Hide and Seek: A Neighborhood Walk with @aveytare_voiceofthefly...

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Hide and Seek: A Neighborhood Walk with @aveytare_voiceofthefly of Animal Collective

To see more of Dave’s cryptic visuals, follow him on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music.

When Dave Portner (@aveytare_voiceofthefly) leads an informal tour of his neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he’s lived for the past three years, he bypasses more conventional landmarks like the Griffith Observatory and Guisados Tacos. Instead, he steers us down an alley that seems unremarkable until a parrot beneath a nearby tree squawks and a cluster of low-hanging, feathery branches suddenly part to reveal a glimmering vista of the city’s downtown.

“I’ve always really liked hidden things, the thing that looks like something more is going on within it,” says the 36-year-old musician better known as Animal Collective’s Avey Tare. “With Animal Collective, we wanted to insert that into our music — mystery, some stuff you might have to listen to more than once to really put your finger on. Not being about the most obvious thing.”

That’s an understatement. In 2000, the experimental group released its singular, freak-fairy tale debut, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. Ever since, they’ve been tucking Easter eggs into their albums, much to the delight of their obsessive fan base. To date, the quartet has nine records, a visual album titled ODDSAC and a long list of starred reviews and raves.

Almost as weird and stunning as the music are the tripped-out photos and videos Dave shoots on his own — partially obscured objects and animals, torn posters and subdued nature shots. The same cryptic quality makes its way into the non-Animal Collective work too, with his newly formed group Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks. Their video “Little Fang,” directed by Dave’s sister Abby Portner, features a puppet from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop careening through the hills and ending up in a carnival funhouse. An avid reader of both Stephen King and Choose Your Own Adventure books, it’s the stuff Dave’s childhood dreams were made of.

Wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, khaki slacks, Merrell hiking shoes (“They’re good for my ankle”) and a little scruff, Dave’s style today is a pleasant mix of granola and day-off dad. He’s soft-spoken, open and likable, especially when he tells a story about a recent DJing misfire or stops mid-sentence to point out houses he’s particularly taken with. He nods toward a stately old Victorian that’s boarded up. “When we were growing up, stuff like this was amazing,” he says.

As a child, Dave lived in Baltimore, but he often went to see his cousins who lived on a wide swath of land in northern Maryland. Most of their entertainment came from playing hide and seek (“You really feel like you have to figure something out, and in the end, know”) and roaming into the woods, making up games and using their imaginations to transform the scenery. The effect on Dave was lasting.

“We drove across the country when we were really young, and you realize how the landscape changes so quickly,” he says. “You see a whole different side of things. It changed my way of perceiving. Especially ‘cause listening to music and taking in landscape has always been important to us.”

Three years in, it’s hard for Dave to deny the influence of Los Angeles’ cloudless skies and eternal summer on his songwriting. Of the cheesy horror movies he loved as a kid, many were shot in another of Dave’s favorite Los Angeles enclaves, Pasadena. With its homage to those films, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks feels like it couldn’t have been created anywhere but L.A. And a very specific carefree, druggy but sunshine-y quality imbues songs like “Strange Colores.” It’s no surprise that a review compared the group’s debut album to L.A.’s own Jane’s Addiction.

But that spirit is also a reflection of Dave’s own state of mind these days. After going through a divorce a few years ago and dealing with persistent sickness in 2013, he says the past two years are the most grounded he’s been in a long time. Yes, he’s working on a new Animal Collective record, but he also hikes, gardens, swims laps and plays with his two cats. And he takes walks, listening not to an iPod but to the sounds of his hood, which today include chirping birds and a tinkly ice cream cart, whose vendor’s radio is playing Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

“It feels comfortable right now. I recently worked on a video thing with kids. And rather than controlling the situation, it turned out best just letting the kids be kids and capturing that. There is a little bit of accidental stuff to it, but I feel like it’s natural,” he says.

Turning the corner, he stops suddenly and beckons to a house. “This one’s yellow. Really bright,” he says, beaming. It’s obscured beneath thick branches, but when you finally see it? It’s almost blinding.

–– Rebecca Haithcoat for Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog