Panda Bear Shares Trippy ‘Boys Latin’ Animated Video
D’Angelo wasn’t the only artist dropping new music after midnight Sunday: Animal Collective’s Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox premiered his music video for “Boys Latin” – like Too Many Cooks – in a late night Adult Swim block. In the hypnotic, trippy animated clip, we watch as a young woman embarks on a spiritual awakening after being sucked in by a sea anemone.
Rolling Stone recently spoke to Panda Bear about how psychedelic music has seeped into his latest LP Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, out January 13th.
“I’m not a psychedelic warrior by any means, but that’s an element of music that I find to be very psychedelic: when everything mixes in weird ways and you can’t tell what’s what,” said Panda Bear. “That’s when quasi-magical stuff starts to happen; when things start tricking my ear and my brain. One of my favorite questions is asking people how they define psychedelic music. For me, it has something to do with things tricking your ear, when things are more than the sum of their parts. I feel like that’s the target always with my music, the psychedelic sweet spot.”
Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper producer Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember stopped by the Animal Collective fan page Collected Animals’ message board after “Boys Latin” premiered to shed some more light on the video. “The anemone is the agent of change,” Sonic Boom writes. “The figures in the video touch the anemone to begin the process of transformation. So in the context of the album the anemone represents the reaper.”
Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch from Encyclopedia Pictura, a San Francisco studio that previously worked on Grizzly Bear’s “Knife” clip, directed the “Boys Latin” video. “We tried hard to bring out the vibe of that alternating melody that Noah is singing. We wondered what that should look and feel like from a synesthesia perspective,” Saxon said in a statement. “We’ve always believed that shapes and forms themselves have emotional meaning. For example, round things are often cute and non-threatening, while spiky things usually seem dangerous. We ran with that idea by creating these dynamic forms that grow out of our characters as they deal with their emotions.”