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Brian Weitz (left) and David Portner playing live at the Forum in Melbourne in 2009. (© Kirsty Umback/Corbis)

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Residing in the indie populace for the better part of a decade, Animal Collective finally broke through last year with their critically-acclaimed record Merriweather Post Pavilion, which beautifully blended a collage of sampled sounds with classic songwriting.

The band's projects feature contributions from David Portner (AKA Avey Tare), Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), Brian Weitz (Geologist) and Josh Dibb (Deakin), and Future Music caught up with David, Noah and Brian to find out how they operate.

How did you start making music together?

David Portner: "Brian [Weitz] and I had a band and we asked Josh [Dibb] to join us. We'd just pick different styles that we really like and think 'let's record a song like this'."

What were you using to record at the time?

DP: "I had a Tascam 48 half-inch reel-to-reel which I still use now actually, it's an awesome machine. Josh had an eight-track ADAT and Noah and Josh soundproofed a room at Josh's mom's house. We didn't really have good mics, just SM57s that we used for everything."

Brian Weitz: "And with the soundproofing, we didn't really know what we were doing either. You'd just walk in and it'd literally be a dead sound. You couldn't really record anything in there. We still use it now though for practicing sometimes."

DP: "After that, Brian and I both went to New York for college, and we talked a lot about stuff that we wanted to do. Sometimes we'd do some music concréte shows. Noah and I would keep writing emails about what we wanted to do, musically, and I think that's when we got the idea that we wanted to start our own label. We used to record everything on a MiniDisc player with a Sony ECM mic."

What was the set-up for those recordings?

BW: "It didn't really matter that much - it was often just one mic in the middle of the room."

DP: "We had a Yamaha DX27, some acoustic guitars and a lot of plates."

BW: "We had a [Roland] Juno-60 and a [Roland] SH-2 too, which we still use."

DP: "For us, the gear isn't that important. We just look for things that are easy for us to use and express our personalities through and that don't take a long time to figure out and that you can use organically. We took it from there to the live setting, as we didn't really wanna use a computer on stage."

Why's that?

DP: "Growing up, going to see shows - I mean there are plenty of people who do it well and it's cool for a certain type of music - but for us and for our music we just didn't want to rely on a computer to generate sequences on stage."

BW: "We're still playing our samplers like they're live instruments. Even the most interactive software for live performance still don't seem quick enough to organically interact with the energy of the crowd. If there's any reason that the music needs to change suddenly because of the lights or whatever, the laptop still isn't quick enough."

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