Animal Collective’s Oddsac — Odd Indeed

The line of pasty pot-smoking hipsters peeled up, down and around the corner at the Sundance Kabuki last night. The 45ish minute “visual album,” which took over four years to produce, was a conceived collaboration by director Danny Perez and members of Animal Collective, intended as a new platform for music enthusiasts. It succeeded in being the most bizarre, old-school horror film-inspired short flick with one of the best soundtracks.

Surprisingly — and intentionally — the raw, organic and unplanned film sequencing was blended and created at the same time as audio, thus surviving the chicken or the egg concept of which came first, the music or the visuals? Genius director Danny Perez of Animal Collective at Guggenheim fame played with themes of emotional purging and sensationalizing the space on the cusp between terror and humor. The result: tripped out visuals, layered video sequences, fire dancers, marshmallow freak-out sessions, forest zombies, montages of melting faces, vampires spewing red steam and blue blood… well, you get the point. The name itself, Oddsac, has no meaning or significance at all, and was apparently inspired by names of “messed up packs of gummy candies.” This thoroughly disappointed the overly-analytical music snobs in the room. Essentially, Oddsac is the power blend of a bunch of dudes on acid with great studio access and incredible film editing talent. Unfortunately, the tracks will never be released apart from the film (as per Avey Tare), so don’t expect to be jamming to the soundtrack on your iPod anytime soon.

But, the show didn’t stop there. Those brave enough to participate in the question/answer session afterward raised hands, and took turns asking the same harebrained film-nerd questions to the intelligent, but awkward likes of Danny Perez, Avey Tare, Deakin and Geologist. Pretty much the only useful information taken from the session (besides that Avey Tare would name his child Turbo given the dumb choices provided by an audience member), was that Danny Perez is currently working on visuals for Panda Bear (insert loud crowd cheering). So to that effect, big ups to the geniuses behind the scenes. I mean who else could hypnotize, confuse, scare and make you laugh all in under an hour like this delightful combo? Look for the DVD due out in early summer.