Last night was certainly inspiring.

Panda Bear is the stage name and side project of a member of my favourite band, Animal Collective, so when I learned that he was coming to Paris, I felt I had to attend. It would be a way for me to pay my respects to that man who had contributed so much to my love for music in the past five years, constituent of the band that, in some way, changed my life, or at least opened me up to musical perspectives that I only felt patient enough to grasp because of my confidence in the band.

Judging by what I had seen in bootlegs, Panda Bear’s show would be quite immersive, with somewhat psychedelic visuals projected onto the backdrop for the whole length of the concert – maybe a way to compensate for the view of the stationary, head-bobbing Panda in the center of the stage, half hidden behind racks of synthesizers; a way to make that somewhat lacking stage presence a blessing and not a curse, letting us focus on the visuals without distraction.

Opening band Jib Kidder apparently took advantage of that opportunity too, and in a very inspiring way at that. I had listened to his latest album, “Teaspoon to the Ocean”, and it had struck me as one of the most psychedelic, mind-massaging albums I had listened to lately. As such, I had high hopes on that opening act.

Much to my surprise, the band is a three-piece. But what shocks me the most is that the bassist is wearing a Suckdog T-shirt, a band I remember as being one the weirdest ones I had come across, with a bootleg of their live performance definitely putting an end to that exotic venture of mine. I was baffled by the fact that the bassist had somehow managed to get a Suckdog tee. If it was from such bands that he got his early “musical education”, then I would assume his output to be quite eccentric, not that it’s a bad thing.

Be that as it may, the show wasn’t about him, but, surprisingly enough, about Jib Kidder. As he comes onstage, the very first thing he does is to recite some sort of nursery rhyme involving sheep falling asleep, in a deliberately monotonic voice, sticking to it until the end of the rhyme. I’m not exactly sure what that was for, but it set the tone for the rest of his set: at least for me, the ideas prevailed over the music. Before each track, he would describe the subject of the song with great precision (among them: fetus in fetu, “teeth in your stomach, in your hair”, or, more remarkably, “birds, their ability to soar above the world”, or “the very many feathers, the very many grains, the very many people”), an initiative I found highly interesting. And if the music and the lyrics didn’t manage to conjure up such images for you, the visuals were of tremendous help. Each time, they illustrated the themes perfectly, a mashup of vintage cartoons and random amateur footage, each clip showing for a few seconds at most, making up a collection varied enough to touch every viewer at some point. Through the multiplicity of examples, this teeming brew leaves us with the essence of the idea, allowing us to somehow extract a more general abstraction from it. A very inspiring experience.

That evening, Jib Kidder and Panda Bear let the visuals play a part nearly as important as the music. The two complemented each other perfectly, and the whole was definitely compelling.