[Photo by Ryan Pfluger]
Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox’s side project Panda Bear has been featured in the award winning short-film, I Had A Dream I Went to Coney Island, by Sherwin Akbarzadeh. The film recently won the Spike Lee Mini-Masterpiece at the second Babelgum Online Film Festival.
Read the full story
[Photos and words by Rez Avissar]
Rusty Santos mixed Panda Bear’s Person Pitch (among releases by Animal Collective, Born Ruffians, White Magic and others) and is a long-time friend of the Animal Collective crew. I’ve seen him before opening for Panda Bear at Bowery Ballroom, which was an awesome, surprising freak-out set. This time, he sported a very Panda Bear-like setup of twin Roland SP-404s (even though Panda has since upgraded to 555s). However, he manipulated a vastly different palette of sounds and to very different effect.
Read the full story
Words by Michael Cranston
Photos by Aaron Aujla
Auj (photographer) and I show up at Circa around 5:40 p.m. The interview is supposed to start at 4:40 p.m., but it’s been moved back an hour. Sure. We kill time in the adjacent bookstore, perusing “Heather’s Picks”, pondering the response of the band if we were to present them with a copy of Keys to Understanding Men (and whether or not that would be funny). As interview time approaches, I phone Cut Copy’s Tour Manager, who sounds stressed and irritable. I make a request (that is fairly unprofessional), which Tour Manager immediately deems unprofessional. The brief small-talk between myself/Auj and Tour Manager is awkward and tense; he informs us we are no longer interviewing the full band, only singer Dan Whitford. He asks a few questions that I find difficult to answer (“how many question do you have for Dan?”), to which I respond evasively (“well, depends which questions I choose”). “Alright,” Tour Manager says begrudgingly, “I’ll go get Dan. Make sure you have all your stuff set up.” I feel like I’m meeting the Pope. We conduct the interview in a worn-down kitchen. There is one chair, which I graciously offer to Dan. I stand during the interview. It’s as if I’m interrogating him and it’s all very strange. Tour Manager stands a few feet away (out of camera shot), not unlike a poised bodyguard.
Read the full story
