stadiumsandshrines(blr)

markrichardson:

This is a Panda Bear song called “Laughed for a World Filled With Fantasy”.

I thought about this track after reading Joe Colly’s interview w/ Panda Bear on Pitchfork. Talking about his vocal style on the new record, Noah Lennox told Joe, “On the singing front, I was really psyched about crooner types like Frank Sinatra or Scott Walker.” 

Lennox’s interest in Scott Walker goes back a ways, at the very least to this track, which was recorded live in Portugal in 2004. This piece is from a 21-minute digital-only live EP called Panda Bear Live At ZDB September 2004, which is a weirdly forgotten release in his discography (it’s not even on his Discogs page). It came out in early 2007, wasn’t written about much, and it seems to have slipped off the radar. But it’s particularly interesting now because, if this was in fact recorded in Sept. 2004, it’s definitely the earliest available example of what has come to be his established style. (That year he also released Young Prayer, which was in the acoustic, droney mode of then-current Animal Collective).

In any event, this track doesn’t appear on another record, and it’s pretty great IMO. Beautiful melody, and I really enjoy the obviousness of the samples, first Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” and then a snippet from Scott Walker’s “Two Ragged Soldiers”.

I asked Lennox about this track in an interview in 2007, and he said:

“I think that’s from “Laughed for a World Filled With Fantasy”[…] I was psyched about doing a duet with Scott Walker, that was the crux of that one. But it’s also why I never recorded it as a studio thing, because that was one of those instances where I didn’t get beyond just singing over someone else’s song.”