Interview: Deakin (Animal Collective) on producing Panda Bear's Sinister Grift, scoring OBEX, and his evolving connection to musicianship and engineering

Listen to the audio interview on dublab

Photo by Atiba Jefferson

Josh Dibb is a musician, producer, studio and mixing engineer, carpenter, and more who performs as Deakin. He’s a founding member of the band Animal Collective, a consistently morphing musical project now spanning over two and a half decades with zero sign of stopping.

From an early age, he would make music and sounds on a multitrack recorder with his childhood friend and eventual bandmate Panda Bear between jokes and a Waldorf curriculum. Going through plenty of change and tumult as they aged into adulthood, they would keep in touch and find their way back to each other through several moves, new schools, and big choices. Animal Collective became a glue that tied them together across continents.

After 35 years, the partnership continues with Panda Bear’s new album Sinister Grift, out now via Domino. Deakin was brought on in its early stages as producer and mixing engineer after an abnormally long stint of touring and recording for Animal Collective.

I had the privilege to sit down with Deakin back in late February for dublab. He spoke to me over Zoom from his Baltimore studio for just over an hour to talk about producing and mixing Sinister Grift, scoring the film OBEX, his evolving connection to musicianship and engineering, working in service of others’ music, his qualms with the Dolby Atmos marketing push, and finally tackling his debut solo album.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To listen to the interview instead, visit dublab.com to listen to the archives.

You were just in Iceland with a big group. How did the performances go?

Iceland was awesome. I'd never been before so it was just a kind of a very special trip to get to do. And yeah, to do it with a bunch of really good friends, it was pretty great. The performances, they were all good—I mean, they were a little bit of a mixture.

The first week when we were there, we were playing as part of a festival in Reykjavik and our flights got screwed up. So Dave [Portner, known as Avey Tare] and Brian [Weitz, known as Geologist, both fellow members of Animal Collective] had already been there for a couple of days and done their performances. Me and my friend Walsh [Kunkel], who was playing with me, we landed Saturday morning and then ended up having to play that night, and there were some technical issues like sound checking. So that one was like a little crazy for me personally but other people said it was good, so I trust that.

After that, we got to go spend about five days, I think, in this amazing little small town on the east side of Iceland called Seyðisfjörður, which is this beautiful fishing fjord village that's gorgeous there. We all got to hang out for a few days and prepare for the shows and enjoy the scenery and go on little hikes and stuff. We were set up to play in this church in that town, which got mixed reports but I think is a church that dates back to the 19th century. It's this really beautiful, really classic wooden church that was very beautiful inside and had a pipe organ, which is pretty special, and a grand piano. Dave's sister, Abby [Portner], was doing all the visuals. That was ostensibly the reason we were there. She had a bunch of amazing projections and pieces of artwork that she had hanging from the rafters and stuff.

Friday night, I played my music with accompaniment for my friend Walsh Kunkel. Dave played as part of this Ellicott Hooligan group, which is [with] two other good friends, Shane and Mikey, who are known for this band Sham that they're in. They've been doing this improvised trio, the three of them. The second night, just because the festival is so small and the village was so small, we decided to do something different. We ended up having a five-piece improvisation. An awesome musician who actually lives in that town named Björt [Sigfinsdóttir] joined us and she sang along. It was, I think, about an hour of improvised music. Dave was jumping back and forth between the pipe organ and percussion, and he was doing vocals and I was doing vocals and Björt was doing vocals, and Mikey was on cello and I was playing piano with a pick. Yeah, it was beautiful. It was really fun. It was a really special time.

The town is in such a deep fjord [with] these massive cliffs on each side, essentially. Most of the winter, you can't ever see the sun even though the sun is up. It's always behind the ridge. And so this festival celebrates the first day that the sun is actually visible above the ridge and hits the rooftops of the town. Sure enough, Sunday morning, we all woke up and the sun hit the rooftops for the first time. It was a really special, kind of mystical journey.

That's amazing. I did see the Northern Lights even made an appearance at some point.

Yeah, we got to see the Northern Lights. Actually, I missed them—the first night that they happened [where] people could see them, we were already inside the church and getting ready to play. Afterwards, people were like, Did you see them? And we're like, No, we were inside. But the second night, yeah, we got a really nice view of them.

You've already had such a busy year. It's only February, but you've just been at Sundance scoring OBEX, a new film which just got picked up, and Panda Bear's new album, Sinister Grift, is coming out. It's been a long process—four of the songs on that album were introduced back in September of 2021, when Panda Bear played at a festival in Madrid and debuted those songs. He even announced the album title on Twitter back in 2020. When were you brought into the fold for this recording?

We started talking about it while we were working on Time Skiffs, when we were getting ready to record in 2019. We wrote a bunch of music—we wrote about 18, 19 pieces of music and we did a short tour, and did a bunch of writing sessions and practices around that. We were feeling really psyched about the music and it was a very band, kind of musician-y era of the group.

We felt really attached to the idea of working with someone as an engineer-slash-producer that was just really good at capturing live instrumentation in a really great way. We had honed in on working with Russell Elevado for that batch of songs. He has an amazing pedigree of strictly analog approach to recording, which we really revered. He's made a lot of records that are amazing, but the ones that stood out to me in my life are the early D'Angelo records, or basically all the D'Angelo records after the first one, and Erykah Badu records. He has this kind of incredible sound.

So we were getting really excited to work on that with him and got together in January of 2020 and had one last writing session together, and we were starting to actually hone in on what studio we were going to go to to work with Russell and setting dates, when the pandemic hit. And that changed the trajectory of things for us in a pretty significant way. First, we were holding our breaths, and then it seemed like by the middle/end of the spring, we were like maybe holding our breath isn't going to work.

To sort of pass the time and to keep ourselves from going crazy, we decided to try to work on a small release that ended up being an EP called Bridge to Quiet. We didn't even realize at the time we were testing the waters of if it felt possible to us to record meaningful recordings while separated from each other. We worked out a system to do that. I was in Baltimore, Brian was in D.C., Dave was in Nashville, and Noah [Lennox, known as Panda Bear] was in Lisbon, where he lives. We were exchanging session files back and forth, and each person would build something and then the next person would take it, and it was this round robin of creativity.

By the time that was done, we all felt like in some ways being able to do that had sort of kept us from losing our minds completely, and we were pretty happy with the way it came out. As the pandemic continued, and it continued to feel impossible to get all four of us in the same space together in any reasonable fashion, we decided to try and record the next record, which became Time Skiffs, remotely, similar to how we'd done Bridge to Quiet.

We started that process in mid-August of 2020. We picked the songs that we felt would work in that context, which essentially meant songs that we could record to a grid and a metronome, and not feel like we were losing the soul of what the music was by the way that it could breathe. We would pass things around and Noah's initial idea was to record his own drums in his own studio himself, and [by] late August and early September, he'd already started tracking drums that way.

As I was working on stuff—I mean, I think we all do this to some degree, but—I, as a mixer oftentimes, even when I'm just working on tracking ideas, I start to pre-mix things to figure out what the vibe is. I think “Prester John” was starting to come together and we had recorded a few things that were already sounding pretty good, and Noah had tracked the drums for that and he was pretty happy with the performance. I decided to just take a swing at getting them to sound a little bit more like a proper mix for a drum kit on a record and sent it around, and Noah just responded really well to it. He initially even suggested that he felt like I should mix that record. The band ended up talking about that idea and ultimately not choosing to do that, but once we did, he just was like, Well, you're going to do my next record. I'm sure of it. And I… [in] a combination of my own humility and even self-deprecation and philosophy of being in service to other people's music, I just kept reassuring Noah that like, Oh man, that's really sweet of you to say so and if that works out, that'd be amazing. I'd love to, I'd be really excited, if it feels real when it's time, we can talk about it, but he kept on bringing it up and he just kept on insisting it's what he wanted to do.

Eventually it just became real, I guess. We obviously spent the next couple of years focusing on Time Skiffs coming out and going on tour for that, and recording Isn't It Now? and, sadly to me, not touring for that—I really wish we'd been able to. At the end of that cycle, moving into 2023—we had decided the band [would] go into one of our classic sort of hiatus periods—Noah started talking about wanting to work on that record in a real way. And he kept bringing it up to me. The idea had stuck in his mind and, and, you know, despite my humility, I was completely over the moon about the idea of being able to do that.

I really love working on records in general; I've done quite a few at this point. I think with Noah specifically, it felt really meaningful to get to do that. Him and I have been friends since we were nine years old, and he's the person I started making music with when we were 12, 13, 14 years old. It was a really exciting opportunity from a friendship perspective, from a professional perspective. I feel like in a way this is probably the highest profile record I've gotten to have a hand in and that felt really meaningful. And it just felt like a lot of responsibility and trust. I like being given that opportunity to prove my mettle.

It didn't feel real to me until we actually—I mean, honestly, throughout the whole process, until the mixes were really approved, I was still kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the moment that Noah was like, Oh, I don't know, man. I mean, this is good, but I think I want to try something different. And I kept on reassuring him he could do that. Again, some of that's humility and some of that is actually just [that] I think artists should on some level feel like as long as they're being cool about it, that if they have a vision that deviates from the people that they're working with, that they need to be able to feel like they can. I just always wanted to reassure him that that was the case, but that wasn't the case. He loved it and I loved it.

Speaking of “Prester John,” Isn't It Now? and Time Skiffs brought out a new interplay between you and Noah—the vocal interplay, the synths, the flourishes that you brought to the songs that he wrote. Was there a new way of working that you feel like you unlocked with him?

Yeah, it definitely felt like a new thing. I don't know if I feel like him or I really thought of that as a particular thing between him and I. I think for me, I probably reflect on that more as just my own relationship to myself musically and where I felt like I was at that point working on stuff. I was approaching things in a really new way and in some ways a new level of clarity, and I guess confidence, for lack of a better word, about how I wanted to approach working on that era of stuff. I was feeling a lot more, I don't know, emboldened to sort of try things.

My voice especially is something that, you know, I used when I was in high school. When [Noah] and I first started making music together, I would sing quite a bit, I think. But as the band started to really come into form in the early 2000s, what I experienced was that I was watching Noah and Dave really just blossom into incredible vocalists and both their capacity to create melody that was remarkable and catchy and, you know, exciting. Even in our noisy days, I felt that. It felt intimidating to me. And I started to kind of close down that part of myself. I literally didn't want to use my voice all that much because I wasn't really sure how to fit in and what role it could play. That became a bit of a hangup for me and for most of the 2000s, I think it felt really scary for me and it felt unnecessary. I didn't feel like it was really welcome or needed and that I really knew how to use it.

Towards the end of the 2000s during the Merriweather [Post Pavilion] era, when I was kind of on my extended break, I had a lot of really deep soul searching about whether music was even the right path for me. I went through periods of feeling like it was bringing a lot of anxiety and strain and pain, and on some level, my life would be easier if I could just let it go and put all my energy into being a carpenter or just do something different with my life. What kept coming back to me is that I could not let it go. It was an indelible part of who I am and what I want to do with my life. I think I realized that as much as I had loved up to that point being an instrumentalist in the group and contributing in that way—and I'm really proud of a lot of the things I did as a guitarist—especially during the 2000s, I felt like my voice was something I needed to figure out how to use.

So I started pushing myself to use it, and it continues to be a long journey I think, but the 2009 to 2011 period was really harrowing for me. I didn't really believe my voice had a lot to offer. It felt really scary. Even bringing a song to the Centipede Hz era and ending up with my voice on the record, I felt really like, You know, are we sure? Is this a good idea? I'm not sure I know how to do this. Does this sound good? Do you guys think this sounds good? It was hard for me to kind of connect to that. So for better or for worse, it took a lot of encouragement during that era, but it worked. I think the more that I did it, and once I made Sleep Cycle [the debut Deakin solo release], I think I started to feel like I had some trust in my voice and some trust that I really enjoyed it, and I could experiment with it and try new things and push myself to places I hadn't gone before. And I guess sitting out Painting With as well, I didn't really get an opportunity after Sleep Cycle and just working on my own stuff to really get to flex it.

I think by the time we started working on new music—between me, Dave, and Brian, that started in 2018 with the Music Box shows [in New Orleans, a two-night, site-specific pair of performances]—it felt really important to me to have my voice be a front and center centerpiece. I don't even know if the four of us ever really talked about it directly, but I think everyone kind of saw that as an asset and understood that it was an important thing to work with. I think by the time we got to those songs, it felt really important to do that and I guess I'd proven myself to those guys that my voice did have something to offer. And so it felt much easier I think for us all on equal ground be like, Hey, you do this and I'll do this. And what if you try this? I guess that's a very long-winded answer [laughs] to say that I do feel like there was, yeah, some new way of interfacing with Noah and with everyone on some level around vocals and instrumental contributions.

I think another thing that I had learned a lot in the 2010s that I think had been hard for me to understand in the 2000s was that—and I think I learned this both as increasingly being in the position of being an engineer and a quasi- or full-on producer for other people's music, [and] by doing my own music outside of the band, which Dave and Noah had already had experience with—I think I started to see that when you're in a group setting as a band, the more you can let go of your own ego and attachment to what you're doing and whether it's the right thing or not, and listen more to both what the songwriter is feeling and really be in service to them, but also what the group is doing as a whole—I think I maybe didn't have the best filters in the 2000s to kind of understand those differences. I think I had a lot of energy to want to be engaged and did and made a lot of really great things that way, but it could feel very personal when things weren't landing correctly. I would be like, What I'm doing is cool. Why don't you get it? You know? I think during this past era specifically, especially, I think it felt much clearer and natural for me to really be listening and just thinking about, Okay, well, if my role here is to be playing keyboards, like, how do I contribute? That's how I've always been, but it felt like it was in a new level that era. I think just in general, we're giving each other a lot more space to find our own roles and be generous with each other about how that fits together.

Do you feel like you learned a lot working with Russell on Isn't It Now? I know you mixed Sinister Grift in Atmos—how was that like?

I have a lot to say about Atmos. In some ways, I want to disregard it completely because I have a lot of strong negative feelings about it, even though I did work really hard on it. We can talk about it in a second, but in terms of Russell, yeah, I learned a ton.

I mean, going back to being a young person, Noah got a multitrack Tascam 48 when we were 14 years old—I think 13 or 14 years old, so we always had multitrack recording capabilities as far back as I can really remember. I instantly had an interest in trying to understand, to some degree, mics and what different mics did and just excited about the idea of you put it here, it sounds this way and if you put it there, it sounds that way, and what happens when you turn the EQ—all that stuff has always interested me.

As soon as we, as a group, had opportunities to work in studios with other engineers, I've always looked over the shoulders of what they were doing. So there's so many. I mean, Russell is one, but Nicolas Vernhes [engineer for Ark, and mixing engineer for Strawberry Jam and Water Curses], who used to run Rare Book Room Studios—huge. Scott Colburn [engineer for Feels, Strawberry Jam, and the People EP], huge. Ben Allen [producer, engineer, and mixing engineer for Merriweather Post Pavilion and Centipede Hz], huge. Being in spaces with any of these guys that have had so much more experience than I have, I try and be a sponge and pay attention to a ton of little things, and Russell is no exception. He's a really amazing person to work with. It was a dream to be in a studio with him. If I even picked up a sprinkle of what he's capable of, I feel lucky.

We recorded everything at Noah's studio onto computer and then I worked on 98% of the mixing and production in my studio in Baltimore where I am right now. Much of that was in the box working in the DAW that I was using, using some outboard gear here and then to reprocess things or re-amping, whether through a pedal or through an amplifier or something. I did all that over the course of a couple months in Baltimore remotely, and I would send him stuff and he would give his reaction or give notes. He gave me a lot of rope to make things sound the way I wanted him to sound. Then he came to Baltimore for one final week to do a couple last overdubs and final mixing tweaks with him in the room. When we finished that in this room, which was essentially playing everything directly off the computer, Noah was like, If this is the record, I'm stoked. If this is it, we're good.

But we had booked two days to work in a studio in Baltimore called Wright Way, which has a lot of really amazing analog gear. They have a beautiful 4000 series [Solid State Logic] console and a ton of incredible analog outboard gear, and I have a relationship with one of the engineers there named Paul Mercer. He's just a really good resource for me. We went to that studio and spent two days doing very, very basic stem mixing through the board. So this wasn't like remixing the entire songs, this was just taking all of the percussion into [channels] one and two on the SSL, taking the bass into three and four, taking all of the instruments into five and six, and all of the vocals into seven and eight. And that was it, basically allowing the balances to stay as they were coming out of the box. But just even the nature of going through the SSL console alone added a bit of warmth and new sonic saturation that hadn't been there coming out of the computer. Then we would route things a little bit, be like, Okay, we're going to send the vocals through these preamps to give them a little extra grit, [through] an [Urei] 1178 compressor. Then the master mix would go through a chain of a couple different things. It changed from song to song, but essentially the idea was to do certain things to carve the EQ a little bit on the tracks and run everything through these analog transformers, and something kind of magical happened in that environment.

We felt a number of things happened. There was a sheen on the mixes that existed coming out of the computer, which in some ways had some detail that actually went away doing this—that at first I was a little sad about—some really fine details of high frequency stuff, but it also brought a ton of warmth to the mixes and did something really special to the low end. It brought the kick and bass element into an even more warm and concentrated space.

Is this an analog era for you?

I feel that all roads can lead to glory and I don't actually really hold any one thing as superior to the other. There's a number of different moments in my life where I've gotten to really experience what pure analog approaches can do and working on Isn't It Now? is absolutely one of them. We've always used analog stuff to some degree. I mean, a microphone is an analog device. We've often gone to tape initially before we mix stuff on almost every record. We've certainly used analog stuff, but I think this was one of the first times I feel like I got to really experience that level of strictly analog approach to things and the quality of the vintage gear like that. Mostly vintage, some newer stuff, but regardless, everything from the microphones to the preamps that we were using, the tape machine that was being hit, using analog effects processing, real plate reverbs, tape delays, all these things. It was undeniable to me, the way that the air vibrated when it came out of the speakers, the way that drums sounded in the room playing back, it just had something amazing to it.

But I have done so many things in the digital realm that I think are also incredible, and so much of my process as a mixer—somewhat by necessity but also by inspiration—is only possible in that realm. I'm pretty plugin-heavy. Sinister Grift was absolutely like that. I process things quite a bit to try to get things to where I want them to sound. For better or for worse, there might be people out there that can hear that and I'd certainly know people that turn their nose up at a certain degree of processing. But to me, it gets me where I want to go and it made Noah incredibly happy, and that was my biggest goal.

So I wouldn't say this is necessarily my analog era. I mean, if money was no object for me, I would have all of these things. I love having toys at my disposal. A friend of mine is letting me use a microphone—the first time I'm conscious of seeing it being used was with Russell at The Bunker in Brooklyn [the studio where Isn’t It Now? was recorded]. It's an RCA R44. It's an old ribbon microphone. You look at jazz singers from the ‘50s and they're singing [on these]. I'll never be able to afford a mic like that. You can find that they're like $10,000. I don't make that kind of money. But my friend has one and he casually kind of let me hang on to it in my studio for a bit. I've had it here working on stuff, and it's an incredible sounding microphone and I'm completely in love with it and I wish I could have it all the time. Any chance I have to kind of have gear like that, I absolutely use it.

But I also am probably not someone that would work primarily in a purely analog realm. Most of the time, I think there's just too many things that I rely on and depend on in the digital realm that are important to me. I think embracing all of it is what gets you the most results, being aware that they're all tools and they'll all get you where you want to go as long as you're focused more on the result you want, than some hardline philosophical ethos.

How was the production side of it, going to Lisbon, being at Noah's home studio? Did you feel like the songs were already there? How did you contribute?

They were in varying stages of being finished. Some of them were pretty fully realized and he had a pretty clear idea of how he wanted to approach them, and others he developed them in the studio. I didn't write any toplines or write any harmonies.

He gave me a pretty large batch of demos of stuff that he had. It was certainly more than ended up on the record. A few of them felt like no-brainers to me, but we had a discussion about which songs to focus on. He had his ideas of what he wanted to work on. For example, he didn't want to do the song that ended up being “Elegy for Noah Lou.” He played me the demo when I was like, Dude, we're definitely doing this song. This one's happening. And he was like, Really? And I was like, Yeah, a hundred percent. If I'm doing this record, we're going to do this song. He felt uncertain about it at first. He had reasons for it feeling like something that he wasn't sure if it was meant to be meaningful to other people or even to himself.

I was very surprised because I haven't actually worked with him in that context in a really long time, even though him and I have made records in Animal Collective. It really had not been since Young Prayer that we had had that kind of relationship with each other, and he gave me a lot of rope is the way that I put it. He really allowed me to guide things. He had given me a palette of worlds that he wanted the record to exist within sonically but allowed me to follow my own nose. A lot of the songs, he really just had a very basic guitar part and a sense of what the rhythm should be.

I went to Lisbon with a lot of pedals. That was one of the main things I brought to Lisbon. I brought a lot of pedals with me. On many of the songs, if not most of them, I would create pedal chains specific to each song and get to a point where like, I think this would be cool if you did this. Of course, he had his own feedback, but in some cases—I think “Elegy” might be one of them—where I think that I was in the studio for a couple hours that morning before he came in and I knew the chords to the song, and I messed around with pedals for a while and got it to a place where I was like, This sounds pretty cool. And he literally walked in and picked up the guitar and was like, Yeah, this sounds awesome. And we tracked it. There was a lot of that kind of stuff.

“Ferry Lady” was something that, before we even started it, I was like, I think this one should be acoustic, like the foundation should be acoustic. The first thing I had him do was double track the guitar part on an acoustic guitar. He did it once. I was like, Cool, we're going to literally do it again. You're going to overdub the exact same thing. I spread them left and right. I would start to do things like that. He just would let me go where we went and that would lead somewhere and, you know, I could obviously tell from him whether he was responding to it or not. I'm sure there were times where things weren't landing, but for the most part, everything that ended up on the record ended up on the record.

Being in Lisbon was a lot of that. It was a lot about figuring out foundational guitar sounds, whether that was electric guitar or acoustic guitar, starting to lay in arrangement details. He had plenty of ideas, I would have ideas. A lot of the songs he wanted to do on a drum kit, but like “Ferry Lady” again is an example where I was like, I think this one should be strictly percussion-based. I don't think we want a kit on this one. Some of that was just me following my own nose. Some of that was—there were many references, but one of the references was stuff like eden ahbez recordings or The Sweet Enoughs, which is a side project of Hiatus Kaiyote. He really loved that record and it kind of has this exotica, kind of tropicalia vibe to it. That was one of the references of many that were kind of floating around for us.

As I said, in the process of tracking, I would immediately start mixing stuff. I'd immediately start throwing a plate reverb on hand claps and compress the drums in a certain way, and just start to get things to a place where it was feeling the way I wanted so we knew what the next thing to do was. We left the tracking sessions with mixes that were already, I think in every case, feeling like what the foundation of the song ended up being. A lot of the things that I did mixing wise during tracking ended up being pretty foundational. I'm trying to remember if there was anywhere we ended up having to rebuild the mix, but I think for the most part we left things feeling the way we wanted them to feel.

Once I got back to Maryland, I got back right before the holidays, so I had January, February, and March. We already knew Noah was going to come to Baltimore in late March to finish the record. I just spent that time in my studio just doing continued production stuff. He did some as well. He had borrowed a Prophet ‘08, I think, from a friend of his [ed. note: the Sinister Grift liner notes refer to a Prophet-6 and a Prophet 12], and started adding in some synth lines to certain things that ended up in there. I tracked my friend Walsh Kunkel who did all the lap steel work on a number of the songs, like “50mg” and “Venom's In,” and another one… I know the record really well [laughs]. I just started doing all that overdub work and that was the time that we were doing the most work.

Brian's involvement with the record, I think even he's kind of unclear about [laughs]. He had made this huge sample pack of sounds that Noah had sort of requested from him prior to even tracking the record. It was meant to be something he was going to use during his demoing and writing process and never really got around to using. When we got to the point where the ideas of the songs musically were already really there, we started digging into this huge, multi-tiered folder of stuff that Brian had made to kind of figure out where these sounds could fit in. So Brian wasn't involved in picking which sounds would go where or what they would do, but they're him. We kind of hear him throughout the record.

I don't remember whose idea it was, but at some point on “Ferry Lady,” we knew there needed to be an additional instrumentation thing and I think Noah flippantly said, Oh, it should be a trumpet. And then I think he forgot that he'd said that. So I ended up messing around with a software synth version of a trumpet and just wrote this trumpet line for the song that I was pretty psyched on. I sent it to Noah half-expecting him to be like, I don't know man, it seems a little much, or something, but he loved it.

It was just a lot of that kind of stuff. Looking for little places where the songs could be sweetened up by any sort of arrangement. Noah had already written a part for “Venom's In” that originally had been a synthesizer part that he'd done on the [Teenage Engineering] OP-1, but he knew always that he was like, I want it to actually be a real lap steel or real pedal steel. It's really sad, I had originally intended to reach out to Susan Alcorn [who passed away in late January]. I had brought her into work on Dave's record Eucalyptus many years ago and done a session with her once, and she's absolutely brilliant. That seemed, at first, like the most obvious choice cause I'd worked with her before. I didn't know her super well, but [she was a] really amazing musician, incredible person.

I was at a show—the place where my studio is also has a show space—and it's a borderline DIY space. There was a show of a couple of musicians that I'm a fan of, and I saw this guy playing with that group that was doing lap steel. I just was like, Oh, this is like a young guy. You know, I'm going to go ask him. I kind of on a whim just went up and was like, Hey man, do you ever do session work? And I always assume people don't know who I am, so I didn't assume anything. Later on, he was like, Dude, I completely know who you are. I was shitting myself. I just on a whim asked him if he'd be up for giving it a shot and brought him into the studio. I cleared it with Noah first. I was like, I feel like this is actually a really cool opportunity, and I think that there's more places than just “Venom's In” to try some lap steel stuff.

I worked with Walsh for like a day. I brought him in and worked on writing parts for “50mg” and “Black & White”—or that's the same one, “50mg.” Anyway, the two other songs that he made it on [“Venom’s In” and “Left in the Cold”].

It's definitely come a long way from that initial performance where it's just bendy guitar and a bit of a beat.

I'm volunteering this, though on some level I shouldn't—it struck me well after we'd finished the record that I had heard that recording once, but I had not fixated on it and it never came up. I didn't think to listen to it prior to working on this record. I know that there are fans of his that have really revered that show specifically, and I've even seen some people initially in responses to some of these mixes go like, Oh man, like I missed that, you know? And it seems like they come around ultimately, but a part of me is like, What would have happened if I had listened to that recording before we started working on stuff? And would I have picked out things and be like, Hey man, I think you had a sound for this one, let's get that back, or something.

I mean, I knew that bendy sound was something that he'd been playing around with and we certainly talked about it. I think we probably even did mess around with a little bit of that kind of stuff in the studio, but I've found on almost every record I've ever worked on, maybe there's exceptions with Animal Collective, but I'd say for the most part, you always go into a recording session with some sort of preconceived idea of what you think you want the record to sound like, or you want the palette to be, or how you think things are going to fit together. I think—I'm sure with exceptions, but I have found often and definitely in this case—it was really important to allow the thing that was trying to come to be without forcing it. There were a lot of ideas that we had that were very, very clear, either on Noah's part or on my part of like, it's definitely going to go in this direction, then we just found ourselves a certain point going, I guess it's not going to go in that direction. We just found something else.

That's the beauty of Animal Collective. I think everything feels like a time capsule—one year it can be sounding completely different, and then the recording might be its own unique thing. I want to touch on OBEX, but really quick—did you want to talk about your gripes with Atmos?

Oh, sure. I don't know what that'll do to my career.

We can keep it brief if you'd like.

The idea of multichannel listening experiences is exciting to me. Obviously, if I was going to a music festival that was some multichannel musique concrète or whatever—there's a lot of ways that multichannel stuff can be really exciting.

I think the way that it's being pushed right now feels very tech-driven and much less music listener-driven, and so I don't kind of trust it from that perspective. I guess I have yet to hear, for myself personally, any earbud mixes of Atmos that sound enjoyable to me. It sounds strange to me. Maybe I'm just old but I don't get it yet.

When I did work on Noah's mixes in Atmos, I chose to embrace it and try to take it as seriously as possible. I was kind of grumpy about it, but I was also really looking—I worked with two different people to get the mixes where they were. One of them is this guy, Ted White, who's in L.A., and he was incredible kind of getting the foundation of things together. Then to finish the mixes, I was back in Baltimore and worked with a guy named Tony Correlli at a studio called Deep End in Maryland here. Both of them technically understood Atmos in a way that I did not. I very much needed to be brought up to speed. If you sat me in front of a computer and told me to mix in Atmos, I would have been lost. It's technically a very different world and there was a lot of things about it initially that I felt very confused as a mixer. How do you get to certain places? Things that I'm very used to doing in a stereo world, I didn't understand how to do in Atmos world.

I won't get too deep in the complications of that, but I found myself in those scenarios in really nice studios, listening back to mixes that I actually would get to a point of going, This actually does sound really good now. Then, and in a few cases, like “Elegy for Noah Lou” or “Left in the Cold” especially, I could even argue that they sound more enjoyable or at least equally enjoyable listening in that environment. It can be pretty spectacular to be surrounded by that much. But at one point in the process of mixing it with Ted in L.A., I was having one of those moments, I was like, Oh, this actually is sounding really good, and I was kind of resentful of how good it sounded. I didn't want to like it. But [Ted] pointed at the left stack of speakers and he's like, Guess how much that stack is worth. And I was like, I have no idea. He was like, That is a $70,000 stack of speakers. I was like, Well, okay, I'm listening to $400,000 worth of speakers right now. Of course, this sounds amazing. Who is ever going to hear it this way? No one's ever going to hear it [like this]. So I'm dubious of the playback for people.

I do know people in my life who are proponents of it, but most of them have the privilege, the luxury, and the income to have dedicated spaces in their homes where they've afforded to be able to get multichannel systems. They had time to tune them up—not $400,000 worth of speakers, but you know, a nice Sonos system and a room that can be dedicated to that. Most people I know don't get a chance to listen to music like that. So if that was all it was, I would be completely fine with that if it was understood to be a very separate thing, but [it’s] the way it's being implemented. As far as I understand at this point, Apple Music is the biggest pusher right now of Spatial Audio. The way that it works is that the default setting deep in the settings of your iPhone is that Atmos is turned on automatically. So if an Atmos mix exists of a piece of music you're listening to, and you are listening through a device that is capable of playing that back—for example, any AirPods or Beats headphones or whatever—if you don't know any better, you'll be hearing the Atmos mix as opposed to the original stereo mix. And I think that's messed up. I know that Tidal, for example, they handle it differently. I think that they're distinct versions of the album, so at least a listener can understand like, Oh, I'm going to listen to the stereo version. I'm going to listen to the Atmos version. What does that mean? And they can at least ask themselves the question.

I find it very devious to have it set up in a way that somebody that doesn't know any better who just happened to buy an iPhone happens to have Apple Music and happens to have AirPods and doesn't even really know what Atmos means, just goes to listen to a record of a band they like and the mix they hear is the Atmos mix. And the reason for that is just that at least up to this point—I think this may start to change—people aren't making records with Atmos in mind. They're making records with stereo in mind. Noah and I spent, collectively, close to two months working on this record to get it to sound the way we want it to sound. Then I spent about a week total working on getting the Atmos mixes together. And it was a compromise because there were things that I had initially done in the mixing that made it difficult to translate directly to Atmos. All the analog juicing that we'd done in the studio I couldn't use for various reasons because things were too funneled down, and I couldn't break it back down to the individual components and spread them in the way that I wanted in the Atmos world. I'd lost all this processing that I'd done to make it sound the way I wanted it to sound, and had to step back quite a bit and figure out how to rebuild it. Even though there were moments where I felt like some of those mixes actually were sounding pretty good, and I was as satisfied as I felt like I was able to, they still felt a bit like they were afterthought compromises.

So I just think I'd feel really differently about it if companies like Apple followed the Tidal model and it was something that people understood as a separate thing. But I feel like it's being a little like wedged down people's throats right now in a way that I just don't trust.

That being said, I embraced the process and I'm trying to understand that this may or may not be something that we have to reckon with as musicians and engineers and producers moving forward, and to at least understand how it works so that I can play with it or reject it for reasons that I am clear about.

Transparency is always key. I appreciate your earnest stance around that. You have done some scores alongside the rest of the members of Animal Collective with Crestone and The Inspection. This time you've gone it alone with OBEX. How do you approach recording and mixing and doing a score for a theater environment, as opposed to an album or a live performance?

I think it's different for each project. I actually don't know if OBEX is the best example to answer that question. The circumstances around it were just particular to the project in some ways.

I'm really proud of it. The filmmaker is a really close friend of mine. I think the movie is really special. The way we ended up—both because of budget and some limitations around trying to hit festival deadlines—we actually ended up doing that score in the same room over the course of about two and a half weeks. I think it was maybe 16 days total or something. It was incredibly fast. I mean, every other score that I've worked on has been months. The Inspection and Crestone we were working on for quite a long time before finishing.

It was a lot of fun, but a lot of the things that I would normally do on a score, I didn't even really have. I didn't really mix actually [laughs]. Albert would come in every morning, plop a peanut butter sandwich down on my desk and a little bag of nuts to tide me over as the day wore on, and we would just open up the movie and start with one cue after the other and be like, What does this need? What does this need? I would sample ideas for him really quickly and he would, in real time, kind of connect with something. Sometimes literally just to get an idea captured, I would go, Okay well, let me just do, there we go. That's that. And he'd be like, Awesome. It's done. Move on. And I'd be like, Well, wait, I want to go back.

It ended up being this thing that in some ways was both really exhilarating and fun for me, but also kind of uncomfortable. What ended up in the movie in many cases is what I would consider the beginning of an idea or the demo of an idea or something, and he, as a filmmaker, chose—and I completely honor this—to see that as part of what made it beautiful, and embracing limitations and embracing what things are.

I'm a diehard perfectionist, to a fault for sure. I'd suffer over things for long periods of time. And like I said, it would be the kind of thing where the majority of these cues would be done in the space of five to 30 minutes and then we'd move on. I never even got a chance to go back and mix them so that they sounded the way that I thought they should sound. So it just literally ended up being demos that he dropped into the movie.

That being said, I think there is some conversation, now that it's premiered at Sundance and going to get some more festival runs and been picked up by Oscilloscope, I think we may reapproach some of that stuff before it actually gets to the DVD and theatrical phase. I think it deserves a little bit of extra attention.

I guess essentially, I wasn't able to answer any of the questions you actually asked me for this particular one ‘cause I think it was a different process. But I'd say the thing that really feels very different from working on music that I'm making either for myself as a solo musician or for the band—and I guess I feel similarly when I'm engineering or producing a record for someone else—I was very, very aware that the process is much more in service to something else than about my own voice.

I discovered that working on Crestone, which was the first film that Brian and I scored together, it was really clear to me how I felt in my body doing it and how important it was to sort of let go of any sort of ego I might have about like what my voice is. Still my style, I still have my own particular ways of doing things, I still have the ways I want to lean, and people are asking me to do it because they like something about what I do, but for the most part, I'm really conscious of serving an image and serving a director and their desire. Which I think is really freeing in a way. One of the reasons I enjoy doing it—I wouldn't want to do it a hundred percent of the time—it's a nice way to fill in gaps where I'm not doing other stuff. I kind of get to let go of the part of me that is like, I got it. This song has to mean what I want it to mean.

Did it feel different working on the score with the filmmaker, instead of with Brian, with Dave, with Noah?

Yeah. We're even in discussion of me asking him to—encouraging him to re-credit it to be that it's a score we did together. There actually are a couple of cues in it that he actually ended up doing completely on his own. That was just music that he had made in his own space that he was attached to. Even the stuff that we did while in the same room, there were a number of instances where it was like I had an instinct for like the right keyboard sound or something and like a certain type of melody, and he would respond to it really well, but then he'd start being like, Oh, but can you change that? He was so involved in the process, and I think maybe even maybe more so than any score I've worked on yet. There were definitely elements of it that felt like even more leaning towards like this isn't something I would normally do.

I think working on Crestone, that score is something we were in service to the director and the movie to do it, but it felt very much like something that Brian and I generated completely of like our own kind of style and what we want. And I think this one was like, Oh, there's style points I need to hit that are important for the storytelling that aren't really so much about it sounding like a guy from Animal Collective. This is what this needs right here.

I don't remember if I'm getting it right, but I think the theme to Twin Peaks came up the same way. Lynch was in the room with Badalamenti and was just kind of like [in a mild David Lynch impression], “No, no, that's it. That's it right there.” It had that kind of feeling to it, which was really fun. I don't think it would work with every director, but in Albert's case, it was just a lot of fun and felt very kind of collaborative and joyous in that way.

How was being at Sundance seeing it premiere?

It was great. I'm really proud of him and the whole crew that made that movie. It was exciting to be there. I don't spend a lot of time in the film world. It's kind of new to me. The last we had gone there to, that's where we premiered ODDSAC in 2010. So I had been to Sundance then and been to a couple other film festivals for other projects we've worked on, but this was the first time going to a film festival feeling really conscious of myself as a composer for screen and film.

I tried to embrace, though it was a little bit against my nature, the idea that like it made sense to walk up to directors of movies that I was watching and tell them how much I liked their work and get into conversation about things. It was kind of a cool and interesting professional experience, for lack of a better word. The world of music doesn't work that way to me. It's not really so much about to me like networking—that's a dirty word to me—but I think in the world of film, it actually makes a lot of sense. People are kind of constantly looking for the connections that they can make to be like, Oh, you should meet this person ‘cause this thing might happen from that and there's so much of that happening. So it was a little scary and new to me, but it was part of what the experience was as well. It felt exciting.

It makes sense. I guess film is a lot more moving pieces of huge casts and crews.

Yeah, I don't understand people do it. I can make a record in my bedroom if I wanted to, but to make even a low budget film, you have to raise so much money and get so many people to be on board with it. It's wild to me that people persist doing it, but quite scary.

Are there any more festival dates that you might be attending?

I don't think anything has been solidified yet. I think, probably just due to the budget of the film, unless something is kind of relatively close by, like East Coast—I think there might be some festivals in New York that they're trying to get into—but at the moment there's nothing on the books that I'm aware of. I'm not even sure if they've gotten any further, I haven't checked in with them in a minute, so it's possible. I'm sure they'll come up. But I have a feeling if it's like Berlin or whatever that I probably, just because of the budget of the crew or the production…

Scores are low on the list. It's been interesting, part of scoring films is to realize very rarely does the score get mentioned. It's like not part of it. You're not really part of the crew. It's kind of funny.

Before we wrap up, do you have anything down the pipeline for this year?

I'm working on a record actually, as we speak for a friend of mine, a really amazing musician. His musical project is called Herald. A record of his came out last year on a very small local label in Scotland [Errol’s Hot Wax], but that record and a contract for this next record got picked up by a label called What's Your Rupture? that's based out of New York, that is coincidentally a very old friend of mine. I'm working on that record right now which I'm excited about.

I am planning on recording my own solo record at some point this year. I've been suffering over a lot of music around it for a long time but it's well overdue.

I feel profoundly driven to get my friend Doug Shaw back in the studio to finish a record that we started two years ago. He's sort of the inspiration behind the record that Brian put out [A Shaw Deal], and technically Doug is on it in a very manipulated way. Doug is an incredible acoustic guitar player and singer-songwriter, along with many other things, and an incredibly dear friend. We started working on recording a record down here in Baltimore in the winter of 2022 I think, or maybe the winter of 2023, and we just didn't get a chance to finish it. He had some life stuff come up over the last year with family that made it difficult to follow through with the project, but it's deeply important to me and I think it's deeply important to him. So that's something that's going to get some energy this year.

I hope that there's more records of other people to work on. I really like doing that at this point. I've done a bunch of Dave's records, and the Tickley Feather record that I made a handful of years back that I'm really proud of and I think is really great. I'm hoping to get more stuff like that, but you know, it comes as it comes. I think that's kind of it. I'm sure some more scores, solo stuff, the Herald record, somebody else's record. We'll see.

---

Sinister Grift is out now via Domino Recording Co. OBEX is out later this year via Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Follow Deakin on Instagram (@deakin_joshmin).