The AC (like The OC only NOTHING like The OC) have built a reputation on going against the grain. Having refused the oh so conventional constraints of the ‘band’ label, their ever changing line-up has given its four members the freedom to work on solo projects wherever possible – and allowed the group to exist as both a duo and a three piece at times.

Existing as a series of collaborations rather than as a band has led to a multi-faceted body of work that sets AC apart and makes them almost impossible to pin down (is that an AC album or just a joint project from two of its members?).

Unlike your conventional band, where someone might leave and get replaced by a slightly cooler looking stand-in (ahem, Oasis), in The Animal Collective members come and go as they please from album to album, talking time out to work on solo stuff or even breaking away with another member for a different project all together. The usually fascist regulations of band politics do not apply here. This is 100 per cent artistic freedom operating at its most ‘right-on’ best.

In short, maximum fluidity in the way they operate has led to maximum creativity; so much so that their sound, though some have bracketed it as ‘noise pop’ or ‘freak folk’, has been almost impossible to define.

The eighth AC studio album (there’s been countless other solo or ‘related’ projects), Merriweather Post Pavilion, was released in January this year and has been universally hailed as their best so far.

Having put out their first record on their own label, Animal, in 2000 the group has gone on to work with a number of labels, including Catsup Plate, Paw Tracks and FatCat, and has released its last two albums on Domino. The Animal label still exists as a means of releasing solo efforts from members of the AC collaboration and as a platform for new bands they want to push forward, but these days the demands of AC’s mass following require the infrastructure of a bigger label.

Having released albums in the past that have been recorded conceptually, the latest record has been a relatively conventional project. Though it still bears the experimental touch of AC, compared to albums like 2003’s Campfire Songs the actual recording process was what you might call straight forward.

Catching up with founder member Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) as the three members of AC that make up the current line-up (Lennox, David Portner and Brian Weitz) are about to embark on their latest European tour, I’m told that Merriweather Post Pavilion was an un-typically smooth project from start to finish.

“To me personally, this record is one of my favourites. I feel like in terms of what we were envisaging the thing sounding like and what it ultimately ended up sounding like, they were very similar. Where as with some of the other albums I feel like it has maybe become a different thing during the process.

“I feel like that in terms of the realisation and execution of the thing, this was pretty kind of spot on and I liked that about it. Also, we had some really good times making the record and that always makes it pretty easy to listen to for me.

“We did it at a studio in Mississippi. Basically, we talked to our engineer, told him what we wanted to do, the kind of set up we wanted to have in the control room and so on and he suggested the studio. We went to see it and it seemed to have a sweet vibe and it worked out really well. We just felt like it was the perfect environment for what we wanted to do.”

And it did work out really well. Merriweather is a great, great album. Without ditching any of their experimental, genre straddling style, AC managed to make a record that felt every bit as avant-garde, off-the-wall and psychedelic as anything they’ve done, yet was somehow less fractured and – dare I say it – more accessible than their previous albums.

Lennox tells me that the idea behind Merriweather was to create a record that felt more cohesive than some of the stuff they’d done in the past. Thinking about previous records, I ask him about the recording of Campfire Songs (his other favourite AC album), which has become legendary in AC folklore for its pure out-there weirdness…

“We went to Dave’s (Portner aka Avey Tare) cousin’s house which is kind of in the woods,” begins Lennox. I can tell he’s told the story a thousand times, but he doesn’t mind going over old ground. “So we set up a bunch of minDisc players with these stereo microphones that we were really into at the time. We had one really close to us, one just behind us and one way outside that was picking up the sounds of the environment rather than the songs themselves.

“We would try and hit record on all the miniDisk players at the same time and it was all done in like one take and then we tried to mix the different recordings at the end of it. I love the way it sounds. I feel like it has a kind of weird quality that I feel like I’ve never really heard before. It has been described as like ‘low-fi’ or something like that but it doesn’t really sound that way to me. I feel like the point was to try and capture what it felt like to be there at that moment and, at least to me anyway, it really brings you back there so I like that about the album.”

Campfire Songs was not actually recorded under the AC name at the time, but has since been labelled one of their albums. The whole line-up were present during its recording, though Brian Weitz’s only role was to press record on the miniDisk player that was located away from the outdoor porch where the other three members were playing. It’s a typically zany part of the AC history and adds to the mythical status that the group has earned.

Having made Merriweather in slightly more conventional surroundings, I ask Lennox if AC are making a conscious step towards becoming more conformist.

“I don’t know about that,” I’m told, “but this one is a little bit more cohesive to me than, certainly, the last one at least. Less schizophrenic maybe. We definitely made a concerted effort to try and work faster in terms of the song writing and how long we took between when we wrote the songs to when we recorded the songs. I think that kind of helped give the songs a sense of cohesion. There is a bit of it that I feel is serendipitous to the songs. Dave was writing songs that were kind of harmonious in form. I also think the length of song time that we spent, the brevity helped.”

Lennox tells me how AC’s creative output depends entirely on the line-up at the time, and that the actual song-writing process is never done as a group – more like an individual coming up with an idea and it being shaped by the other members at a later stage.

Solo projects, and anything else for which members of the collaboration want to step away from the AC name tend to vary massively from the AC sound (which itself has no real fixed formula), with each musician seeing time spent away from the others as a chance to “concentrate on their own stuff”.

The project that Lennox has worked on lately with Dave Portner, for instance, really bore no relation to the eight studio albums that go down officially as being AC records, and his solo stuff is very much just that… his “own thing”.
“It is a totally different process to me,” Lennox tells me of working alone. “There is a different vibe to it and it is kind of the music that I feel like I want to do for me. It is just a totally different thing I guess. I don’t really tour a whole lot.

“At first it was just stuff that I’d fit in when I wasn’t doing AC and now I guess it has filled out a lot. I think I may soon take some time off doing AC to focus on doing my own thing again for a while, in the next couple of months or so.”
That’s how it works with Animal Collective. Just as Josh Dibb has taken some “time out” from the most recent album and tour, Noah Lennox looks set to take his own mini sabbatical from the band – sorry, collective – in the coming months.

And it seems to work. There’s a freshness to AC’s music and a sense that this is an ever-evolving project which is perhaps lacking in a lot of other bands that have been around for the same amount of time. One thing’s for sure, AC won’t ever sound stale. With their constantly changing line-up, there seems to be no danger of them ever producing an album like the last. If Animal Collective fans look slightly fraught, that’s because they’re always on their toes. Schizophrenic it may be… but long may it continue!