Considering: "Person Pitch" & 15 Years of Panda Bear

Listening to Panda Bear's third solo album, and first real critical hit, Person Pitch which came out on this day in 2007 is like stepping into a time machine. But, like, a time machine that goes back to a less efficient machine era. Also, a much bitchier era for me personally.

It would be disingenuous for me to celebrate the 15 year milestone for a few reasons. First of all, a lot of digital ink has been spilled on Person Pitch and most of it far better and far more musically and technically literate than I could ever be, so instead, let me tell a story about this album that has literally nothing to do with this album.

Spite makes us do strange things. Sometimes it takes us to strange places. 

In Fall 2007, my girlfriend went to Oberlin and we slowly stopped being boyfriend & girlfriend. During that messy process, Animal Collective played a show at The Dionysus Disco (called the Sco for short) and it was, unsurprisingly for any liberal arts college at the height of the pitchfork/blog era of indie rock, all the rage on campus. It looks like it was a wild, wild show.

I can imagine, especially if you were homesick, especially if you didn't want to have anything to do with your idiot back home boyfriend, or Oberlin, or blog rock, or being surrounded by pseudo-intellectual utopian hippies playing "Peacebone" and getting high to Strawberry Jam in anticipation for Animal Collective's visit to your tiny rural Ohio campus (despite those 2007 setlists being largely yet-to-be-released material from Merriweather Post Pavilion) maybe I too would channel all my blame on Avey, Deakin, Geologist, and Panda Bear. Maybe I too would say "fuck Animal Collective" and call it a day.

But, I was back home, time divided between high school and The Internet on the family computer in our basement that had essentially become mine, my older brother having set off on his own (though much more positive) college journey. Mad that Oberlin took my girlfriend away from me I did the same dumb thing she did: channel all my dumb bad bitchy feelings into something else. "Fuck Animal Collective" eh? Fine, I'll go out of my way to like 'em as much as I can. That'll fix ... whoever!

The first mp3 from limewire (yes, really) to hit my hard drive was song that goes like this:

I'm 100% positive I did not like the song. It isn't, at first, a very pleasant listen. It kind of blows up with bleeps and bloops, noises I still to this day cannot imagine a real instrument regardless of distortion and effects making. It was my mission as a 17 year old to think this was the coolest shit I'd ever heard in my life, if for no reason other than to spite my ex.

I downloaded more (sorry Domino and My Animal Home and Paw Tracks record companies, I have long sense given you so much of my money I think we can call it square). Generous torrent files with folders and folders of music. One thing stood out from the rest: a sub-folder called "Panda Bear" that had its own sub-folder called "Person Pitch." Was this a virus (remember when we thought those were lurking everywhere in the internet? now its just boring phishing schemes trying to get our passwords...)? Was it a mystery? Was it a gift just for me?

One thing was immediately for sure, and that was that the 7 mp3s in the Panda Bear folder were separate from my mission to spite-enjoy a band to get wise on my ex. 

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This is an honest-to-god earnest picture I took of myself (not a selfie, that's not what you called it when it was a digital camera NOT attached to a phone) probably while listening to Person Pitch on my iPod in summer 2008, just to give you an idea of what an infant I was. Like I said: bitchier time.

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Luckily for me, for my mental health, and as a redemption arc for diptshit teenagers misusing music to sort through feelings of loneliness, isolation, rejection, confusion, etc., Animal Collective is not a spite store band for me. They're an authentic, good-old-fashioned favorite band. In fact, I just saw 'em a few days ago with my Uncle. Like my once-raging heart, the music is less abrasive, but if you listen closely, those bloops and bleeps are still lurking. It was a great show, the only downside was Panda Bear, who is the drummer of the group on this tour, was totally out of view. And Panda Bear is my guy.

here is panda bear utterly unenthused by my panda bear hat outside the fillmore, sf, 2014

Person Pitch is an obvious masterpiece. Listening to it now, that's so clear. But in 2008 it was an elusive pleasure. Like looking at the sun through a curtain. I didn't not like it, but I couldn't quite make sense of it, and for whatever reason, always regarded it with warmth.

In 2012, for one of the very first Record Store Day events I participated in, a limited edition of Panda Bear's follow up, Tomboy, was released on some handsome white translucent wax. I picked up a copy and promptly ignored it. Same thing: I liked it, I knew it was good. Like listening to it now, it is an obvious masterpiece. It was a little dirtier than Person Pitch with less sunny samples, Panda Bear's voice more urgent, instrumentation more bleak (with some exceptions!). It was both more dense and more roomy than the previous album. I shelved it and later sold it. The previous year, some friends and I went to a now-defunct music festival in Philadelphia (Popped! Music Fest, which I think had maybe three total years) and much to my friends' chagrin dragged them to the Panda Bear set which I watched, transfixed. 

This kept happening: Panda Bear's music would shoot past me like a comet and I could never catch it, but would bask in the cosmic stardust it left behind.

Things changed when I got out to San Francisco in summer 2012. A new Animal Collective album and tour was on the horizon and, speaking of horizons, I was a whole country closer to the sunset! Neat! I got to see them a whole bunch and it was awesome. Other favorite artists released new music and toured that year, so I was aplomb with pop culture pleasures.

In summer 2013 living in California started to almost feel normal (save for the nagging ache of missing my now-wife, which I wrote about a bit here) and when things feel normal is when you're really fixing for a surprise. My surprise came in the form of Panda Bear's headlining set at the 2013 All Tomorrow's Parties Music Festival.

11 of the 11 songs in the set were never-before-heard brand-ass-new-songs. Remember: I am not a huge fan of Panda Bear, merely sympathetic to his music, aware it is special but unsure why. I'd been floating around the Animal Collective fan forum community during 2012-2013 primarily to find bootlegs of shows I'd been at so while I am aware there's a big concert recording culture, I'm not a participant. But for whatever reason, that day I was online, I once again downloaded some freely traded files of this guy's music and took it on a ride in the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) one afternoon when I was meeting my dad out at SFO. The bootleg played exactly the length of the ride. During our weekend in Sonoma, I went back into my iPod again, and again, and again.

You see, in California, I had exactly two responsibilities: make coffee and write poetry, which is to say I had time to be following the theories for new Panda Bear music: interpreting interview responses, listening to demos, alternate takes, and ATP rehearsals being graciously shared on the fan forum by the unexpected participation of the album’s producer (and member of Spacemen 3) Sonic Boom, piecing together ideal tracklists, lyrics, chasing clues on tour dates to come, an album release date, and even trying to pin down the name of the album that would, in January 2015, become Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper.
Frantic and fun as the real time roll out for Grim Reaper was, soon, my eagerness outweighed available content.  Old heads on the forum, among other praises, talked with tremendous eagerness about how different Grim Reaper tracks sounded from Tomboy.  Prior to 2013, I had been more a fan of the sum of Animal Collective’s parts than individual members’ output. The promise of new music was as good a reason as any to start working my way back into the world of Panda Bear's music. I remembered Popped! Music Festival in a new light: at the time, I knew what I was a part of in that audience was special.  But until the coldest parts of the San Francisco summer of 2013 did I understand how really special Panda Bear’s music was.

And so, to quell the wait for more fully developed versions of the frantic “Mr. Noah”, its meandering almost hip-hop rhythm along to actual samples of dogs barking with the somber “You Can Count on Me”.  One on end, the disjointed digital future of deconstructed real and invented sounds scattershot reassembled into what we could barely call music, on the other, “Drone” making good on its title to pulse out what feels like a single crushing note for four minutes.  Tomboy’s title track, suggestive of future sounds from Panda Bear is matched by “Crosswords” which hangs up guitar for keyboard tones.  At the center of all: Panda Bear’s sublime voice.  It is the secret weapon of Animal Collective, and it is the allure to all of Panda Bear’s solo offerings: something that can peek out from underneath endless layers of samples, a digital dirge of noise, convey a nonsense turn of phrase into prayer.

Grim Reaper familiar like an old friend by the time it was official released still manages to surprise upon repeated listens.  The song’s live interpolations further create space for the songs to be ideas and concepts, as opposed to static ‘finished’ products which rewards frequent concert goers, plus, you might get to meet the guy.  The album is dark, Panda Bear’s sunny voice lulling you into a false sense of comfort until the record slowly strips back the layers of noise to unfold centerpiece track “Tropic of Cancer”.  While the tumult of my leaving California to move home is my story and not the story of this record, you can still imagine how the lyrics “and you can’t get back / you won’t come back to it / you can’t come back to it / and you can’t get back / you won’t come back” land as mountains turn to plains turn to snow as I fly East for the last time.

On Tomboy, the life-saving affirmations of “Surfer’s Hymn”: “when there are hard times I’ll step it up / when there are dangerous times I’ll spot them up / I’ll take my time to make up my own mind / to step it up when the times are calling for a steady creed” might speak to the song’s title in a literal sense, but, to take all this on top of a twinkling cycle of bells, percussion that pulses like a heart steadying itself during unsteady times, the sublime reveals itself in each measure.

What happens next is I am working both forwards and backwards. Tomboy falls into clear view as a masterpiece. Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, once it is finally released, meets and exceeds the two years of expectations those earliest bootlegs set up. Now I'm back in Poland, Ohio, where this whole journey started. Panda Bear's self-titled debut gets some play, as does the mournful concept album Young Prayer, which was made in tribute to Panda Bear's father after passing, but Tomboy and Grim Reaper hold the middle. Person Pitch hangs out, original mp3s from seven years earlier, literally feet away from the corner of the basement where I'd originally downloaded them.

Then I move to Michigan. There's a new Animal Collective record somewhere in there. Then the music subscription service Vinyl Me Please represses Person Pitch ​on vinyl.

stock image from vmp this is definitely not my vinyl set up

Now, I will not wax (hah) nostalgic about Vinyl Me Please. Their pressings usually suck, and the admittedly pretty 2017 reissue of Person Pitch is no exception. But even hopelessly warped, even in a paper-thin cardboard gatefold, Panda Bear's critical breakthrough, finally, finally reveals itself to me. Or I reveal myself to it, I don't know. Either way, I hear it and its like hearing something for the first time. I bask in that first trip around the four sides of the album, the chaos of the opening, the warmth on "Search for Delicious," the dueling epics of "Good Girl/Carrots" and "Bros". This album is everything everybody says it is, but it is also so tender.

​That gets lost too often.

I told you, this was a story that has (almost) nothing to do with Person Pitch. Because even before I really could truly obsess over Panda's third outing, A Day With the Homies EP and Bouys come out in 18 & 19. More new Animal Collective and, not fully unnoticed in the excitement around Time Skiffs: more new Panda Bear on the horizon. 

But, as I hit play again on my Person Pitch mp3s feeling a little nostalgic, I think this is the only way to tell a story about Person Pitch: backwards, forwards, loosely scattered samples of this memory and that memory, reshaped over a delicate but not overly-cautious assemblage. 

In the opening track, "Comfy in Nautica," Panda Bear sings:

Try to tell me how to do it
Only because I'm new to it
Coolness is having courage
Courage to do what's right
I'll try to remember always
Just to have a good time
Try to show me that you know me
Do you know what coolness really is?
Winning is what you want to
But you're scared to go forth
You try to remember always
Always to have a good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time

I try to be profound before, once again, hitting play on track one, thinking about how many lives these mp3s lived shared peer-to-peer before making their way onto the hard drive of a computer that no longer exists in a house my parents no longer live in. Time and space and memory is both finite and vast, liner and irregular.

Short of something meaningful to say about a perfect piece of music that's said all it needs to say on its on, I close my eyes, powerless to guess what the next fifteen years hold. Hopefully less bitchy spitefulness. I think I can do that, I think I can remember to always have a good time.

Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time
Good time