Animal Collective, your favorite band of all time ever, and filmmaker Danny Perez are collaborating on a piece to be performed March 4 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. If the name Danny Perez sounds familiar, it’s because your favorite band of all time ever collaborated with him previously on the recently released ODDSAC film (TMT Review). Their latest team-up, Transverse Temporal Gyrus, is a multimedia piece featuring video projections, costumes, and props, along with an original recorded score composed by Animal Collective. All of the aforementioned will be used to create a psychedelic environment that the audience can freely explore throughout the performance. It will be like entering Animal Collective’s mind! A dream come true for 92.43% (statistic estimated/made up) of this site’s readership!
Gain a little more insight into Animal Collective’s headspace with this quote describing their inspiration for the piece:
One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds; so many different sounds coming from so many different directions. Are they communicating to each other? What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination? If you don’t know the first thing about bird songs, these questions can rack a brain for days. The jungle seems louder than most New York apartments but its symbiosis makes it subtler if not more pleasing to foreign ears. The longer you sit awake in bed listening at night, the more you hear. It brings to mind Jane Goodall hanging out with chimpanzees in Tanzania and how she noticed them reacting to distant or inaudible sounds that at first she couldn’t hear, but as her ears adapted to the environment after months she began to hear them too.
But as the environments around us change quickly, as people encroach more and more on land where only select symbioses occur, we wonder how this will change the sounds around us and how this alters the way we hear things and react to them. As New Yorkers we are all familiar with the everyday noise around us—the car alarms, the subway trains braking, the music in bars—so familiar that sometimes we drown them out. But then do we not realize how these sounds are affecting us? How they make us feel or act? With this in mind we wanted to create an environment where people could take some time to listen to other kinds of sounds and get away from those familiar sounds of the city. Keeping in mind the birds of the jungle, we’ve created an array of sounds with Animal Collective’s music that is seemingly random… or is it? We invite you to come take some time out and sit with us. As time passes it is our hope that you will wonder if you are hearing songs or patterns or maybe simply hearing more. The visual work of Danny Perez has been incorporated to turn the environment of an empty museum into a more mysterious hideaway. The core elements and colors are worked into the piece in order to unite this room of sound with the inside of your brain. We hope you enjoy.
Animal Collective taking inspiration from animals? Nothing has ever made more sense! Tickets for the performance can be purchased from the Guggenheim’s website; however, they appear to be completely sold out. Here’s hoping someone got you a great birthday present. Otherwise, work on your cat burglar skills. If they can steal priceless jewels and paintings, surely they can sneak into a simple Animal Collective performance.
• Animal Collective: http://myanimalhome.net
• Danny Perez: http://diptriana.com