• ODDSAC

Last night brought two audio-visual psych-outs to Seattle: Animal Collective's new "visual album" with director Danny Perez, ODDSAC, and Black Moth Super Rainbow head Tobacco's live electronics act, featuring by visuals compiled by montage alchemist (tv shit into video gold) TV Carnage. Both were hallucinatory and funny and freaky, both showcased ace electronic music, but they were two very different events.

Before the 9pm showing of ODDSAC, young folks milled around in the cold outside the theater; one guy offered to sell us acid. Inside, the theater felt a little like it had been taken over, like a particularly culty midnight movie. One of the film's producers provided an introduction and then handed the mic over to Perez, who proceeded to expound on the film in an epic, almost totally unintelligible mumble while gesturing vaguely at the Egyptian's awesome interior design features.

Then, the film: It began with a sequence cutting between some fire dancers (and a costumed guy strumming an autoharp) out in the woods and a girl inside a house smearing black ooze all over a white, patterned wall—at one point, the girl's fingers traced white lines the black ooze that almost perfectly mirrored the white trails made in the dark by the fire dancers. It was probably the most artful juxtaposition of the whole film. Next, we see a very David Lynhcian dude—face caked with fake age, draped in red cloth, mouth moving but only emitting weird, backwards-masked, asynchronous speech. There's an abstract sequence in which a white background fills with blue and pink squiggles that slowly go black and white and begin to resemble a swarm of bats (your Rorschach results may vary here). Then, a guy whose head seems made entirely of long hair drags a drum kit piece by piece out into an expansive rocky clearing in the woods then starts banging out a loud, simple beat. (If a drum solo happens in the forest, and nobody's there to hear it, does it really rock?)

Next, we see a family of campers gathered around a campfire while a nosferatu-style vampire (played by Deakin) stalks around in the darkness. The family's roasting marshmallows, and as they eat them, pointing the sticks into their mouths, we sense things are about to get sinister. Indeed, this is the film's most inspired no-budget horror segment—Susperia bad-trip gore by way of "chubby bunny." The film ends with four women in a house staged as if for a cooking show with a red-faced, white-haired humanoid hovering over them; as the women crack eggs into a bowl and handle flour, the red-faced thing yells at them, and the scene quickly devolves, first into sinister anxiety and then into an ecstatically silly food fight.

Overall, there's a lot of textural action here—ooze is weird, water is weird, hair is weird, etc—and an emphasis on effects. Things are playfully gorey at points, there's barely a trace of sexuality here—this is essentially a g-rated psychedelic horror film. And while you could draw parallels to Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle—AnCo and Perez recently staged a "happening" at the Guggenheim, a Cremaster set piece, although the event doesn't feature in the film—but by all accounts ODDSAC is both less odd and less concerned with sacs than Barney's work. Lynch is probably a better reference point, not only for the Twin Peaks move of mining psychic, pesudo-mythic terror from the woods, but also for the film's use of sudden loud sounds and fast strobing cuts to induce almost physiological responses.

As for the music, the biggest surprise for me was that there were a couple genuine, latter-period Animal Collective pop songs mixed in with the all the (equally satisfying, but of a different need) ambient drones, tribal ryhtmic loops, found sounds, and synthesizer oscillations (everything could've benefited from some more bass response in the Egyptian's sound system). They felt like maybe great sketches for future songs, and I could see them working their way onto the next Animal Collective album—except, that feeling was kind of dashed by the post-screening Q&A.

On hand to talk about the film were Deakin (who's performing tonight at Neumos), Avey Tare, and Geologist, as well as Perez. Asked about his inspirations and aims for the film, Perez continued to mumble admirably, but I was able make out something about "the juxtaposition horror and bliss," which he illustrated with an anecdote about watching Sex and the City on a turbulent airplane before trailing off, "...just generally outside of the box I guess" He estimated the film's budget at $65,000-70,000, and when asked if there was anything he'd wanted to do that they weren't able to pull off, he said, yeah, there was lots of stuff, including a scene he'd envisioned of "teenagers in a car crash, in a limo, with girls flailing everywhere" that he'd hoped would be "like Mulholland Drive." (Some folks who didn't like the "visual album" complained to me that it felt like $65,000 worth of an art school film.)

The guys from Animal Collective had more concrete, and potentially sobering insights: They have no plan to release any of this music apart from ODDSAC, although "some melodies may work their way into live sets"; Deakin is still part of the band and was never considered to have left; they have no definitive plans to record another Animal Collective album.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this to non-AC fans, but I'm definitely glad I saw it, even though I don't imagine wanting to watch it again anytime too soon. I do kind of wish I'd taken something stronger than beer ahead of time, though, as I think the film would've handsomely rewarded some actual psychedelics (maybe Kirby can let us know?).

After all that, my energy was a bit low for Tobacco, although the set sounded great—vocoders floating over a thick, dirty bass beat, the mid-range kind of hollowed out, synths squealing in the periphery. I mentioned it in my review of Tobacco's set at SXSW, but Truckasauras has gotta be a little bit hurt to see this dude touring their aesthetic set-up to a national audience, from the wonky analog instrumentals right down to the trucker hat and old pro-wrestling footage. I still say they ought to team up somehow.