June 2011
40 posts
Panda Bear Performing on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on July 11 →
latenightwithjimmyfallon.com
Enter to win seats to see him perform on the show.
Attention Late Night with Jimmy Fallon fans: our “Band Bench” Sweepstakes is your chance to get close to your favorite band when they perform on the show!
What is a “Band Bench” you ask? The Band Benches are a special audience seating area set aside for HUGE fans of musical guests appearing on the show. Fans sitting on the Band Benches will be given the exclusive chance to come down to the studio floor and surround the musical guest during their performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon!
We’re currently accepting entries for the chance to see the following musical guests:
- Monday, July 11- Panda Bear- Code: PAN
Enter Alien Workshop's Panda Bear Giveaway →
alienworkshop.com
From Alien Workshop:
Enter to win one of 5 Panda Bear - Tomboy Packages
Each package includes 2 Alien Workshop/Panda Bear boards (1 street and 1 old school), a copy of Tomboy on vinyl, a Panda Bear t-shirt and an assortment of Alien Workshop and Panda Bear decals.
Early Bird Tickets for POPPED! Music Festival On Sale Now →
poppedphiladelphia.com
Panda Bear is playing Friday, September 23 at the POPPED! Music Festival in Philadelphia, where you can buy early-bird passes now, using code “Popped.”
Pitchfork Music Festival Set Times Revealed
For those of you going to see Animal Collective at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this year (like me!), Pitchfork announced set times today. Animal Collective will be closing the festival’s first day at 8:30 pm. Full list here.
“
At this point [pot] is something I’ll do almost exclusively in private when I’m working. Especially when I’m mixing, it’s my favorite time to do it a lot; it gives me a perspective that is advantageous. For me it’s more of a mental and hearing tool, it gives me the kind of focus I really like when mixing. It’s not like I do it every time, but with the last two records it was definitely part of the process, for sure.
Playing live I feel I don’t do that well when I’m stoned. Maybe if I was more of a consistent smoker. When I get blasted and I haven’t done it in a while, it’s more debilitating, whereas if it’s a more consistent daily thing, I feel I have a better grasp physically on what I’m doing.
” —Noah Lennox.Oliver Platt Interviews Panda Bear for New York Magazine
- Oliver Platt: Do you find it hard to talk about how you create? When I’m forced to talk about how I do what I do, I sometimes get embarrassed—the nuts and bolts of it can sound stupid. But it’s also wanting the process to remain mysterious. I want to protect it.
- Noah Lennox: It’s like when you get really drunk or something, there’s a loss of control that happens. You get yourself into this place where you’re not thinking about, "Is my mouth closed?" "Is my fly up?"
“
Even before he sent me the stuff, there was a certain amount of, you know, “This sounds pretty cool, man. What is it that you’re looking for?” He had really specific things he wanted fixing, improving, and showing. Obviously, I wanted to know about the songs and lyrics as much as possible. When you get to see the lyrics, they’re really impressive. He’s all super modest about it, but it’s just sickening how talented he is.
We ran instrumental and a cappella mixes of all the songs, which may or may not show up at some point. As weird as it sounds, in some parts of Tomboy, the vocals detract from the music and the music detracts from the vocals— in that when you take each element by themselves, they’re so amazingly pure. The combination is incredible, but to my ears, the mixes sound amazing. It’s an album that really stands up looking at in that much detail. The decisions all really lie with him, though.
” —Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, on working with Noah Lennox on Tomboy.
Listen
Panda Bear - Song for Ariel (Live at Governors Island 2010)
“I called it “Bulls Eye” for a long time. It sounds kind of silly but I didn’t like having two songs starting with “B” to go together because “Benfica” comes right after that. “Afterburner” was actually my original title for the whole record; that sort of thing that happens after an event, the event being Person Pitch I guess. And since it’s at the end of the record, it’s kind of nice because it turns on the jets right at the end there.”
—Noah Lennox, on “Afterburner.”
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A friend of Rusty Santos played me Person Pitch at a party at the Tribeca Grand and I was blown away. It was just sickeningly good. I bought a copy of it, and he had listed a bunch of influences or nods to people on the sleeve, and Spacemen 3 was on there. My memory is that I said to him, “Hey man, if you ever wanted to do anything collaborative I would be so into it for a 7” or something.” Memories are notoriously unreliable, but I remember him being like, “I haven’t got time to do more Panda Bear stuff because I’m really busy with Animal Collective.” I was just like, “Oh, don’t tell me that, you gotta keep going with this!” But he has a wife, two kids, and a band to feed, so to speak.
At some point, he decided he was going to start his new album, and I guess he did all the singles and wasn’t happy with the final mixes. I think Deakin and Avey were meant to be kind of fleshing it out, but then it was running late and they were unable to do it. Then Noah sent me an email asking Spectrum to play the Animal Collective ATP, and right at the bottom, in his typical style, he wrote, “Oh, by the way, you wouldn’t want to mix my new record would you?” Yeah, like I wouldn’t.
” —Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, who produced Tomboy, on how he got involved with Tomboy.
“Scheherazade” and “Drone” are in similar places to me. The original version of “Scheherazade” is a little bit different, there were a couple of sounds that we took out of the mix to make it stand out a little bit more than the other tracks. I didn’t go into it really thinking I was going to do a totally different song. So many of the songs are heavy and relentless sounding that I thought it’d be cool to have a song that was a little sparser, a little more spacey sounding. If somebody was listening to the record from start to finish to give them moments where they could breathe and take it easy. I really wanted the album to feel like there were waves crashing over you and some of those waves I wanted to have slightly less impact than others. So “Drone” and “Scheherazade” serve that purpose for me.”
—Noah Lennox
“I really don’t mean to complain in any way. I feel really lucky to have everything I have, but it is curious the way my life has gone considering the type of person I am. I’m very shy and reserved, so for me to have this public life as a performer is a weird thing to be doing.”
—Noah Lennox
