Panda Bear Can Be Counted on for Psychedelia

Today, Panda Bear, the solo project of Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox, released a new video by  prolific video artist Danny Perez. Lennox tapped the trusted Animal Collective favorite Danny Perez to design the dizzying accompaniment for the track. Expectations were high after Perez and Animal Collective’s collaborative Guggenheim installation project last year.

The psychedelic vignette begins with a cloudy, over-saturated galactal scene, followed by a sequence of kaleidoscopic tableaus, reminding even the philistines among us of color and texture’s ability to inspire and disturb. Lennox’s earnest, melodic chants and rhapsodic percussion provide the background. Challenging our retina agility (and epileptic threshold!), astronomical time lapses are quickly interrupted by saturated blotches and strings of colored lights that fold and bleed into one another, with colors and shapes reconfigured into different representations throughout. Visuals are intermittently backed by live-action clips of first a woman’s mouth, followed rather jarringly by that of a dog. Fittingly for a song titled “You Can Count on Me,” the video ends with a close up on man’s best friend. 

Perez and Panda Bear manage to narrativize the video even without relying on intelligible words or images. The marriage between Perez’s visuals and Lennox’s sound one you can count on is a successful one.