Avey Tare searches for transcendence with 7s

By Stephen Smynuik

Anyone who’s ever been can attest, no two Animal Collective shows are ever the same. But at its best, the music is delirious and melodic, chaotic, and communal (the audience as much a part of this ritual), everything pulsing with strange electronic rhythms and the reverberated yelps of Avey Tare.

It’s weird, exhilarating stuff—and exactly what Tare, aka Dave Portner, has always had in mind. From the very beginning, his M.O. has been exploring new routes in the music, finding new ways to express himself, depending on his mood, the vibe in the room, or the feeling of notes on any particular night.

“I’d like somebody in the audience to feel like they’re exploring with me,” Portner says, speaking from his home in Asheville, North Carolina. “Like there’s some kind of journey happening,” “I always wanted a live performance to be this happening, going back to the old acid tests. That kind of thing. I do like improvised music quite a bit, and I think there’s something you can only get out of an improvised music set—some kind of feeling that you can’t get with somebody recreating a record note for note.”

Portner has set out on his first solo tour in four years, and it’s literally a solo tour—just him and his rig. It’s a “nerve-racking” approach, he admits, in part because he hasn’t done it enough. He’s performing songs from his latest album, 7s, as well as older solo material, finding the space between “jammier moments and more straight up moments.”

“I’m trying to figure out ways for it to feel organic, because that’s important for me: having fun on stage and keeping it interesting and having it feel like it’s not this set thing that’s always the same way,” he says.

Fan responses on the Animal Collective subreddit to the first run of shows of the tour back this up, with some noting that the old transportive approach is alive and well, even without the rest of the Animal Collective in tow. And in some ways, the live experience feels like an extension of 7s’ recording, which itself was a response to the isolation Portner experienced during the pandemic, particularly while recording AnCo’s lauded 2022 album, Time Skiffs

“I just needed to get out of my home studio,” he says. “Being alone, when you’re used to collaborating a lot with people and making records that way— when that’s all taken away from you and you’re just alone with your thoughts [through] this pandemic thing… it just got to be a little much.”

Portner set out to record at the studio that a close friend, Adam McDaniel, had built. The writing process had technically begun in 2019, when he wrote “Hey Bog.” There was something about that tune in particular that he felt needed to be at the centre of this new project, so he wrote the other tracks around it, with “Hey Bog” serving as the album’s centrepiece and emotional core.

“7s was… so spontaneous that in some ways, it didn’t matter to me if everything was in the same world. I just felt good about

[“Hey Bog”], so it was a matter of just constructing a record around that idea.”

Each song inhabits its own universe, skipping from the breezy refracted pop of the album opener “Invisible Darlings” to the squelching ear-wormy head-trip “Neurons.” There’s a weightlessness to 7s, riding cosmic vibes most commonly associated with Portner’s AnCo bandmate Panda Bear—and feels like the flip side of his 2022 collaborative album with Sonic Boom, Reset

It’s this trifecta of albums (which includes 7s), in fact, that has marked what some consider a renaissance of sorts for Animal Collective in the post-pandemic era. Gone are the fickle experimentations of the ’10s AnCo, which seemed to push as far as possible from their most critically and commercially successful work, 2009’s seminal Merriweather Post Pavilion Instead, the band seems to have settled into a comfy middle age, embracing the experimental pop of past records without ever sounding like retread.

That’s the critical assessment, anyway. Portner sees it differently.

“Time Skiffs was just me marking time,” he reveals. “I felt like I had a good record there, and was excited to put it out. And I feel like it also ended an era for me of where I’m at creatively, and just is allowing me to move on and away from that. It’s weird when somebody just takes one record as, like, ‘Now they’re back!’ I’m very appreciative of all the love that Time Skiffs has gotten, but I also feel like a lot of people felt like maybe an older Animal Collective was back.”

Portner says new Animal Collective music will be released at some point this year, though he can’t say how much or in what format. But as always—like everything he’s ever done—it’s a mere milepost, a stopover, until whatever comes next. Wherever that is, he’ll see you there. GS