Avey Tare Talks Pullhair Rubeye, Animal Collective

One fateful night in December 2006, Avey Tare and Kría Brekkan decided to do something crazy. They had just seen David Lynch's three-hour mindfuck Inland Empire and found themselves holed up in a New York apartment after a blizzard foiled holiday travel plans. They had a reel of new recordings lying around. An air of whimsy had descended on the evening. And what happened next just might blow your feeble mind.
They decided to play their recordings...backwards.
Okay, so not exactly revolutionary. Still, not many musicians take backwards recordings a step further. Not many make a whole album out of them. Indeed, those backwards versions have become Pullhair Rubeye, Avey and Kría's previously reported Paw Tracks debut that has the message boards abuzz-- nevermind that it doesn't technically come out until April 24. (This is the age of internet, after all.) Most of the discussion, meanwhile, can be summarized with a single question: Is this a joke?
According to Avey Tare, it's no such thing. "There's not really anything behind it or anything," he told Pitchfork recently. "We're not trying to mess around with peoples' heads or play a prank or anything like that."
In fact, Avey Tare (known to the IRS as David Portner) and Kría Brekkan (known to rock journalists as former Múm member Kristin Anna Valtysdóttir) happen to like the backwards versions.
"We just got really into it, and decided to focus on that as a release."
Avey is ready for the obvious rebuke to his and Kría's approach. "I think some people would criticize and say, 'You could flip around any music'-- like a Garth Brooks record, and you know, it's just going to sound like Garth Brooks backwards, or equally as crappy or whatever.
"But I think to us, the songs have a looser, organic feel anyway that doesn't have a lot of A-B-A-B structure. So in a way it does work backwards, just because it doesn't lock into...these tight drum sounds or tight guitar chords."
Plus there's an enticing element of fate at work. "That's [part] of why we liked [it] backwards, because it's almost something we didn't have a hand in, in a way. It's this music that was just there without us planning out so much, kind of this freeform thing that was happening. So that was appealing."
Avey understands fan's gripes, which he recently responded to on the Animal Collective message board. "We realize there's kind of been a little disappointment [among] the Animal Collective fanbase because people know a lot of the songs," Avey told Pitchfork. "They've seen them played live or [heard] bootlegs, and we think it's sweet that people like the songs enough to make a stink about it a little bit."
According to Tare, it helps to consider the reversed tunes in a vaccum. "We don't even really see [them] as being related to the forwards versions of the songs. We were able to totally detach ourselves from the songs forwards, and I think most people that are hearing the record are just wondering about the songs the other way...and so they're seeing it as this release that's double-sided, whereas for us the backwards version is just something in itself."
Keeping with that logic, Avey and Kría concocted new titles for the reversed songs, often drawing words and phrases from the phonetic goulash. Check out "Sis Around the Sándmill" over in Forkcast; the titular phrase leaps out as though it were intended.
Avey and Kría did manipulate the recordings a bit to a achieve a particular sound. "There's a few instrumental ones we thought had a more electronic feel [when played backwards]. They're just guitars but we liked how they didn't sound like guitars, [but] had this warm, electronic feel-- so we made them faster."
Yes, Avey has considered releasing the songs in their original versions-- indeed, the way he intended to release them before that December night-- but "it's hard to say now that this record can be played forward and backward basically by anybody on a computer. It kind of pushes us to want to do a different sort of release."
Recreating the album to some degree live is also a possibility. "That's definitely one thing we talked about as soon as we started listening to it. We thought, 'Oh, it would be really interesting to try and play these,'" said Avey.
"You know, in some ways it would be impossible or almost ridiculous to try, especially vocal-wise, but I think sonically it would be nice to somehow incorporate that kind of thing into a live performance," Tare stated, adding, with a laugh, "if people actually want to hear those versions of the songs!"
Before any of that, however, Domino-signed Animal Collective have their previously reported spring tour lined up-- and they've just finished recording their new album, the follow-up to 2005's Feels: "We recorded 13 songs," Tare revealed, "but we haven't mixed them yet...so we haven't really decided what songs are going on the record." Likely candidates include live favorite "Cuckoo Cuckoo" and "Peace Bone".
Sonically, Avey Tare likens the band's new recordings to the recent performances. "Anybody that's seen us play live lately...should expect to kind of hear something similar to that. We've tried to stay pretty true to how we've been playing the songs live." Hear the new jams beginning May 14 in Columbus, Ohio.