The dark, dubby, and deeply personal Down There marks the first proper solo album from Animal Collective's Avey Tare. Following the recording of Merriweather Post Pavillion, a breakthrough critical success and AC's most accessible album to date, Avey Tare began quietly crafting his own body of bedroom mythology to battle his personal demons. Altered Zones took a stroll through McGolrick Park with Avey to discuss the origins of Down There, musique concrète, and '80s cult horror films.
AT: A lot of it started in my head while working on "ODDSAC". I was using a lot of new synthesizers and oscillators and wrote a lot of it by myself in our old practice space and in my apartment. I have this 8-track reel-to-reel and it got me really psyched to work on something with more of a bedroom feel. Animal Collective usually does stuff in big studios these days. It seemed sweet to just take my time and work on some of my own bedroom songs. When we were on tour in South America, I remember being in the airport, thinking about a song, and starting to work on it from there.
AZ: Was there something that triggered the inspiration?
AT: A lot of songs come to me just out of the blue, or in the morning between being asleep and awake. I was thinking about a specific idea at the airport, like what type of song I could make. It’s really hard to put into words because it’s just a sound or melody you hear, and it ended up becoming "Ghost of Books". That song has changed a lot over the past two years. Originally, it was a lot faster, but the more I thought about the record as a whole, the more I wanted it to be in this kind of murky swamp.
Pitchfork posted Avey Tare of Animal Collective's latest single, "Lucky 1", yesterday at 4:20 PM. Were you crying?
Down There available October 26th via AC's own Paw Tracks Check out our recent guest post with Mr. Tare here
Avey Tare of Animal Collective says:
I found this track via Geologist via our friend Bradford Cox and I keep going back to it. It's awesome to have friends always sending me unheard of jams to listen to. Ann Steel was a Michigan-born singer who had traveled to Italy in the 70s to do some modeling, and wound up serving as the face and voice of this one-off project by Italian electronic composer Roberto Cacciapaglia. This album is from 1979 and falls in the lineage of composers collaborating with singers or other musicians to create something more poppy or rock-centric (like Pierre Henry and Spooky Tooth, White Noise, Bruce Haack, etc). I love the push and pull of all the sounds. It's like it's breathing. It's synthesized but also really organic in a way that's really hard to accomplish with preset fades and the computer programs used these days. I love the contrast between the clang-y junk rhythms and the analogue backdrop. I'm a sucker for arpeggiators sometimes. Think it was all that Ray Lynch mom played me as a kid. Thanks, mom.
MP3: Ann Steel: "My Time" (1979)
The Ann Steel LP is out of print
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