The last time the world heard from Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, he was in the company of Pete Kember, better known as Sonic Boom, co-founder of Spacemen 3 – the latest in a string of musical left-turns that have made Lennox the most prolific and intriguing member of Animal Collective. Solo, he has variously spawned an entire sub-genre more or less singlehanded (the sample-heavy sound of his acclaimed 2007 album Person Pitch effectively gave birth to chillwave), collaborated with Daft Punk, Solange, Paramore and Jamie xx, commissioned dub albums from On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood, and dabbled in a stark acoustic sound on 2019’s Buoys.
Lennox and Kember’s collaborative album, Reset, united two generations of psychedelic experimentalists in a charmingly playful musical dialogue. Among its delights was a track called Whirlpool. It sounded beatific and blissed-out, but on closer examination seemed to depict a failing relationship: Lennox later confirmed that his marriage to fashion designer Fernanda Pereira – who directed the videos that accompanied Reset – had collapsed.
