On How Almost Drowning Changed The Way He “Felt About The Ocean"

In 2014, Dave Portner - aka Animal Collective wailer Avey Tare - travelled with bandmate Brian 'Geologist' Weitz to Mexico, where they had access to a remote beach in a marine conservation area of the Gulf of California. Portner went out to sea, and almost never came back.

"I was able to swim out past this section of rock, where you couldn't touch the ocean floor, so I could just free-float," the 38 year old recounts. "I tried to turn back, but the ocean was so strong that I thought I wasn't going to be able to make it back to shore. I almost gave up. But, finally, I managed to make it back to shore, and I threw up immediately. That changed the way I felt about the ocean: you have to respect something so powerful that it could, at any moment, just destroy you… It's a feeling I've always remembered, and it's something I relate back to when I'm feeling struggle, or overwhelmed by anything else in my life."

The second solo record for Avey Tare, Eucalyptus, picks up on this idea. In 2014, Portner was living in Los Angeles. He'd finished off Enter The Slasher House, the debut LP for his new band, Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, but it wasn't out yet. Animal Collective had yet to start work on their tenth album, 2016's Painting With. And he'd just broken up with his girlfriend, former member of Dirty Projectors - and… Slasher Flicks member - Angel Deradoorian. Spending day after day by himself, writing songs in the sun, Portner conceived of an acoustic album inspired by California's environment.

"All these ideas, images started flooding in, burning in my brain," Portner offers. "It started as this very intimate, very personal, bedroom-recording thing about this specific time in my life, in this specific place; the relationships I was having in California and the memories it was bringing up."

Portner wanted Eucalyptus to "feel like you were travelling through an environment, like it was this sonic journey". The album was cryptically announced when puzzles were sent out to listeners; because, he explains, "the album came together like a puzzle". At times, the environmental overtones get heavy; as on Coral Lords, which evokes the demise of coral as bellwether of greater environmental decay. It's a cousin to Coral Orgy, a live collaboration between Animal Collective and the video-art activists Coral Morphologic, that was staged in February. Another song on the LP, Selection Of A Place, also appeared on Animal Collective's 2017 EP Meeting Of The Waters, which was recorded live in the Amazon.

"I wanted to focus on the birth and death of the environment," Portner says, "explore the life of a human as a microcosm of a macrocosm. So, I could contrast smaller things - the birth and death of feelings, the birth and death of the relationship I had, the birth and death of my time in LA - with the birth and death of the environment. Just as people around us die, so too is the environment dying."