Pitch perfect

Only last week I wrote about how Pete Shelley has described Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP as (initially, at least) more "a stroke of necessity" rather than "a stroke of genius". Here's another musician, Panda Bear aka Noah Lennox, claiming that a more recent seminal release (albeit not quite so widely revered or influential - yet), his album Person Pitch, was also in many ways an accidental triumph, its "signature sound ... partially indebted to a customs mishap". Gawd bless the Portuguese officials who wouldn't let his guitar into the country, but did let him have a 303 sampler.

The LP may have been created in the downtime between Animal Collective tours but it doesn't feel remotely forced or rushed - on the contrary, it's a kaleidoscopic and sonically dense record that you could live for a week, and that went on to shape the sound of his main outfit's career highpoint, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion.

It seems a little odd to me that it's getting the tenth anniversary treatment already, but that's just because I only discovered it two or three years ago, having long ignored all Animal Collective members' side projects (and indeed Animal Collective themselves, pretty much) ever since the debacle that was Glastonbury 2009. An extremely unwise decision - at least as far as Person Pitch is concerned.