Noah Lennox is feeling old. Though he still looks boyish, the American musician who performs as a member of Animal Collective and solo under the name Panda Bear, has recently turned 40. And never does he feel it more than when he hits the hardwood.
“In high-school, basketball was always my thing,” Lennox says from his home in Lisbon, where he has lived since 2004. “[But] whenever I try and play these days, I realise how much the success of my game was predicated on quickness … I had a real drive-and-kick game. It relied a lot on my speed and my jumping, those were my best attributes. But all that is gone, now. I’m an old guy.”
Panda Bear.Credit:Hugo Oliveira
Lennox sees comparisons between how he felt before high-school basketball games, and how he feels when performing solo. “I’d be really nervous before games, but once we started playing, I wasn’t nervous at all,” he recounts. “There’s an intense focus, one that’s so intense it trumps any other thoughts, or nerves, or anxieties. It’s the same with shows. I get really nervous before a performance, but when I’m actually playing, I’m just focused on that.”
Lennox will finally be touring Australia for the first time as Panda Bear, 11 years after releasing his classic record, Person Pitch. He’ll be performing before, and playing material from, his sixth Panda Bear album, Buoys, which is due for release in February.
Lennox sees Buoys as a logical successor to his 2018 EP A Day With The Homies. But, after the darkness and conflict of his past two albums — 2011’s “desperate and conflicted-sounding” Tomboy and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper — listeners will see more that connects it back to Person Pitch: its warm and summery sound, its acoustic elements and vocal harmonies, and the presence of collaborator/producer Rusty Santos.
“When I wrote the songs, they came super-quickly, much swifter than normal. I wrote them all in about two months,” Lennox says. “At first they were guitar songs, with a really basic drum-machine foundation. Once I started working with my friend Rusty, with whom I made Person Pitch, he was extremely influential in the way the album actually came out. We started experience with a lot of 808 sub-bass, it became like a really elemental part of the sound, became this real sub-bass record. That was never my intention when I set out, but once we found that road, we kept going down there.”
Buoys clocks in at 31 minutes, just two minutes longer than the EP that preceded it. It’s a length its maker feels is in keeping with an era of short-attention-spans, be those of the young, or the ageing baller. “At this point, asking people to listen to an hour’s worth of music seems like a tall order,” Lennox says. “Personally, I find that around 30 minutes is about when my mind starts to wander with an album.”
Buoys is out February 8. Panda Bear plays at the Meredith Music Festival, December 7-10; Melbourne Recital Centre on Thursday, December 13; and Sydney Opera House on Sunday, December 16.
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