Animal Collective en el Guggenheim de Nueva York

Escrito por Iñaki Espejo-Saavedra el 18 February, 2010

Animal Collective, los grandes triunfadores del año pasado, protagonizarán junto al artista gráfico Danny Perez una performance en el mismísimo Guggenheim de Nueva York. Los de Baltimore, utilizando proyecciones, música compuesta para la ocasión y toda clase de recursos escénicos, crearán un espacio de ambiente kinético y piscoldélico, en el cual podrá participar el público. La experiencia, que se enmarca en la celebración del 50 aniversario del Guggenheim, se titulará Transverse Temporal Gyrus. Esperemos que sea todo un éxito y lo repitan en Bilbao.

La banda, describe así la iniciativa:

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.

Thanks for joining us.
—Animal Collective, February 8, 2010