Panda Bear headlining the FYF fest on the oak stage was a weird experience, a strange trip into a foreign country where you don’t understand the language, but a realization that little by little you begin to get some parts of the conversation, although it stays very mysterious till the end.
There were like two parts in the show, the first part was the most incomprehensible although it does not mean bad, because I like to listen to Russian and I don’t get a word of it. Before his set has started, I was next to a girl who was constantly talking to people around her, and she had made it clear she had come to the FYF fest because of Panda bear. However, she did not stay more than 2 minutes once the show has started. Weird! Either she did not know what she was talking about, or she got surprised by the weird performance, which was different from the album. And it was indeed very different.
During the entire show, Noah Lennox/Panda Bear, member of Animal Collective, was installed in front of his synth, holding his guitar, almost still in the dark, leaving the music filling the stage space he obviously did not want to occupy. At the top of this there was this huge on-screen projection of colorful and psychedelic images, orange melting in the blue, red exploding in the green, a constant kaleidoscope that was sometimes including real images of jumping people, or screaming women, some repetitive and hypnotic fireworks. The vibrations coming from his synth were so intense you could feel them in your whole body, crushing your bones and fucking up your eardrums.
Creating a spooky mood, he began the set with some extremely repetitive and violent delirium played on synthesizer that was restlessly piercing my tympanic membranes, and seemed to last forever; this is what probably scared off the girl mentioned earlier, certainly used to Panda’s soothing ballad. Too bad that his haunting vocals he was putting at the top of all this were totally incomprehensible and almost inaudible, but may be it was part of the act.
The music was going nowhere, repeating itself ad nauseum, obsessively and hypnotically till it created a real tension, and I would say that the people around me seemed completely stoned. He later added more beats, even dance beats, to this drowsiness, and it became more and more interesting, still repetition was the key, but repetition can be comforting.
The vocals seemed more audible at that time, and they were adding this emotion only possible by a human touch.