Killing convenience with Panda Bear and Sonic Boom

Pete Kember lights a spliff before I’m sure he can even hear me. The producer known as Sonic Boom is more at ease during our conversation than he is on A ? of WHEN, the second collaborative record he’s made with Panda Bear, aka Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox. Their previous LP Reset was meant “to be uplifting… a sort of musical panacea,” released into the post-lockdown turmoil of a world grasping for disintegrating memories of normalcy. Despite their shared surface of whimsical panache, both albums grapple with increasingly dystopian modern life. “The grift and abuse by corporations and governments has become so transparent,” says Kember. As things continue to deteriorate, buoyancy and resilience only become more necessary. It’s not a question of “if” things will go to shit anymore, so Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are infusing their songs with world-weary resistance to inevitability and exorbitant convenience.

The duo has worked together for fifteen years, from co-producers to co-writers, wringing sunkissed beauty and acidic burbles from an ever-growing arsenal of sounds and cast of collaborators. Surprises may be fewer and further between, but they still manage to push the boundaries of joint creation. “The collaboration is very open and has been right from the start, from Tomboy,” Kember recalls. New musical crevices keep them on their toes—Lennox will incorporate yodel-esque glissandos, or Kember will insist on including wordless doo-wop chants.

Both Lennox and Kember subscribe to the inertia of work, always staying busy out of habit and necessity. Between Reset and the present, Lennox completed and toured Sinister Grift, his seventh solo Panda Bear LP, while Kember has continued collaborating (remixes, Christmas albums, WU LYF’s comeback, etc.). “It’s just routine,” Lennox tells me. “[I’ve been] writing songs and recording stuff since I was a teenager. Life doesn’t feel normal if I’m not doing it.”

“I like to work,” Kember adds, taking a drag of his joint. He describes his desire to keep expanding his roster of collaborators “as a stretching experience,” referring to the producer’s challenge of coalescing with new bands as a “gift” and “magical.” The privilege of a temporary invitation into a group is just as symbiotic as that of extensive musical partnerships—“bands are like gangs, they’re quite insular,” he chuckles. Kember doesn’t wield the narrow bludgeon of a “signature” production sound, preferring to adapt and use his skillset to further the vision at hand, unlike the Rick Rubins of the world (“do not mention that name again,” he says with mock seriousness).

As someone who would “feel punished if he had to only make his own music,” Kember is not just an agile accomplice but a malleable co-pilot. A ? of WHEN was constructed in a similar way to Reset—sending loops back and forth, tweaking sounds bit by bit—albeit with one core difference: no samples. As much as both he and Lennox love sampling, they are “just so expensive” and “such a pain in the ass” to deal with. “You get to the end of the road with your song and you can’t get the clearance,” Kember concludes with a wry grimace. 

Almost immediately upon completion of Reset Mariachi, the aptly-titled 2024 EP of reworks featuring Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez, Kember and Lennox were on to the next thing. Many of the instruments found on A ? of WHEN have been long-in-discussion with the duo, whether it’s Mary Lattimore’s harp, vocaloid keyboards, quaint sound effects, steel drum, or something else unexpected. With an open canvas before them, the duo explored many of the textures that had been waiting in the wings.

The need to craft loops from scratch resulted in abundant raw material, improvised (“zero plan, just following instincts”) by Kember and multi-instrumentalist Dan O’Sullivan, and cut down into faux-plunderphonic pieces. Lennox would “just follow his nose,” adding vocal arrangements before resuming the rally and sending it back. The songs are as layered as ever before, though the simplicity of the base loops takes on a different hue. Almost every sound was made by Lennox and Kember, with O’Sullivan and Lattimore contributing to multiple tracks as well as brief appearances by pedal steel guitarist Zena Kay (“Somethin’ that lasts”) and strings from their old mariachi colleagues (“Pray to you,” “Moth to a flame”).

While work on A ? of WHEN got underway relatively quickly, the full LP’s construction, back and forth, was noticeably gradual. Kember and Lennox went out of their way to find or make the sounds they had in their minds, layering synths and interweaving stacked vocals, adding more percussion until the very end. Most of the tracks can be boiled down to singing and clapping. “The human voice and hand claps are the oldest instruments we have,” Kember explains. “You’re carrying a lot of weight just by using these things,” operating in an “instantly human idiom.” 

The tonal interplay between Lennox’s mellifluousness and Kember’s rich baritone is another crux of the record. Even after all the years of performance between the two, nothing quite compares with Reset and A ? of WHEN. Kember’s low end creates much of the vocal multiplicity, whether it’s serving as the anchor for towering vocal stacks or taking the lead for the first time on “Something like dreaming.” At the heart of each track’s kaleidoscopic arrangement are Kember’s deep, vibrant ballast and Lennox’s effortless tenor.

Masking uncanny and painful lyrics with effusively radiant music is not new for Sonic Boom and Panda Bear. Reset’s “Edge of the Edge” is the likely synecdochic example for the duo’s happy/sad divergence. Kember describes it as “sound[ing] like the happiest little song that ever was, while the lyrics are about uncomfortable issues.” As society has continued to speed-run its way to decay and collapse, it’s only fitting that A ? of WHEN is more grounded in the daily feeling of “getting bashed about by the world,” as Kember says.

“Like a moth to a flame” is the LP’s emblem of the sweet-versus-somber dichotomy. “It’s incredibly pretty, but it’s about this crazy compulsion that humans and moths share, where even though they know they’re doing something terminally fatal to them, it somehow doesn’t stop them from doing it,” Kember continues. From the start, “Like a moth” presents itself almost like an antiquated ballad—echoing backing vocals, saccharine strings, minimal guitar and percussion. Ignoring the lyrical implications, one could almost imagine it as a Brill Building love song. 

Much of A ? of WHEN is spent reckoning with this feeling of magnetic inevitability, destined to helplessly self-immolate in search of something good. Lennox adds, “A little bit of a good thing is great, but if you mainline it, it kills you.” On a macro scale, most of these “good things” have long since passed the point where any goodness remained intact. Take your pick of the topic du jour, and it’s nearly guaranteed that the never-ending quest for convenience and comfort has been doing more harm than good for some time.

“I have a phrase: convenience kills. If you look at everything humanity has achieved in this regard, it’s all been bad for us,” says Kember. To combat passive ease, the duo is embracing inconvenience, both in how they constructed the album and how it is delivered to listeners. A ? of WHEN is rare for an album being released on a “major” indie label—it will only be available in physical formats and as a digital download. The ease of immediate access has conditioned listeners to view even the slightest required effort as daunting. Kember has clear memories of taking the bus to go buy records as a kid; from this fondness comes his insistence that “you have to engage with other humans to go out and buy it.”

Both Lennox and Kember clarify that their problem isn’t with people listening to their music for free. Anyone who can’t drop $30+ on vinyl is welcome to “go out and find the digital files” (the singles have been on Soulseek for some time). The animus is instead directed at convenience culture writ large and, more specifically, at streaming services (“there’s one very popular streaming service that I think is full of miserable human beings,” Kember adds, not trying to hide his disdain). While the choice to keep one record off of streaming might feel like a raindrop in the ocean, the duo hopes it’ll catalyze reflection at the very least. There’s no easy answer to infinitely complex systems and situations like digital media consumption, but, as Kember puts it, “at least we’re having a conversation about it.”

A ? of WHEN focuses on inquiry, with the understanding that there is no perfect answer or solution, if there are any answers at all. On top of another record of stellar, sun-dappled psych-pop, Sonic Boom and Panda Bear offer a mirror of contemplation, a forty-seven-minute window of resilience despite grave uncertainty. It’s nice to pull out from a world where everything has to be done on a fucking phone or computer,” says Kember. “It’s more work, but it’s nice. It feels like being alive.” There’s nothing quick or frivolous about it.

A ? of WHEN is out July 10 on Domino. 

aly eleanor is a writer and musician from Minneapolis. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp, The Creative Independent, POW Mag, and more; she makes music as purity olympics. Follow her @purityolympics or email her.

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