Throughout her time spent rehearsing, recording and touring in other people’s bands, Clark maintained a sense of herself as an autonomous and almost entirely self-sufficient artist, and “Marry Me” is the fruit of years of solitary trial and error. Released this past July, the album is almost recklessly heterogenic: each of its 11 tracks has its own highly idiosyncratic frame of reference, from torch songs to New York’s no-wave of the ’80s to Parisian chansons. “That album took forever to make, mostly just me alone with my computer,” Clark said with a good-humored sigh. “I call the time I spent on it ‘invisible hours,’ because no one knows how long it took but me.”
On some tracks, the hours are less invisible than on others: “Paris Is Burning,” a protest song disguised as a fantasia of Paris’s fall to the Nazis, is an opera unto itself, beginning with a somber trio of horns and arcing through an elegantly condensed history of 20th-century popular music before landing, somewhat drunkenly, in a stiff-legged, apocalyptic waltz. The title track, by contrast — a deceptively dulcet piano ballad that manages to conceal a disquieting critique of marriage behind its seemingly straightforward proposal — is a study in effective restraint. Like Pallett, Clark plays virtually every instrument on the record, though she draws far more heavily on synthesized sounds and effects; the handful of other musicians featured (among them Mike Garson, David Bowie’s longtime pianist) seem to have been brought in less out of necessity than as the sonic equivalent of icing on the cake. From start to finish, “Marry Me” succeeds in fostering the illusion of effortlessness, of an almost careless expertise, as much in production and arrangement as in songwriting and execution — a far cry from such low-fi, rough-around-the-edges indie debuts as Cat Power’s “Dear Sir” or the Pixies’ “Come On Pilgrim.” It’s a fair bet, however, that “Marry Me” was considerably less expensive to record.
“It’s a completely different situation these days,” Clark said when I asked how she recorded her album. “With the — can I call it a technological revolution? — and the advent of the Internet, there’s this idea of global access, and to some extent it’s true. I came to music at a time when the Internet was still mostly for freaks, but I kind of fit into that category; I discovered all sorts of crazy things that way.” I asked whether that might account, in part, for the wide range of stylistic influences on “Marry Me,” and Clark nodded thoughtfully. “The home-recording situation — having it be affordable and easy — was a big part of it, too: I had so much time to try out weird ideas, then get rid of them or keep them if I wanted. I never really fantasized about joining a band, or thought, This song would be really good if I could just find a drummer, because I didn’t need to think about things in those terms. It was more fun for me to try it on my own.”
IF PALLETT AND CLARK ACHIEVE POP liberation through technology, “chops” and a flair for performance, a third variation on the theme of musical self-sufficiency is presented by the curious case of Noah Lennox. Lennox records and performs, both alone and in a wide variety of partnerships and collectives, under the moniker Panda Bear. Although he is an accomplished drummer and guitarist, he used neither instrument in the recording of his acclaimed third album, “Person Pitch,” and the technical aspects of his performances have more in common with Clark’s “invisible hours” than with Pallett’s assured showmanship. You could almost describe Lennox, whose persona is low-key in the extreme, as the drummer who fired himself.
Panda Bear has been well known for a number of years — at least in the insular world of experimental pop — for his involvement with the peculiarly elliptical band Animal Collective, of which he was a founding member (in either 2000, 2001 or 2003, depending on whom you ask). Animal Collective — which features Lennox and three collaborators of long standing who go by the names Avey Tare, Geologist and Deakin — is arguably the most innovative group to emerge from New York City’s progressive-music scene since Sonic Youth. What it is, exactly, that makes the band unique is hard to pinpoint, since its sound ranges widely, from ethereal, open-ended psychedelia to something Owen Pallett described, admiringly, as “panic folk”; common to all the band’s projects, however, is an unapologetic embrace of eccentricity.
Side projects are often perceived as threatening to a band’s equilibrium — Metallica famously forbade its members to participate in any — but everyone in Animal Collective seems to have at least one, and Lennox clearly views his two endeavors as mutually sustaining. “We’ve been getting more interested in sampling lately, all sorts of electronic sounds, moving away from conventional rock-band instrumentation, that whole guitar-driven thing,” Lennox told me when I visited him in Lisbon, where he now lives with his Portuguese wife and their child. He gave a quick, self-deprecating smile. “I guess my solo record is proof of that.”
Lennox established himself as a solo artist with Panda Bear’s first two albums, 1998’s eponymous debut and 2004’s “Young Prayer,” but it’s his third release, “Person Pitch,” that has generated the most buzz, both popular and critical. The Internet’s most powerful indie tastemaker, Pitchforkmedia.com, selected it as the No. 1 release of the past year. “I can’t really explain it, to be honest,” Lennox told me, looking genuinely dazed. “I’ve always kind of thought of myself as a weirdo.”
“Person Pitch” is a profoundly strange recording, often seemingly at odds with itself: absolutely digital and yet obviously homemade, repetitive yet oddly restless, airy yet packed to the breaking point with every sound effect under the sun. With the exception of his bittersweet, echoing, multitracked vocals, the songs consist entirely of samples culled from online databases: tribal rhythms float high above the revving of engines, falling trees punctuate acoustic guitar loops and the album’s signature track, the spacey, beach-partyish “Bros,” kicks off with the hooting of an owl. “My favorite music sounds like it was recorded underwater,” Lennox said earnestly, as we sat in a bustling restaurant off Lisbon’s Praça de Camões. “Dub music is like that: Augustus Pablo, King Tubby, that kind of thing. Reggae rhythms with a ton of reverb and effect-tweaking: that late-night, 4-in-the-morning kind of sound. I go after that a lot in my own songs.”
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