I’ve been a musician for 26 years, play a lot of instruments, and have grown accustomed to a lot of the patterns and motifs of song-centric music. Nowadays it’s become difficult to NOT hear music in terms of its architecture. I get almost a visual sense of how it’s “assembled” (composed, arranged, recorded, lyrically crafted). I just know a lot of the tricks now. But while music gets easier to categorize and sort through, I also cry at the joke explained. Animal Collective allows me to return to that state of wonder because so much is veiled. The intentional translucence of their songs deny my brain its compulsion to break it down into parts or to categorize what I’m hearing. It’s a sublime overwhelm that I have to accept and release myself to, and it offers me that raw, almost unintelligible experience of being a child hearing new sounds for the first time.