The point of crowdsourcing seems straightforward: Give someone money, so they can make something cool. But not every Kickstarter or Indiegogo has a tidy ending. The internet is littered with stories of well-meaning entrepreneurs who raised large amounts of funding, only to disappear with no product to show for it.
It had seemed like this might be the case with Animal Collective's Josh "Deakin" Dibb, who in 2009 raised nearly $26,000 to fund a trip to Mali to play a music festival, which would then serve as the inspiration behind a solo album and an accompanying book of artwork. By 2012, the promised rewards hadn't surfaced, leading some backers—to say nothing of the internet's judgmental hordes—to complain, and accuse Dibb of ripping them off. In an interview with Pitchfork conducted that year, Dibb apologized for the delay, which he attributed to his "fatal perfectionism."
More than three and a half years later, Dibb has—as of this week—officially released the solo album, which is called Sleep Cycle. Before that, he mailed out the promised rewards to all of the project's Kickstarter backers that he was able to track down. There were some small differences: The album was initially intended to be a CD, but with the revival of arcane audio formats ever upon us, it became a cassette, inspired by Dibb's experience in Mali where cassette stores are still widely prominent. But it was an album of music, an accompanying book of photographs, and assorted footage from the festival, just as was promised back in 2009. More importantly: It's good, brimming with pastoral and melted melodies combined with field recordings taken from his Mali trip, and steadied by Dibb's increasingly confident voice and songwriting perspective. Animal Collective fans who cherish the band's freewheeling Feels and Strawberry Jam records—both of which Dibb played on—will surely appreciate it.
So, what began as a question of whether Dibb was ripping people off has turned into: How long is too long for an artist to take when he's using other people's money? As it turned out, all but $1,500 of the raised funds went to TEMEDT, an NGO that works to end slavery throughout Mali. The remaining money partially funded the cost of manufacturing the album and book, which were otherwise funded by Dibb's own finances (which was money he'd saved up from record sales and touring with Animal Collective). It's hard to complain about this much money going to a noble cause. But some will ask: If Dibb was able to eventually fund the album on his own, why do the Kickstarter to begin with? To make sense of this, and everything that happened with him between 2009 and 2016, Pitchfork hopped on the phone with Dibb to speak about the long process of bringing Sleep Cycle to life.
Pitchfork: You last talked to us in 2012 about the status of the album. What's been the timeline of getting it out?
Deakin: I was struggling with the music aspect of it for a really long time. In the middle of 2014, I put together a couple of posters that I ended up sending to as many people who had responded with addresses from the Kickstarter as possible, and gave them an update at that point. [Animal Collective] had stopped touring for Centipede Hz at the end of 2013. 2014 came around and we as a band made a decision to take a full year off. The combination of me going through my own doubts plus my ongoing considerations about the music for [Sleep Cycle]—I hadn't really dug into it the way I meant to in 2013.
I got a personal studio space in Baltimore, where I was living, and I started working on it [Sleep Cycle]. In the early spring of 2014, that studio space, which was primarily where I worked but also housed all the band's touring equipment and stuff, flooded very severely. We lost a lot of stuff, and there was insurance claims, and I had a hard time finding a new place to go. There was also some stuff going on with my family that took a lot of emotional and literal attention. I don't think that anything that happened to me was that particularly brutal or gruesome, and many people deal with far worse, but for me and my own kinds of habits, it was very overwhelming.
It started to be November or December, and I couldn't believe that much of the year had passed, and so little had been done. I had begun recording some of these songs and trying to make sense of them, but nothing had really come together, and the studio thing really screwed that up. In the process of all that, we ended up as a band having a discussion about what was coming up in 2015. In November of 2014, Dave [Portner] and Brian [Weitz] were in Baltimore. We had a talk, and that was what led to the decision to not be part of what ended up becoming Painting With. It was a very friendly discussion, but it definitely threw me for a loop. It definitely was not part of my plan. The fact was that this particular project, the relationship to the Kickstarter thing, and my desire to get my own music out in the world—that hadn't been fulfilled. That's what made it feel like it didn't make sense for me to work on the next [AnCo] record.
I went into 2015, to be honest, feeling kind of like the wind had been taken out of my sails, but also realizing there was nothing else that I really needed to focus on. I went into a studio in March to record a couple of the tracks with Rare Book Room, where we'd worked before. That process was sort of the first time that I had gone in with my own songs and put myself in a situation where someone else was behind the controls, so I didn't have to think about everything. There were a couple people who heard those tracks and worked on them with me. Pete Kember [aka producer and musician Sonic Boom] heard them and he was really psyched. I started getting a certain type of encouragement, or sort of feedback that felt heartening in a way.
I'm not historically very good at seeing the value in what I do. So it wasn't until the end of summer of last year that things really started to feel like they were coming together in a clear way for me, where I could see the vision of what I wanted the music to be, what the sonic world of it would be. Throughout the fall of this past year, the pace of everything picked up. The recordings that I worked on in March 2015, plus more recordings that I worked on in the fall and winter of 2015, sort of came together.
Pitchfork: In the previous interview, you talked about the problem of not giving people regular updates. As soon as you did, were people generally supportive?
Deakin: There were people who were definitely like, "Wow, what is going on? I wish you communicated more." But once I would, they would be like, "Of course, art takes a long time, do what you gotta do." I literally can't think of a single person who was part of the Kickstarter project who ever wrote me a "fuck this" kind of response. Most of the criticisms I really felt came from outside. I still see some people that are still under the impression that I scammed people out of money. There's a lot of misinterpretations of what the project even was, and how the money was used.
A lot of the lack of updates over the years, to be honest, came out of a certain amount of shame on my part. I felt like there was only so much that writing to people to say that I'm still thinking about it could really do. Until I had viable things to deliver, it felt like an empty gesture. I'd go through waves of feeling like it made sense to do it, and then there were times where I'd be so frustrated with myself that I felt like it was just absurd for me to write yet another update just saying, "Hey guys, it's been another six months. We're still here."
The one thing that's been a little heartbreaking to me—and I'm actually hoping that this coming out will sort of get these people out of the woodwork—there's a minority, but a significant enough number of people that just have never responded to the surveys[asking for updated contact information]. Maybe those are the people that backed it that got so fed up that they just refused to have anything to do with it. Literally we've been trying to hunt people down on Facebook based on clues we find, you know? So there's that aspect of it, but there's only so much that I can do about that.
Pitchfork: Initially, the Kickstarter was to fund the cost of this trip, and the production of this album. Eventually, it turns out that most of the money is donated to charity, and the album is mostly self-funded. I guess the question is, if you were able to self-fund the album, then why do the Kickstarter at all?
Deakin: In mid-November of 2009, our at-the-time manager had come across this opportunity to have both Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective play at a festival in the desert in Mali. At that time, Dave, Noah, and Brian were finishing up touring with Merriweather Post Pavillion [which Dibb did not play on], and they didn't have any interest in adding more shows, so they said no.
I had been working on solo music up to that point, but I hadn't put anything out and it was still very embryonic. The proposal to me was, "Hey, you and Gang Gang Dance go to Mali, play a show, and when you come back, you guys will collaborate on some sounds and, like, a book." At that time, I was just sort of a guy jumping on a ship with other people. I'm friends with Gang Gang Dance, and Brian [Degraw] and Lizzi [Bougatsos] are both really talented artists, so I felt this sense of, "Okay, yeah."
I think it was literally two days before the Kickstarter campaign was going to launch, Gang Gang Dance decided they weren't going to do it. And so, it was proposed to me, "You could still do this on your own if you want." I had just been in a place where I had taken a long break from the band, and I had taken a long break from music. People can criticize this, but I just really did not think that much about the amount that was being asked for at that moment [$25,000]. From a really personal level, I just really wanted to do it.
But it was within 24 to 48 hours of the campaign going up, I realized that it was absurd that I was asking for that much money. I was going over there with two other people, but still, we just didn't need that much money. My family has a lot of social justice resources, and we knew some people that were really keyed into African concerns and what might be going on there. We tried to find an organization that seemed relevant to that area, and seemed really respectable and trustable in terms of what they'd do with the money.
We came up with this organization, TEMEDT. Within 48 hours of that campaign going up, all the text on the Kickstarter page was changed to make it really clear that all the donations coming in were donations that were going to go to TEMEDT and that I wasn't going to use the money. But I think it was one of those Internet moments where the initial reaction was people going like —excuse my language—"Who's this guy asking for 25 grand to go to Africa just to play a fucking show?”
This all happened within the space of about four, five, six days at the most. Initially, I felt like, "Oh, this is going to be something that I'm maybe doing with Brian Degraw, and Lizzi, and Josh from Gang Gang Dance, and it will be really easy to collaborate with everyone and make something that's cool." Once they left, I just was like, "Well, I'll just figure it out." But it's not like I had any sense of a budget for producing these materials, or what exactly they'd be. I just knew there was a sound element, a visual element, and that was that. Over the years, all these different pieces of what things were actually going to be just sort of kept on evolving.
And I'm not trying to make some sort of point about how much I spent or something, but the truth is that, at the end of the day, I spent a lot of money out of my own pocket to do this. I definitely enlisted the help of friends, but even a lot of the people who I consider friends, who are really skilled at what they do, who helped me put together the book or helped with the video, I figured out ways to pay them. Like we said in the letter [sent to backers], there was a small percentage of the money from the Kickstarter that was held back that literally covers a portion of the shipping. But it's a very, very small percentage of what I ended up spending out of pocket.
Recent Deakin photo by Annie Sachs
Pitchfork: You're not the first artist to take years to work on an album, obviously. A big part of this project has been whether there's a difference in owing the album to people through Kickstarter, and owing the album to, say, a label. The process of this Kickstarter ordeal—did that end up funneling some of the creative impulses behind the album as much as the trip to Mali?
Deakin: The Kickstarter thing ended up representing the struggle that it's taken me to do this. I don't want to dwell too much on the struggle of myself as an artist, because I think that's a really boring and cliche thing, but it's been difficult for me for a long time to feel very good about music that I make on my own. That process was already something I was fighting with before the Kickstarter thing even happened. It was this moment where I had made two records I was really proud of with Animal Collective in a row—Feels and Strawberry Jam—and had taken this break. I had been stewing for two-and-a-half years of just: What is my capacity, what is my value, what do I have in myself that's really worth recording that people want to hear?
Through no fault of Dave, Noah, or Brian in any way, shape, or form, but comparing that to the reality of what I've made with them, which I'm really proud of and feel a lot of ownership of—when left to my own, is any of this really valuable? So when that opportunity to go on that trip came up, it was like: If you're going to do this, do this. This is what you've chosen to do with your life. A lot of the ambient sounds that are in the recording are field recordings from when I was on that trip. But for me, it's far more about just my own relationship to being a person who's overly self-critical, and who has been, for a long time, figuring out a way to feel value in what it is that I have.
Pitchfork: At the end of this process, would you say you have more confidence going forward as a solo artist?
Deakin: Maybe "confident" is not quite the right word, but yeah, I do. Since I actually finished the final mixes for this record in January, I had already had a bunch of other songs floating around leading up to that, and I think they've been even more prominent since then. I do feel a certain amount more trust in myself to be able to follow through with those things. That's probably the biggest hurdle that I've had—just my own lack of trust in myself. My singing voice is something I have just come to terms with in the last few years. I remember when I was doing those shows at the time—in some ways, probably people say this about every Animal Collective show they've ever been to—but I was drowning my voice in effects in part because I was so uncomfortable with what my voice sounded like on its own. Having realized that, and now being out in the world and seeing that other people aren't horrified by the sound of my voice—I think it emboldens me to feel a certain amount of confidence.
Pitchfork: What's your status with Animal Collective? Do you expect to rejoin them after the Painting With cycle is done?
Deakin: I would be really surprised if that didn't happen. The way that we talked about had nothing to do with us breaking up, or anybody feeling like I shouldn't be in the band anymore. There was definitely a conversation that had do with my own processes that affected how long it took me to finish this. There have been times with them where it's felt as equally frustrating for all of us. I've felt so much self doubt about what I'm doing that it's become difficult. I think they had a sense that if we dove into another album cycle and I hadn't finished this yet, it probably would have been challenging for me. I had to face the starkness of this being a thing that I really had to do.
It would be facetious for me to say that it wasn't hard on some level. I love the band. And I know those guys love me. But we talked very clearly about this just being about this album cycle and going back to literally the first records we put it out, we've always had a sort of a rule that each era of the band stands alone on its own configuration. There is an understood agreement that if these guys are working on material that's going to be on a new record, that they would follow that through, including all the touring, until that was done—and after that point would be the discussion about what was next. There is no way for me to say with 100 percent assuredness that anything will happen after Painting With, for any of us, but I think that for all intentions, there's absolutely a clear desire to continue to make records and music together.
Pitchfork: Aside from the album speaking for itself, is there anything you want people to take away from it after such a long process?
Deakin: I've already gotten some reactions from people. The ones that are the most meaningful to me are people saying that there is something they are hearing in the music that is really affecting them on a deep personal level—helping them see something, addressing something they had not been, or feeling a way that they were blocking. More than anything, that's what validates that I did it right: People being genuinely affected on an emotional level, and finding their own sense of empowerment or self realization through the music. I hope that doesn't sound really full of myself. I don't expect people to have that reaction. But the fact that some already have—that means a lot to me.