animal Collective precursor, Automine which featured all other members of the future group except for Lennox himself; the exact number of compact discs produced is unknown, but can be assumed to be small because the label had no distribution network at the time. It was paid out of pocket by Lennox and Dibb themselves; the aforementioned factors as well as lack of awareness and interest led to the album becoming out of print.
Lennox commented on the possibility of a reissue in 2004. Lennox became interested in electronic music and other forms of experimental music as a teenager. Feeling inspired, he began recording compositions of his own to tape under the name "Panda Bear", he chose the name because he began drawing pictures of pandas, on the tapes. These recordings became the structure of the eventual album. Lennox commented on his approach to making the record in 2004. "Inside a Great Stadium and a Running Race" "Mich mit einer Mond" "On the Farm" "Ohne Titel" "Fire!" "O Please Bring Her Back" "Ain't Got No Troubles" "Winter in St. Moritz" "Liebe auf den Ersten Blick" "A Musician and a Filmmaker" "We Built a Robot" "Sometimes When It Hurts Bad Enough It Feels Like This" "A Lover Once Can No Longer Now Be a Friend" "Ohne Titel"
Other Music
Other Music was a music retail store that sold CDs, records and cassettes online and at their brick-and-mortar location in the Noho neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The store specialized in the sale of curated underground and experimental music; the physical store was located at 15 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003 from 1995 to June, 2016. In January 2007, Other Music announced that it planned to sell high-quality MP3 files for download without using any type of digital rights management; this announcement follows similar moves made by other small online music retailers, including United Kingdom-based Rough Trade, New York-based Insound and New York-based Anthology Recordings. The announcement coincided with the closing of Tower Records' Lower Manhattan location. According to Other Music co-owner Josh Madell, this closing signifies the growing hardship of selling music out of a physical store considering his store's location just across the street from Tower. In August 2012, Other Music launched the record label Other Music Recording Company in a partnership with the Oxford, Mississippi-based record label Fat Possum Records.
Among the label's first releases was an album by Japanese musician Shintaro Sakamoto. In May 2016, Other Music announced its plans to close on June 25. Co-owner Josh Madell cited rising rents and the changing face of the music industry as the reasons for the closure. Writing about Other Music's closure for The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich said, "In 1999, if you were the type of person, looking for something a little different from the schlock being peddled to the herds of dead-eyed automatons browsing the Tower Records up the block here was the store for you!" "A Real Music Store Sprouts Online", Wired News, January 22, 2007 "In the Shadow of No Tower", The Village Voice, January 26, 2007 Other Music Website Rough Trade Digital Insound Digital Anthology Recordings
Chillwave
Chillwave is a music microgenre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by a faded or dreamy retro pop sound, escapist lyrics about the beach or summer, psychedelic or lo-fi aesthetics, mellow vocals, low-to-moderate tempos, effects processing, vintage synthesizers; the term was synonymous with "glo-fi" or "hypnagogic pop". Chillwave loosely engages with notions of memory and nostalgia, it was one of the first music genres to develop through the Internet. The term was coined in 2009 by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff to describe indie acts whose sounds resembled incidental music from 1980s VHS tapes, its most prominent artists were the acts Neon Indian, Washed Out, Toro y Moi, who gained attention during 2009's "Summer of Chillwave". Washed Out's 2009 track "Feel It All Around"; the term was criticized for being nebulous and contrived by various media publications, while the music was derided for its reliance on nostalgia. Some artists rejected the tag, while many exploited the style's low-budget simplicity, which led to an oversaturation of acts.
Another Internet-based microgenre, evolved from chillwave. Most accounts attribute "chillwave" to a July 2009 post written by "Carles", the anonymous manager of the blog Hipster Runoff; the site, active between 2008 and 2013, was known for its ironic posts on "alt" trends. Carles used the term to describe a host of similar rising bands. A July 27 post titled "Is WASHED OUT the next Neon Indian/Memory Cassette?" Ruminated on a nascent trend involving the "musicsphere" searching for a "new'authentic, undergroundish product' that isn't a huge brand like AnCo/GrizzBear/etc.... It seems easiest to have a chill project, somewhat'conceptual' but demonstrates that ur band has'pop sensibilities' or something." He proposed a list of genre names, including "Chill Bro Core", "post-AnCo rock", "Conceptual Blog Core", "post-electro". The post concludes: Feel like I might call it'chill wave' music in the future. Feels like'chill wave' is dominated by'thick/chill synths' while conceptual core is still trying to'use real instruments/sound like it was recorded in nature.'
Feel like chillwave is supposed to sound like something, playing in the background of'an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late 80s/early 90s.' Carles explained that he was " a bunch of pretty silly names on a blog post and saw which one stuck." Neon Indian's Alan Palomo surmised that the name stuck "because it was the most dismissive and sarcastic... the term chillwave came when the era of blog-mediated music was at its height at that time." The term did not gain mainstream currency until early 2010, when it was the subject of articles by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Chillwave was one of the first genres to acquire an identity online. According to writer Garin Pirnia, it is an example of linking musical trends by Internet outlets rather than geographic location. Pirnia wrote in 2010, "Whereas musical movements were once determined by a city or venue where the bands congregated,'now it's just a blogger or some journalist that can find three or four random bands around the country and tie together a few commonalities between them and call it a genre.'"
Chillwave has been classified as bedroom pop, or electropop. Before the term was invented, chillwave music was described as shoegaze, dream pop, ambient, or indietronica. Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe writes that, since at least 1992, the style has existed for the same principal reason: "stoned, happy college kids listening to records while they fall asleep." Abebe cites Slowdive, Darla Records' Blissed Out ambient compilations, Casino Versus Japan's eponymous 1998 album as examples. One of the earliest manifestations of the genre is the Beach Boys' song "All I Wanna Do" from their 1970 album Sunflower. Boards of Canada, whom Abebe says pre-chillwave music was compared to, were influential. Ariel Pink is described as "the godfather of chillwave", he gained recognition in the mid 2000s through a string of self-produced albums, inventing a sound that critic Simon Reynolds called "'70s radio-rock and'80s new wave as if heard through a defective transistor radio, glimmers of melody flickering in and out of the fog".
The Paw Tracks record label, which distributed Pink's albums, was run by Animal Collective, who signed Pink after being impressed by a CD of his home recordings, starting with The Doldrums. In 2010, Uncut's Sam Richard profiled Pink as "a lo-fi legend" whose "ghostly pop sound" proved influential to chillwave acts such as Ducktails and Toro y Moi. Discussing chillwave's bedroom pop precursors, Allene Norton of Cellars believes that Pink is "definitely not chillwave but that kind of stuff influenced a lot of the artists making it, like Washed Out." Dummy Mag's Adam Harper disputed Pink's "godfather of chillwave" status, writing that his influence on lo-fi scenes has been somewhat overstated:, that his music lacks "the mirror-shades-cool synth groove of chillwave... Pink's albums are zany, personal rock-based and dressed in awkward glam"; the genre's flourishing between 2008 and 2009 was prefigured by the 2007 album Person Pitch by Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, credited with launching the style.
The album influenced a wide range of subsequent indie music, with its sound serving as the major inspiration for chillwave and a number of soundalikes. Animal Collective's music contributed to the movement, their album Merriweather Post Pavilion, released in January 2009, was influential for its ambient sounds and repetitive melodies, but was not as associated with the "hazy" psychedelia that chill
You Can Count On Me (Panda Bear song)
"You Can Count on Me" is the second single to be released by Panda Bear from Tomboy. It was released October 2010 by Domino Records. Gorilla vs. Bear ranked B-side "Alsatian Darn" the 7th best track of 2010 in their "Songs of 2010" list
