#Centipede Hz

[thisdastampdoesnotexist]

stamp of the twin fantasy ftf album cover with the background being a lesbian flag with flames. caption "gayville"

[thebowerypresents]

Animal Collective Bring Joy to SummerStage on Tuesday Night

Animal Collective – SummerStage – August 30, 2022

Animal Collective appear to have strange powers. I’m not the first to say they’re a spiritual and sonic journey, that there is something meditative in the quartet’s signature sound. But on a Tuesday night in Central Park, the band held off a much-discussed torrential downpour until the set’s very last song. Coincidence? Probably. And yet, dancing in the rain to “The Purple Bottle” (Feels, 2005), I’m not not convinced it was their doing. 

Coming off the February release of Time Skiffs, the band’s first album since 2016, AnCo delivered a beautiful set that plumbed the band’s decades of adventurous experimental music, while heavily featuring the new record. “Dragon Slayer,” off Time Skiffs, floated gently into form mid-set, Dave Portner/Avey Tare’s vocals blossoming and Noah Lennox/Panda Bear’s drums effortlessly keeping pace. Animal Collective are masters at blending not only form but also feeling. In the great tradition of psychedelia, they have a knack for making your brain feel like it’s become a liquid light show. On “We Go Back,” also off Time Skiffs, the loop-like keys and lyrics make for a poppy, near-manic chorus that melts and distorts at song’s end: “I stood for a moment and the sun went down / I got sad for the sun ’cause I would get lonely.” And “Car Keys” is a new classic, total jam-inspired AnCo canon.

The band played some excellent deeper cuts, too. “Applesauce,” a wacky song that Portner once said was simply based on eating fruit, from 2012’s Centipede Hz, and “Chores,” off my favorite, 2007’s Strawberry Jam, were highlights. But who am I kidding: Nothing can really beat hearing “Bluish” (Merriweather Post Pavillion, 2009) live, a Beach Boys–on-mushrooms love song that sends my heart near-bursting. “I’m getting lost in your curls / I’m drawing pictures on your skin / So soft it twirls.”As the whole of the SummerStage crowd lost its collective mind at show’s end to “The Purple Bottle,” I got emotional. When pleasure and joy can seem increasingly distant these days, it’s a salve to know we have this and each other. Such is the power of Animal Collective, and I’m grateful. —Rachel Brody | @RachelCBrody

Photos courtesy of Mark Ashkinos | www.markashephotography.com

[1teeth]

“MPP is the best Animal collective album” “no it’s Strawberry Jam”

Both wrong. It is Feels .

[labgrownmeat]

ive never had more fun online than i had on this website watching the livestream when centipede hz dropped. frankly

[rcmndedlisten]

...And then there are the albums that defy any distinct definition because they are outside of even unconventional boundaries. Experimental music can creak into corners ambient and electronic, or twist rock and contort pop into artful, avant patterns. There were many artists this year across the spectrum who molded the sonic canvas in challenging sound, color, light and matter itself in how their music entered our conscious. These were the best albums that tapped into other worlds even if they were created in our current physical...

Animal Collective - Time Skiffs [Domino Records]

Time Skiffs is a reminder of why we should never take a band like Animal Collective, as it’s a reunion of sorts with it being the first album since 2012′s Centipede Hz to feature all four members in the mix where their matured wilderness and nautical voyages have never felt as fit for a real chill as it has here as their hyper-color psychedelia reaches the closest they’ve come to jam band status without sacrificing their feral sides either.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody [Sub Pop]

Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally definitely have nailed down singularity with their style at this stage in their career, but their eighth studio album -- a double album opus at that -- is perhaps their most definitive sensation of instantaneous synesthesia and mind-and-physical-nature-altering music they’ve produced yet. Embellishing their dream-pop elixir with strings and psychedelic portals to worlds beyond worlds, Once Twice Melody is well worth its lengthy travel all while promising a kind of transcendence only the Baltimore duo hold the key to.

Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up There [Ninja Tune]

As it turns out, we hardly knew Black Country, New Road at all upon last year’s breakthrough debut, for the first time. On the London septet’s sophomore effort Ants From Up There, the band – led by the fascinating, wild-eyed narrations of now-departed vocalist Isaac Wood – it’s their own uninhibited instrumental malleability that steeps their sound into a captivating post-rock theater which gives us something further to consider of a band who are intent on never sounding or looking the same as they did even just one year ago.

black midi - Hellfire [Rough Trade]

Chaos, chaos, and even more chaos, even when it sounds like all the calamity and human destruction in the fantastical tale have reached cease fire. That’s black midi’ Hellfire, the latest album from the London-based experimental art rockers, who on this turn go all in on a glory of their their most unhinged sonic facets that have been steadily climbing over the course of their first two albums in the form of precisely meticulated post-punk of their 2019 debut Schlagenheim and last year’s cosmically imploded jazzist traverse Cavalcade without losing their grip.

björk - fossora [One Little Independent Records]

björk’s fossora was inspired by fungi and a sound she earlier described as “biological techno”. That very much checks out, and as usual, reinvents genre, as the tenth studio album from the experimental art icon is the sound of nature burgeoning its way through the soil from its most microscopic spore, reaping and sewing with the seasons of birth, decay, and death where love, partnerships, motherhood and familial bonds eventually return their energy back to the soil.

Boy Harsher - The Runner (Original Soundtrack) [City Slang / Nude Club Records]

Boy Harsher don’t regard their original soundtrack to The Runner, a short, Lynchian horror film which they wrote and directed themselves, as a release separate from the rest of their discog. Rather, it’s a proper fifth full-length effort as well as a watershed moment for the Northampton electronic duo of vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller in creating their most inviting release yet, with eight songs being scene-setting chapters building terror in the most cinematic sense through strobing lights and heavy fog as well as gleaming goth club and new wave bangers.

Carlos Truly - Not Mine [Bayonet Records]

Ava Luna guitarist Carlos Hernandez’ talents on his own merits are fully realized on Not Mine, his first solo album as Carlos Truly. Recorded alongside his brother Tony Seltzer, the album professes an nth degree of synesthesiac sophisticate taste to it in the way Hernandez sculpts wave forms of R&B, funky guitars, and experimental pop and jazz flourishes in relation to his world view onto the emotional, personal and creative connect. With his voice barely touching ground, the listen blends sense and memory into a warm air feeling.

Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here [Shelter Press]

Claire Rousay collage of sound is the immersion of her own specific surroundings, temporal to that moment, but committed to tape to live on forth with we as listeners. The San Antonio-based field recordings specialist’s latest, everything perfect is already here, continues mining seconds passing by through an instrumental rendering with ornate contributions from violinist Alex Cunningham, electrician and violinist Mari Maurice, harpist Marilu Donovan, and pianist Theodore Cale Schafer in a delicate inversion into Rousay’s world where even in stillness, her music can adorn a space with a deeper meditation onto the self.

Guerilla Toss - Famously Alive [Sub Pop]

Noise, psychedelic powers, and flashes of pop have long permeated Guerilla Toss’ music over the years, so it’s a fitting irony that on Famously Alive, their first album for Sub Pop, they would find a sense of clarity and balance in it all, created across some of the most chaotic times of our modern existence. Their synesthesia explodes vividly, and the hooks stick like Gak to the ears, all while vocalist Kassie Carlson confronts existentialist dread head on with empowering messages of reclaiming ownership of one’s fate in anthem.

Healing Potpourri - Paradise [Run for Cover Records]

Simi Sohota has reengineered the power of the calm vibe with Healing Potpourri’s Paradise. A bouquet of chamber pop, yacht and kraut rock in a breeze sailing its way in from the cosmos, Sohota alongside producer and Stereolab collaborator Sean O’Hagan have created an album that indulges in soft rays of sunlight and sighed reflections on connections through organic highs and interstellar journeys of the self that see every color in this strange human experience.

The Mall - Time Vehicle Earth [Self-released]

With so much within the overlapping industrial, electronic, and punk realms having become blasé and a mere goth cosplay, hitting play on Time Vehicle Earth will have all your perceptions of reality rearranged and raged. The moniker of St. Louis artist Mark Plant and Spencer Bible is like the equivalent of staring deeper and deeper into the cosmic sights of James Webb Space Telescope and realizing that the further out we get, the less we know as Plant’s shouts echo through spiraling space-synth at a punk-fueled speed of light.

Moor Mother - Jazz Codes [ANTI- Records]

Prolific and faceted as always, be it in her own name and other projects like her free jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements or the avant rap-pop duo 700 Bliss, Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa has taken less than a year to bring forth a bookend 2021 standout, Black Encyclopedia of Air, with Jazz Codes, an album which she goes even deeper into the ether with a seance of Black creativity’s most brilliant, unheralded minds lifting through her new age jazz conversations and electronic multiverses that rupture enlightenment throughout.

Palm - Nicks and Grazes [Saddle Creek Records]

Mashing together philosophy, color and synesthesia, rock noise and electronic devices, Palm come alive on their third full-length effort in their newfound freedom of approaching their art while becoming hyper-aware of the outside obstacles that brought the four-piece to this point. It’s pop extracted from every high and lull of emotion, but unlike one meant to imitate anything beyond the moment its consumed.

P.E. - The Leather Lemon [Wharf Cat Records]

The Leather Lemon reassembles sound through the pieces of the world we continue to pick up in its aftermath. For that, P.E. focus on their strongest pop points amid the asymmetry, filling deeper grooves where absent pockets once were with body contortion and skin-on-skin contact. The turbulence of these times still exists within the context of these songs, though this time around, the Brooklyn band are working with them to connect emotionally, sensually, and physically rather than add to the discord.

Rachika Nayar - Heaven Come Crashing [NNA Tapes]

A new galaxy just dropped, and it’s called Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing. The Brooklyn-based guitar virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist’s sophomore follow-up expands the celestial atmospheres discovered on last year’s Our Hands Against the Dust in one of the most sensory-entrancing examples of modern guitar art in which Nayar synthesizes her instrument with ambient colors and haloing vocal accents by songwriter Maria B.C., blurring the space between emotive rock, ambient electronic and trancelike dance music –emotion in motion at a constant centripetal force.

The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention [XL Recordings]

A Light for Attracting Attention is clear evidence that the Smile are more than just a Radiohead side-project. Featuring Thom York and Johnny Greenwood alongside drummer Tom Skinner of the now-defunct Sons of Kemet, the trio have built their own new world of sound using places they’ve visited in their respective past lives, but at an alternate universe distance where its more experimental terrain of free jazz and electronic music allow them to continue to predict the future of art rock and our existence in an eerie spectral delight.

Sonic Youth - In/Out/In [Three Lobed Records]

Even in their post-mortem, Sonic Youth still remain among one of the most innovative sculptors in noise rock whose ideas remain unparralel in our current existence. A decade removed from their final bow, In/Out/In – a collection of several mostly instrumental tracks unearthed from their early Aughts era – moves seamlessly in its own distinct singular waveform despite being created in disconnect rendering Sonic Youth in their jammiest formation yet, with the static becoming a transfixing groove.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water - lucky styles [Smoking Room]

lucky styles, the third full-length effort from They Are Gutting a Body of Water, realizes the Philly experimental band’s wildest yet appeasing impulses in one sitting within textures of static-washed shoegaze, electronic-speckled zone-outs, and noise-pop over dreamy overtures and post-hardcore aggression rendering something much more adventurous than what we perceive in our everyday waking life.

[poppetsisters]

I thought for the longest time that psychedelic music just meant music that sounded really good with psychedelics. It wasn't until after my first psychedelic experience and going back to Animal Collective that I started to realize what it means for music to be psychedelic.

It's easy to associate psychedelics with all the fractal imagery and absorbing soundscapes, because that's how people have come to translate the aesthetics of the experience, but that by itself is only half the purpose.

To be psychedelic is to introspect and be challenged, to see perspectives outside of your own, and come away from the experience having learned something about yourself and the world. That has always been the purpose ever since early civilization.

True psychedelic music is that which captures the psychedelic experience on both an auditory and symbolic level. A marriage between captivating musical composition and insightful commentary. Anyways, Animal Collective is really damn good psychedelic music. Centipede Hz deserved more attention.

[kushblazer666]

“centipede hz is actually the best animal collective album” says st peter at he casts you out of heavens pearly gates. you clasp your sweaty palms together. “you mocked it"he said. "you thought it was shit”

[babylonbirdmeat]

Oh geeze I've almost always specifically kept surviving for horror

I kept going because I wanted to see how Marble Hornets ended, more indirectly I kept going because EMH introduced me to Animal Collective and I wanted to listen to Centipede Hz with all my friends, I kept going for Outlast 2 (and then kept going because I was mad I survived for THAT??? Fuck you), and right now I am still just truckin along to see Silent Hill F

[thisdastampdoesnotexist]

rofa cat

enby flag

text: i love breakcore!!!!!!!

[musiconanironingboard]

26 March 2023: Monkey Been to Burn Town (EP), Animal Collective. (Domino, 2013)

This, like the music in my three previous posts, was purchased at Lilliput Records in Milwaukee. I hadn’t intended on buying this decade-old, four-track EP of Animal Collective remixes, but it’s a release by that band I’d always passed up and when I saw new copies near the cash register for something cheap like ten dollars I added it to my stack. Lilliput, even in its previous guise as the last-standing Milwaukee location of now-defunct Wisconsin chain Exclusive Co., always had a strange assortment of new albums near the register; it’s not clear if they are employee recommendations or what, but there’s no other pressing reason I can think of for this EP to be on display there.

I’ve recently been listening to Centipede Hz, the 2012 Animal Collective from which the original versions of these songs come from, and “Monkey Riches” is one of my favorite tracks on the album so it made sense for me to snap this up when I saw it.

Above are the front cover, title sticker (it’s nearly impossible to read the actual album artwork), and the back cover.

Below are both sides’ labels.

[davvvd]

Anyone still have their gun from the deluxe box set of Animal Collective's album Centipede Hz? Mine is in pretty bad disrepair.

[tetrabanshee]

Wow uh I'm in the process of realizing that I got a fucked up CD copy of centipede Hz from the library like three years ago and I was just willing to accept that I enjoy like 4 other animal collective albums but this one was just "too experimental" for me and maybe weed really does make you an idiot sometimes...

[macksmediadiary]

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013) - 5/6

#album #experimental #electronic #onrepeat

TLDR: the post-structuralist themes come through in the instrumentals in a really cool way, the long slow parts make for a fascinating and repeatable cover-to-cover

Since this is a personal journal, I'm going to start personal.

In 2013 I was spending a lot of time on 4chan.org/mu/. Most of what I was listening to I found there. When Shaking the Habitual came out, it was the hot controversial topic. It's certifiable /mu/core, with a unique sound and heavy experimentation, but it's also undeniably left-wing in its themes. The way I remember the discourse can kind of be summed up as people falling on either side of "this album is absolutely brilliant musically, but it's awful SJW nonsense and that either doesn't quite or does ruin it." Due to where I was at in my journey in grade 12, this meant I was scared to listen to it in case I liked an SJW thing.

I didn't justify it to myself that way, however. There was a second toxic thing going on on /mu/. "It's impossible to understand this album outside the context of this band's other work." I heard that about everything, and never clued in that it was a pattern. I now recognize that this is often an intelligent thing for a serious music reviewer to say, as context can help a lot, but what isn't intelligent is for people who are not serious reviewers to recommend to each other not to listen to what they want to listen to until they've made it to that point in a band's discography, which is sometimes how this was presented. This got ingrained into me so deeply that in 2014 when a very attractive classmate, after a really long stimulating conversation about music, asked me if I wanted to go listen to her vinyl copy of Centipede Hz in her dorm, but I said no because I was only as far as listening to Strawberry Jam in their discography and didn't want to ruin the album for myself, a memory that can derail me very hard when I think about it.

In 2019 or so I saw the iconic neon album cover and realized I'd missed out on an album because of my political confusion, so I did the natural thing and listened to their self-titled 2001 debut. It's an okay album, featuring a wonderful half-cover of I'm on Fire by Springsteen, but it didn't really catch me. It took 2 more years of occasionally listening to it in hopes of getting it until I forced myself to listen to their 2003 album Deep Cuts, which I thankfully disliked enough to break my habit - I said "well I'm not going to stick to this discography, might as well see what the fuss on this one was about."

Shaking the Habitual blew my mind!

A Tooth for an Eye is way better than anything on their first two albums, right out of the gate. It sounds like the bike jousting scene from Akira with a witch mournfully chanting spells over it. It starts out disorienting and enticing, and slowly ramps up for a few moments, paying off with high-pitched flute-like synths that are still understated enough to not blow the whole album's load, then slows for a minute of percussion playing with itself to set you up for the rest of the album. Full of Fire follows it up perfectly. It's super dancey, and continues to have expressive and untamed percussion alongside shifting synths and other sounds with witchy enticing vocals. The repeated "let's talk about gender baby" at the end dragged me into the lyrics, which turn out to be dense enough that I'm far from done analyzing them. And then A Cherry On Top is the big reveal - this is not going to be a dance album, even the presentation is experimental, we could dip down into nearly 9 minutes of drone at any moment, don't get comfortable.

The album continues to go up and down this way, playing with post-structuralism at every level. My favourite song is Without You My Life Would Be Boring, which has the eponymous Foucault quote, though I sure appreciate what the grueling 19-minute Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized adds to the actual listening experience, making me forget every time that I'm listening to my current favourite album and helping Raging Lung and Networking do what they're supposed to do after. While my favourite fact about it is that this album was the result of two progressives going full tranarchy after reading Foucault, at once proof of and a celebration of what theory can do to someone, and furthermore that even the troglodytes on 4chan could tell this just by listening to it... more skilled music reviewers than me have already explored this extensively. It's why you should listen to it, but but to how it impacted me.

So, in terms of my thinking... sorry not sorry gang, but I was already where you were trying to get me. Foucault has been big on my radar since I realized more than half of the biggest sources for my dissertation considered him their biggest influence, and at this stage of my life, "let's talk about gender baby" sounds less like a threat and more like a nice thing a friend would say over tea. Maybe this album could've done me some good in 2013, but at this point it's too late to say. However, it's definitely to this album's credit that it embodies its themes so well that to someone who already embraces its ideas it's absolutely perfect to bump non-stop!

The big effect, however, has been on how I approach music I'm interested in. This album gave me the confidence to trust that I can handle listening to an album for the first time without context. I don't think anyone on /mu/ ever actually warned me not to listen to anything from an album without the context of the discography it's part of, but my autistic brain constructed this version of that site's ideology. Now that I've even gone back and listened to 2010's Tomorrow in a Year, I see that there is merit to putting an album in context for review - while The Knife has been wanting to be experimental since their second album, and have been talented musicians capable of making catchy stuff since their first, only when they found a topic that truly stirred their passion did they make good on bringing the two together - and that this merit is virtually nonexistent for a casual listener. Nothing about my individual love for this album comes from the context I brought from having listened to their first two albums, and my Midcity loving ass would've grocked it just fine on its own in 2013 as well. Never again will I see a specific project I'm interested in and immediately go to the artist's discography to see if it's worth catching up. I will go where my fancy takes me, and use the structure of discography where it makes sense to in order to guide my exploration after that. I, too, am post-structure (I know that's not what that means).

[foxydunsparce]

Centipede Hz SUCKED actually fight me