Animal Collective mastermind Panda Bear has spoken about his guitar heavy new album 'Tomboy'.
With his album 'Person Pitch' Panda Bear discovered a new way of writing music. Tossing aside his acoustic guitar, the songwriter began to use a sampler to layer bizarre yet melancholic new sounds.
The results have been massively influential. Helping to spark the wave of bedroom producers who would shape the invented genre 'chillwave' Panda Bear went on to guide Animal Collective's seminal album 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'.
Now the songwriter could be set to change direction again. Panda Bear is planning to release his new album 'Tomboy' later this year, which he claims will strip back the sampling and re-introduce elements of guitar.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Panda Bear explained that he began to find samplers constricting. "I think I just hadn’t done it in a while, so I thought it might force me to write different types of songs, and it did. But using the samplers and strictly electronic means to write songs, I just started to feel like I was writing the same song over and over again."
Continuing, Panda Bear revealed that he was already anticipating a change of direction during the recording of 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'. "I was definitely thinking about it. Even when we were recording the Merriweather stuff, I was already kind of considering songs, parts of songs" he said.
"I would just kind of jam on the guitar, singing sometimes, before I even started writing songs, kind of just seeing if I could come up with little parts here and there – really kind of like scrapbook style. And then when I really started sitting down to write songs, I would often go through these little pages of stuff to see if there were little parts in any of those things that I thought I could make a song out of. It was a long process, it was a long road."
Panda Bear is set to release his new album 'Tomboy' in April.