"Noah writes music that, technically, probably shouldn't work," says Pete Kember. He's talking about Noah Lennox, better known as Panda Bear, and he should know: as the co-producer of Lennox's new album, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, Kember is the one responsible for figuring out how to get Lennox's improbable ideas to stick to the magnetic tape.
Kember, aka Sonic Boom, knows a thing or two about psychedelic sounds, having been a member of Spacemen 3, Spectrum, and Experimental Audio Research. After Animal Collective tapped Kember to play their edition of All Tomorrow's Parties, Lennox brought him on board to mix Panda Bear's 2011 album, Tomboy, but the British musician's role on Grim Reaper was greatly expanded. When I met up with Lennox in Lisbon last November, he stressed the impact that Kember had had on the final shape of the album.
"Especially on the recording side of things, I don't really know what I'm doing, which I can see as both a positive and a negative," Lennox told me. "A negative as far as getting something that sounds good, and a positive as far as something that sounds unique and has a personality that's mine. Working with somebody who does know the ins and outs of engineering and recording is really a valuable perspective for me, and that's something that Pete does really well. He's really good at getting sounds and sets of frequencies together in ways that produce magical results. I don't know how to do it, but I know it when I hear it."
Last summer, after Lennox performed new Panda Bear material at Deerhunter's edition of All Tomorrow's Parties, he figured that he finally had enough material for a new album, and he and Kember began vetting dozens of demo files he had amassed over the previous couple of years—files with provisional names like "Ms. Pacman" and "Deadmaus Thing". In November, Kember flew to Lisbon, and the two spent a week in the studio fleshing out Lennox's home-recorded demos. Encouraged by their progress, he returned in January and they spent the better part of the next five weeks finishing up the album.
When I returned from my trip to Lisbon, I called up Kember to find out more about the process of making the record. "We would go to the zoo for lunch some days," Kember told me, describing a period that sounds far more chill than the typical finish-line sprint when an album's deadline looms. "The McDonald's there is next to the crocodile pit, and it has glass windows, so the crocs are hanging out right with you when you're eating hamburgers, which is pretty weird. It's a sweet zoo, that one. It's not the world's biggest, but it's one of the prettiest ones I've ever seen, and the animals all seem pretty psyched and happy."
Pitchfork: What shape was the material in when you started working in November?
Pete Kember: They were the most basic skeletons of the song that you could put together and call it a song, really. The first time I heard most of the stuff was around the time of the ATP show that he did, which is the first show where he played any of the songs. I guess it was at least 50% there—what he felt were the most essential bits. A lot of elements I think he hears in his head, but doesn't necessarily put them down initially. So one of the missions was to get down some of the other stuff that was in his head, to fill it out to how it sounds now, really.
Pitchfork: How did you do that?
PK: Through trial and error. The way he had written the songs initially, in their skeletal forms, some worked better than others, some needed more attention to drag them into line with the others. Partly we used synths, partly percussion. There was a whole range of instruments in the studio as well. I think we pretty much go through most of them. There was no real formula to it. I guess the only one that's close to a formula is the bass parts were all done on a Moog keyboard, and then by taking the MIDI, we'd sync another FM bass in parallel with that. Noah came up with all the bass parts pretty much on the spot.
Pitchfork: From the way Noah described it, the process sounds very organic. He said that some songs he thought were going to be the highlights didn't end up working out, but others that he didn't think much about turned out to be the gems of the sessions.
PK: I think a lot of artists do this, they have quite fixed ideas about which songs are going to work out best, and which ones won't. I would say 80% of the time, all artists are wrong about that. They change so drastically. There were songs that were going to get left by the wayside in early days, I was like, "No, we really should take all of these to their logical conclusion." I'm not sure he's always had the luxury to do that. I know originally this album was going to come out this year [in 2014], so he definitely was very cool about pushing stuff back and just letting it find the right zone. And sure enough, the songs that at the start he said would be the ones that would definitely come out, I would say he was between 50 and 80% right about it. There were definitely some songs that really came through. "Crosswords" would be one where there was a sudden sort of change in the studio in that song. "Príncipe Real" as well—it changed a lot in the studio. He would come up with some little idea and be like, "I don't know if this will work, but let's try it." I don't remember many of them not working.
Pitchfork: How much of the lyrics did he have finished? Was he writing in the studio?
PK: I guess he must have had about 70% of them, but "Butcher Baker", maybe "Crosswords", maybe "Príncipe Real"—they were instrumental, and I asked if he had lyrics for them. He said he had some ideas, and if I could free some time up for him, where I'd work on some stuff, he could go and work on them. I think maybe out of all the songs from the session, there were three or four of them where he'd disappear into the other room in the studio for an hour or two and came back with something he was happy with, and finished them off.
Pitchfork: Did he talk much about his lyrics with you?
PK: Yeah, if I asked him about stuff, he does. But I think we both believe that, whatever the lyrics are, people will hear what they want. In a way, there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, having songs that aren't really linear and obvious to figure out what the story is, I think gives much more breadth for individuals to sort of overlay their trip on, and relate it to their lives. I think that's kind of cool. I had an idea roughly what he was writing about in general. One of the early things that I did, and the same with Tomboy, was to get the lyrics from him, just to kind of know what was going on, and to make sure that it was sounding like it was meant to be saying, if you know what I mean.
Pitchfork: He told me that you were instrumental in making sure there was a lyric sheet for the album.
PK: If it was down to him, none of his lyrics would have been on any of the records. I think he writes incredibly good, succinct songs, and approaches things in interesting ways. His lyrics are far from obvious, and I think stand on their own away from the music, to a certain extent. There's a sort of poetic form to them which I think isn't hackneyed at all. It's really fresh.
It’s not always the easiest to understand what he's saying, and I think that's partly by design. But I noticed a lot of people have said that certain songs really clicked with them when they could see what he was saying. The whole process is about communication, I feel. I'm glad that those are going to be out there for some people, in some form.
Pitchfork: On the one hand, he's a very private person, as he said to me again and again, and yet his lyrics are also incredibly unguarded.
PK: Yes.
Pitchfork: And he's also one of the most chill people I've ever met.
PK: Yeah, he is. I have to say, he's a pleasure to spend time with and to work on sessions with. His influence on the session and his attitude towards keeping morale up over long days, day after day, day after day, is impressive, I have to say. He's a pretty special character, and I feel privileged to be able to work with him at all.
Pitchfork: He told me you guys accidentally fried the hard drive on his laptop when you were modifying a synthesizer in the studio.
PK: [Laughs] We! Oh, it's we now! No, I do feel a little bit guilty about that. We were having to fix something on the Moog, and he was taking screws out of it, and so they didn't get lost, I knew there was this very small but very powerful magnet in the studio that the guy who runs the studio liked to toy with, so I was like, "Hey, just use this to keep all the screws together." He put it down, and kept putting the screws on it—this is right next to his laptop—and then at some point he picked up the magnet and put it down on the corner of the computer, on the laptop, rather than on the desk. And of course, being a super-strong magnet, it started freaking out the drive. By the time we figured out what was making this crazy sound, it had fried the drive. I forget what the outcome was now; I think he managed to get all the stuff off the drive anyway. But yeah, that was kind of a drag.
Pitchfork: That must have been a moment of terror in the studio, thinking you'd just lost everything you had recorded up until that point.
PK: I have never, ever seen anyone so chill about their computer just getting fried. I felt, of course, guilty, because I'd introduced this magnet into the scenario. But Noah's not one to blame people. I was freaking out more than he was.
Pitchfork: He told me you were responsible for a lot of the interstitial synthesizer bits on the album.
PK: Because of the way that he plays live, playing by himself, he often does these transitional pieces between songs. Noah was interested in trying to do it in the studio, and we talked about it, but to do that sort of thing properly, you have to decide on the tracklisting right from the start and build it like that. It's a much more laborious process to do it afterwards. So with that in mind, and knowing how I've worked on things before, I figured out where things spill over. Like those unearthly vocals in "Sequential Circuits", that was when he was doing his vocal tracks. That was him warming up just before doing his vocal take. And then each successive overdub of the vocal, he would somehow—and, endlessly, this would amaze me—he would remember what he had done the first time, and add a second part, and then add a third part. This happened on a few different tracks, and it would just create these beautiful little bits. We used one at the end of "Tropic of Cancer", that was him warming up, and then the stuff—I think it's turned backwards, but at the end of "Sequential Circuits". After we got the basic tracks down, we were doing vocals at the start of each day, which was I have to say a pretty sweet way to wake up each day. I know the engineer in the studio—he was a little shy with Noah, but he would talk to me when Noah was out of the room—just thought it was the greatest thing ever. Just to hear his voice soar like that, to spend a couple of hours each day warming up while he was singing, it was pretty sweet, I have to say.
Pitchfork: Noah told me that you mixed the album on the Balearic island of Minorca. What were you doing there?
PK: My wife's parents live there. We go out to visit them as often as we can. I really like it out there. It's super quiet. I like to work outside whenever I can, and I had access to a situation where I could basically set up on the cliffs and do final mixes and tweaks for stuff.
Pitchfork: Right out on the cliffs?
PK: [Laughs] I'll send you a photo, but yeah. Basically, the apartment that we were staying in, if you walked out of the front patio and walked 10 paces, you're over the cliffs. I could set up what was technically in our garden and just be able to vibe it. I don't know, there's something about being in the outdoors, particularly somewhere beautiful like that, working on stuff. I know Noah's always keen to get a certain amount of sunshine into records. Which I think does happen; I think the environment you work in really reflects on the music that gets made.
He's one of the few artists that I've worked with that is very definite about seeing sounds in certain colors. I know he had quite fixed ideas about the color palette for the album. Just sort of visually as well as sonically. I know that's something that he somehow gets wrapped into stuff. I'm not quite sure where it comes from or how he does it, but the end result is really magic.