For whatever reason, I still find Merriweather Post Pavilion really hit-or-miss. Miss the weird shit, I guess. As such, I tend to revert back to Danse Manitee for my Animal Collective fix, as well as their many side projects that had varying degrees of interest. One of the more overlooked releases was the record cut between Panda Bear and his best bro Scott Mou. The project was dubbed Jane. Scott and Noah worked at New York’s Other Music and recorded music together at the former’s apartment. They released a couple of albums, but Berserker was the only one with any distribution (since it jumped on the Paw Tracks catalog, obviously).
Berserker was released in the spring of 2005, between Noah’s Young Prayer and Person Pitch. You certainly hear some embryonic forms of what was to come – warped ambient textures over fractured, booty bass heavy beats. Jane resembles an almost primordial Person Pitch… on lots of psychedelics. Mou was a professional club DJ at the time, and they both considered Jane to be a “dance” project, as indicated on Noah’s description of Bersker via Paw Tracks:
We both really liked dance music and dance music from the very beginning and I mean stomps and shouts and claps and stuff like that. Of course we like all kinds of other stuff too, but it’s the dance that gets us going on Jane. We played once at the Animal Collective practice space, but found it much more pleasant to play at Scotty’s home in Greenpoint where he had his mixer and simple microphones and we would drink brews and talk about all kinds of things and then play. I would usually sing about stuff I was thinking about that day and Scotty would move with it, playing jams and it would all kind of pour out. We liked all the mechanical robo dance jams from Detroit and Chicago and Germany but we wanted to do something with less 0’s and 1’s and more souls.
Despite what he says, I would invite you to try to boogie down to this record. Take video and send it to kb [at] thedecibeltolls [dot] com so I can lol, por favor. But then again, I suppose “Slipping Away” does start to get pretty funky past the six-minute mark.
Anyway, Berserker isn’t for everyone, but if you slept on this release and/or miss the odd electronic explorations of Animal Collective’s pre-Sung Tongs material, the songs below are not to be missed. Moreover, it’s interesting to hear this album in relation to Panda Bear’s musical trajectory, especially since it was recorded during the transition between the acoustic-friendly Young Prayer/Sung Tongs era and the sample-saturated, dub-informed Person Pitch/Strawberry Jam period. In retrospect, it seems that Mou had a greater influence on Noah than anyone gives him credit for.
Jane’s Berserker is available through Paw Tracks. You should buy it so you can enjoy the Grateful Dead skulls on the back over.
Awesome.
For fans of: Aphex Twin, Odd Nosdam, Tim Hecker
MP3 :::
Jane – Slipping Away
Jane – Berserker
