Article - Animal Collective and Danny Perez present Oddsac

Remember the last 10 minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when logic flies out the window and the film becomes a blast of brain-scrambling sounds and colors?

Animal Collective cohort and filmmaker Danny Perez certainly does. He even counts Kubrick’s montage of abstract images as an influence on his own work directing videos and providing live visuals for Animal Collective, Panda Bear and Black Dice. Oddsac, a new film that Perez co-created with the members of Animal Collective, is the culmination of his visual style. Although the film was conceived and designed as a non-narrative, visual album, it’s not a documentary, it’s not a concert film and it’s not a rock opera.

“Oddsac makes Pink Floyd’s The Wall look like the fucking Brady Bunch,” Perez laughs. “There’s a lot of violence to it and it has a really harsh vibe, but that’s part of my aesthetic.”

Perez is quick to add that there is a sense of humor to the film’s brutal, dream-like pace as well. As an example, he sites the cover art for AC’s Strawberry Jam. “The strawberry looks really great when I mash it up and shoot with a close-up lens, but it’s only a strawberry,” he says. “That kind of re-contextualization is at play in the movie, as far as twisting your perception of what’s happening. The movie is not unlike that album cover – something that’s grotesque and sort of violent, but actually kind of pretty.”

Perez and alternating members of Animal Collective are touring the country with Oddsac. Outside of a screening at Sundance in January, the only other preview of the film is the short trailer on www.oddsac.com. But last June, Perez provided the dizzying, visual dirge for Black Dice’s show at the Earl, which Perez says was a strong cue for Oddsac’s look and feel. “Black Dice are the most mild-mannered, sweet-natured dudes who happen to make the most fucked up sounds in the world,” Perez adds. “That’s something that I’ve gathered from them and that’s something that is in Oddsac – a sense of humor, albeit a very nontraditional one.”