A blonde woman struggles to keep an oily black liquid from oozing through flowery wallpaper. A mumbling man washes what seem to be giant eggs in a stream. A family camping out and roasting marshmallows on an open fire somehow segues into a moment of demonic possession and an orgiastic food fight. And alien beings perform some mysterious fire ceremony, amid tribal drums and other rhythmic weirdness, before flashing to audio/visual noise that certainly could induce seizures in the more epileptically vulnerable.
     Animal Collective, the ever prolific group hailing from Baltimore, have followed up last year’s acclaimed Merriweather Post Pavilion and Fall Be Kind with this “visual album”, a collaboration with Philadelphia filmmaker Danny Perez that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has been touring the world in one-off screenings. The 54-minute film marks the culmination of four years of “an open-ended operation of audio-video synthesis”, said Perez, who previously helmed concert films for Black Dice and Panda Bear, “the passing back and forth of visuals and sound so that each would inform the other and create an organic structure.”