The Records That Made Me: Panda Bear

With The Records That Made Me, VF uncovers the vinyl releases that have influenced and shaped our favourite musicians, DJs and artists.

Musician, producer and Animal Collective member Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear has spent over two decades pushing forth an ever-morphing sound. From the looping samples of his early years to the full rock band approach of his upcoming album Sinister Grift, Lennox has built an empire by reshaping his references into something entirely new.

A stack of records his father gave him, including Tower of Power, The Beatles and James Brown, kickstarted Lennox’s relationship with vinyl and music. At this time, he had dabbled in piano and cello but the records and a specific piece of kit ignited his passion.

“It wasn’t until some of these records that I got inspired to try to do my own stuff,” Lennox explains. “Then, my parents bought a Korg 01 keyboard. I remember spending so much time with it. It was the first instrument I felt like I developed a relationship with. It almost becomes your friend – you know it inside and out. I find it happens a lot with pieces of gear that I get on with. I develop a way of making stuff on it that becomes really routine”.

Later on in life, Lennox worked at a record store in New York. Here, he learned the “vocabulary” that would inform his approach to music-making. “My favourite thing about record shops is the exchange of stuff that you like about music, bands, stuff that you think is shitty,” Lennox says. “The social part of the record store I think is really great. I worked at a spot where all the people who worked there were really heavy music people. I felt like I got schooled on all this stuff”.

Read on to discover the records that made Panda Bear.

The Police

Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings

(A&M Records)

In my house, I had two very distinct experiences. One was with my mom, who was exclusively into classical music, opera and a lot of music for ballet. Then it was my father with Top 40 radio in the car all the time. Those were the two streams of music that I was getting all the time.

I think I got into The Police because my older brother was into it. He liked some of the singles, and when I was pre-teen, he got the box set. It was every album, all the singles, b-sides, everything. Besides liking a lot of the songs, especially the drumming, it was the first time I felt like it was somebody doing the rock and pop thing that I might hear in my dad’s car, but with something different about it.

It was familiar, but there was obviously a reggae influence, specifically with the rhythms he would do, and how he would arrange his drum parts. It was so different from everything else on the radio. I think it was important to me because it was the first time the point was made that you can still do something catchy, immediate and powerful, but it doesn’t have to be like everything else. It seems simple, but it was a really powerful thing for me.

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Astrud Gilberto

The Best Of Astrud Gilberto

(Verve Records)

I remember hearing “A Girl from Ipanema” at a restaurant when I was like 11 or 12 and I asked my parents what it was. They told me it was Bossa Nova from Brazil. It was so exciting to learn that there’s this other form of music. I learned that there are traditions of music in other places where they like different things, and there’s been a whole different evolution of a sound.

It led me off into paths of “What’s it like over there? What are they into over there?”. My world before that was very insular and of its place. It let me see that there’s other stuff beyond the world that’s right in front of me.

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Red Hot Chili Peppers

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

(Warner Records)

I was in high school for this. This one I chose because it’s the one that made me want to play guitar and I’d never done that before. “Breaking the Girl” on this album is the first thing I learned to play.

It’s got Rick Rubin’s production. I think he’s an amazing producer and I love the way his stuff sounds. The big thing was this though is it’s the album that made me want to play guitar.

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The Orb

U.F.Orb

(Mercury Records)

I went to this thing called the Waldorf School in Baltimore and it only went up to 8th grade. It was a private school right down the hill from where my parents lived, I probably should have gone there. My brother was in another Waldorf high school further away.

In retrospect, it seems a bad decision, but I went up there like he did and stayed with another family who was local in Pennsylvania while my parents lived in Baltimore. I spent Monday through Friday going to school there. I wasn’t ready for it. It broke me a little bit but it’s hard to want to take things back in your life because it got you to where you are today.

The family I lived with, their son had just gone off to college. I moved into his room and there wasn’t much left behind, but there were a couple CDs.

One was the LAs record, which is one of my favourite records now, there was another one that I can’t remember but the third one was U.F.Orb. I’d never heard electronic music before. I was making that stuff on the Korg, and I had a realisation that other people do this too, but in a much more evolved, sophisticated way than whatever I was doing.

The soundscaping of it was really exciting and foreign to me. It led me along a path of discovering new things – techno and house. I feel like I started with them and went backwards towards Detroit and Chicago. It took a while for me to get there though.

It’s just really big for me because it was the first electronic music that I’d heard.

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Quasimoto

The Unseen

(Stones Throw Records)

These are all formative records – maybe not records that I would say are my favourite records – I wouldn’t consider The Police box set one of my favourite things ever yet it was important in terms of setting me along a path that seems very distinct now.

With The Unseen, we all love this record. I was curious how he made it and I read that he did the whole thing on a Roland sampler. I looked it up, it was relatively cheap compared to a lot of music gear, which usually isn’t attainable. I got it and, like the keyboard I was talking about before, this was sort of the second big piece of gear that I felt like I developed a relationship with. I probably played music exclusively on this thing for ten years after that.

I still love this record to this day. I still listen to it quite often. It was really big for me because it got me into sampling and I felt like that set me on a path that maybe I’ve just sort of broken on the new record, but it had a really good run for me.

Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift is released via Domino on February 28. Pre-order it now.

Read more of The Records That Made Me series here.