Introduced to Animal Collective

Earlier this week I was introduced to Animal Collective.

I've always had one of their albums buried deep in my iTunes but had never really given them a serious listen. They show up on mixtapes that mysterious boys make for me and things like that, but I hadn't sought them out.

My interests in music (and literature for that matter) are mostly driven by an ambiguous whimsy. I let the music come to me, you know? Some people research and consume music and bands like an entomologist will categorize and collect every single species of beetle in a specifically-defined area. That's not how I get onto new bands. I wait until it's playing in the background somewhere and I happen to be listening. Or it stands out on a mixtape that a mysterious boy has made for me.

Or someone puts it on their myspace page. Or a boyfriend plays for me what he happens to be obsessed with.

Depending on how much I like you, I might become obsessed with it too.

That's just how I work.

I knew that this new boy I've been spending time with, A, was a big fan of Animal Collective. It was, like, his favorite band. So when he said he was going to their show, which First Avenue hosted last Tuesday, I asked if I could come along. If I like you, I want to see what you like. I want to be taught something.

The flooor was a sea of bobbing heads and bodies like a bed of kelp. We had a good position on the balcony.

I always thought of them as more of an acoustic, folksy band--quirky and purposefully under-produced. Like I said, I had never really listened to them. At the show on Tuesday it was all about reverberations and reptitions--beats recorded and circulated, voices looped, themes returned to constantly. The light boxes in back stimulated a partial shut-down of the senses and an emergence of detached, abstracted thought. I kept running my hand up and down the thick wool of A's sweater.

You couldn't really understand the words which was okay because the voice was another instrument; you couldn't really understand the words which was a shame because the words, when granted an equal share of the aural range with the music take on a mystique-poetic quality you can best appreciate through headphones.

Back to the kelp metaphor I so awkwardly wielded.

During the show I kept thinking of the neat little distinction I carry with me into the realm of music, where I really have no business pontificating, because I know very little. It's the distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian, as set forth in Nietszche's The Birth of Tragedy.
The Dionysian, I have always thought of as a more pure form of music, or more natural so to speak, organic, emerging from the ground, dirty, driven, in terms of both beat and lyrics, by blood and impulse. The Apollonian -- more human, mediated, driven by and relating to the mind. Music of the body, music of the mind.

If I were to stage a rendition of Euripides' Bacchae, I'd have Animal Collective score the Chorus. You could see how perfect the fit would be by gazing over the balcony at the sea of bodies that, in response to the light boxes and the repetition and reverbs, bopped back, or swayed, off-balance and en masse, from one end of the floor to the other.

I have always wondered where beats come from. That's a silly question, but it's only silly because beats and rhythm are such basic elements of human culture that we take their existence for granted--but there must have been a moment in prehistory when our primitive ancestors did not have access to beats or rhythm as an organizing principle.

Watching Animal Collective, I thought the big thought--why are we so easily corralled and connected by beats? They hypnotize us--repetition at a regular interval--copying, repeating, the same sound or series of sounds over and over again, a form that can be highly malleable into mathematic precision, forged Apollonian into a Mahler symphony or a Beethoven sonata, and also so primitive and wild like an Animal Collective show.

It must come from either 1) the blood or 2) our first experiences with tools.

At first, I leaned toward the blood theory. The beats are echoes of the blood.

But then watching these boys pound their drums with their fingertips and dervishly caw into microphones while the reverbs brought them down to a possessed, almost pentacostal unintelligibility, I thought more of tools. That the drum, the keyboard, the mixer is more like a Cro-Magnon slowly beating her dinner on a rock or the Anasazi pounding corn into meal--a reference to the days when rock pounded on rock.

Perhaps there was a moment a million years ago when not-yet-human humans were making some nice stone tools and unconsciously, as their thoughts drifted, began to beat their tools in time to the rushing of blood in their brains. This, I think, is the consanguinity of which Animal Collective is a part.