Animal Collective and improvisation
Lately, I’ve been looking for improvised music.
I know that most music stems from improvisation, that you just prune out the bad parts and develop the good ones, and that is precisely why the end result necessarily feels contrived to a certain extent, as it typically withholds the exploration and progressive enhancement part, the crafting of the tune – what I’d currently like to witness. I’ve been yearning for quite a while now for a piece where I can clearly sense the interplay between the musicians and have a glimpse at that peculiar form of communication on an overt and clear channel.
This is the reason I’ve been looking into jazz for the past few days: I think it’s the best starting point to quench my thirst. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been quite a success so far, but I know that with time I’m bound to find a piece that will resonate with me; I simply need to hone my listening skills. To do so, I’m trying to listen to some albums actively and repeatedly, in the hope that the complicity will transpire with time. Videos of live performances could maybe help, too, and I’m counting on the sequel to the Jazz Appreciation MOOC on Coursera to help me in that task. The first course was really top-notch and had helped me get some tentative insights into this vast vast world.
As far as I can tell, improvisation first appealed to me when I watched live videos of Animal Collective, my favourite band, four years ago. There is this section in the middle of one of their songs, Brother Sport, that is slightly different each time they perform it — the reason for my listening to over 60 different bootlegs of that song. A sound loops in the background while the two vocalists engage in some vocal interplay, eventually building up to a climax. Seeing the framework of the song and the nature of that interplay evolve throughout the years — the song enjoying tenure in their setlists — was also a very interesting experience in itself.
In that very same song live, the second vocalist would also often utter bursts of sloppily articulated words in what sounds like an invented language, or as if he were muttering in his sleep, and I long thought that these utterances were cues to start the next section of the song, since they come at the end of an improvised section. I even thought at some point that the language had its own defined vocabulary, and that the band members were using it as an elaborate means of communication, telling each other covertly where they wanted the song to go. In retrospect, it seems highly unlikely, but the idea remains quite appealing all the same. Since this “language” was used in the context of a band that I idolized and of songs that I adored, I actually ended up finding beauty in it and associating its sonorities to pleasure, just like I did with the main vocalist’s yelps, which on top of that were also bringing me second-hand feelings of catharsis. I later learned that the secondary vocalist had lived in Portugal for quite a while, so I think the language’s probably Portuguese or a derivative of it. Be that as it may, the way the band, or rather, the listener, frames it makes the latter focus on the sonorities of the words, and in my opinion that’s a good way to make one fall in love with a language.
There’s something that appeals to me in the “letting go” side of improvisation, the letting go of your assumed self, of your image; the uninhibitedness of it all. Some of Animal Collective’s earlier songs will probably put a smile on your face, but once you’re into them (for example by going down their discography in reverse chronology, their eccentricity having tapered off slowly with time), the experience is truly transcendental. For instance, at some point in their earlier shows 1, the members would all utter animal howls, and the result is, vicariously maybe, liberating. That they above all do it for themselves, as an outlet for primal urges, and to a much larger extent than most bands at that, might be the reason why they’ve managed to put out such original material.
As I’ve mentioned before, their wild side has slowly petered out with years, but they periodically relapse and let us have blasts from their past. For instance, during the pounding, entrancing “We Tigers” at a festival in Malta in 2006, the vocalist was in such a flowing stream-of-consciousness state that at some point, after a technical failure, he started singing, with all the drive of the world, “No more monitor, no more monitor, my monitor went out” before ecstatically announcing “it’s back! it’s back! it’s back!” and resuming the normal course of the song. 2
Improvising, letting your subconscious express itself, implies being absorbed in some sort of trance, a state you are guided to by the steady pounding in We Tigers 3 or the frenetic yet regular strumming of the guitar in some other songs.
Essentially, variation is what makes live performances so interesting to attend; they are a proof, a product of the discrete, definite minds of your idols, and in my opinion listening to a fully improvised album (with talented musicians, or otherwise it would probably sound too much like endless fumbling) would be a delightful concentrate of that individuality.
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https://youtu.be/V0m2p0pnsc4&start=280 and http://bit.ly/1vEGKFH (This is AnCo at its weirdest; you’ll probably find it either disturbing or hilarious on first listen) ↩