I never dropped acid and never plan to do so, but I’ve always loved the strand of art and music that came about after the stuff turned up in the ’60s. You always wonder when you see or hear something “trippy” if it was inspired by drugs, but it’s not necessarily the case. Some artists have simply freed their imaginations to such an extent that they aren’t bound by the structures you’ve come to expect. It’s interesting to me that psychedelic art never really goes away. It just keeps coming back like a recurring dream.
And speaking of dreams…
The video below has fascinated me for days. The song, “Bros,” is by someone I recently discovered called Panda Bear (real name Noah Lennox). He’s a founding member of The Animal Collective (also a recent find for me). The song is long (over 12 minutes), drenched in echo effects and to my mind at least, influenced by the Beach Boys. I read an interview where Lennox said he was unhappy with that comparison, but I mean it as a compliment, honestly. (Someone on YouTube compared “Bros” to Pet Sounds and I thought, yeah, only more interesting.)
The video was created by a couple of Brooklyn-based multi-media artists who call themselves Peru and Ana. They have a reputation for leaving cryptic, artistic graffiti around the city and producing strange, avant garde films. Their aesthetic kind of reminds me of Nurse with Wound. The video they created for “Bros” illustrates a strange but beautiful nightmare with lots of faded old bits of film and flickering imagery. I find it irresistible.
It looks better in Vimeo, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to embed that version.
Also, check out this video from Animal Collective:
Trippy stuff!
Here is Panda Bear’s MySpace page.
This is the Official Animal Collective website, but at the moment it just has one video up (a really cool one for a song called “Bluish.”)
Until the band fleshes out its website, you can get a lot of information on this fan site.
You can see more of Peru and Ana’s work on their website and their Vimeo page.
And consider this a cry for help: If anyone can help me figure out how to embed a new Vimeo vid in a WordPress.com blog, I will be forever grateful, or at least grateful till my mind wanders onto some other matter.
The MusicMissionary 