Part 1

Name: Brian Ross Weitz aka Geologist
Nationality: American
Occupation: Producer, songwriter
Current release: Geologist's new album Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is out via Drag City.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: It should be obvious that I love “Silence” by John Cage. I like the Macaulay Library website for animal sounds. Used them a bunch over the years!

If you enjoyed this Geologist interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram, and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Well that depends on the music. I see shapes and colors. I don’t even know if I see them, but they come to mind. Textures too. Sounds can feel chewy to me a lot of times and I feel it in my teeth.

When I was younger I used to have more narrative cinematic responses to music. Comes from my love of soundtracks.

Especially with more abstract music I liked to listen in the dark with eyes closed, as I do now. But sometimes when I go for a walk or drive, I pick music that suits the weather, light level, or surroundings.

That is very much eyes opening listening and I think just as valuable to me.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

In headphones the music becomes my sole focus. Even if I’m walking around and letting the music and scenery compliment each other, the music seems to rule.

I’ve been wondering if I like the new noise canceling headphones recently. I think growing up with early walkman headphones I find the lack of ambient bleed a little unsettling and have been putting them on aware mode.

I wish I had a house and stereo system where I could let the music rule as well, but I don’t, so for me now music on the stereo is more about mood than detail. It’s on, and the volume is loud, but my house is small and doesn’t have one of those great listening spaces so the family and my pets are part of the experience and I need to think about how my mood will be as a social creature.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

Too many to really do this question justice.

I will name a group called Climax Golden Twins as being important to my teenage self. I loved horror movie soundtracks and had been learning about collage, music concrete, and modern classical music through talking to guys at record fairs and record stores. But those things felt a little inaccessible without the technology and know-how.

Discovering noise music through publications like Bananafish magazine and records like Climax Golden Twins "Imperial Household Orchestra” made it feel like something I could do and really opened up the possibilities of what you can do with sound right at your fingertips.



I also would like to mention Jeph Jerman and his project Hands To. He had a record called “Egress,” where he put contact mics on dead saguaro cactus skeletons. It was the first thing that made me feel connected to the Sonoran Desert even before I’d lived there.

After living there for a few years I really wanted to make a record that felt personal to my time in the desert and this new one Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is closest I’ve come so far, but I put that “Egress” record as the pinnacle for me in terms of personal expression of human/desert relations.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

Certain people’s laughs really make me happy and I feel it in my chest. They have to be really genuine to trigger it, so I’m not sure if there is something deeper there where I’m responding to honesty or instinct. I’ve always thought comedy and horror were similar genres because the desired response was so instinctual, and I love both of those things for that reason.

In terms of music, there is a resonant string sound I always enjoy. Things like steel string guitar, hurdy gurdy, guqin. I worked on a soundtrack called Crestone and tried to model a lot of those sounds with my modular synthesizer. I did it with Animal Collective too and eventually moved to teaching myself hurdy gurdy for real so I could feel the resonance.



One of my dreams is to play Ellen Fullman’s long stringed instrument.

I’ve had an unsent email in my drafts folder for years where I ask her if she wants any help with someone playing it in soundcheck while she listens in the room. I’m going to see her play it in January so maybe I should send it.

[Read our Ellen Fullman interview]

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

People chewing annoys me I guess, though not all the time and I think the older I get the more I realize if someone’s chewing annoys me, there is something else annoying me about them in my subconscious.

Musically … this may come as a surprise to some Animal Collective fans, but I’m sensitive to 808 drum machines in a bad way.

I obviously have nothing against programmed drums, electronic drums, sampled drums, etc. I’m not even sure there is something specific about 808s that bothers me in terms of audio quality. If anything it’s how recognizable it is. I find it distracting from the rest of the music and takes me out of the full picture.



Particularly the snare. It’s like every time it hits I don’t hear a snare. It’s like an annoying person tapping me on the shoulder saying “I’m an 808!” I’m also not really into super sub kicks anymore. It kind of does something to my jaw that I don’t like.

Of course these opinions are super hypocritical because they apply to other people’s music and not mine ha.

When I first started playing the Camel Lights songs live, I was on tour with my AC bandmate Avey Tare, and he pointed out that the programmed drums in songs like “Tonic” or “RV Envy” had 808 characteristics.



An old song I used to play called “Super” also had a subby kick and my bandmates liked to tease me about that since I’m always arguing against 808s or sub oscillator generated kick sounds.

In terms of sounds I like, I miss when my kids were young and they’d play with toys in the bath. I could listen to that forever. They’ve been too old for that for a while now, but when I try and recall general impressions of them as young kids, I hear them playing with toys in the bath with water gently splashing around.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Ice skating rinks! Especially indoor ones. I have a soft spot for both ice skating and roller skating rinks. Roller skating rinks from the 80s were a big part of my childhood. I wasn’t a great skater or anything, but I could do it pretty well and it was a popular place for birthday parties when I was in elementary school.

It was a big part of my musical education because it was often teenagers playing the music and where I first heard a lot of hip hop and hair metal that my parents wouldn’t have played on the car radio. Referring to something as a “skateland jam” is a big reference point in Animal Collective. I still go to one in the suburbs by my house sometimes where people take roller-skate dancing really seriously. I try and skate behind them and copy what they do to get better, but I’m worried I’m going to really hurt myself.

But that is a very music-specific thing in terms of the space. The wheels don’t make a lot of sound when music is playing. Ice rinks on the other hand, I like because of the non-music sounds. Granted it helps if it’s a public skate with teenagers running the playlist, but on top of that you get some many great textural sounds of the skates on the ice, the doors opening and closing. They are also really echoey too so you get great reverb.

And I also love hockey and played it a little as a kid so hearing the sound of stick slaps and pucks hitting the goal posts, boards, glass, etc really hits a deep spot in my heart.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

Yes, I’ve been in both extremes.

I lived at the Biosphere 2 Center on and off between 2000-2003 and that structure has dome-like areas called the lungs. Since it is supposed to be closed to the outside environment, it has to have areas for air to expand and contact with changes in temperature and pressure. It’s a bit like standing in an empty water tower with endless reverberation, but also because of the curved room, you can whisper across the entire thing and hear very well.

For the other way, I’ve done float tanks a lot and those are supposed to be soundproof though I’m not sure I’d qualify them as anechoic. The only time I can really say I was in a space like that was at the Guggenheim Museum in 2017 for a Doug Wheeler installation. We were on tour so the entire band and crew went.

I think maybe if I was by myself I would’ve enjoyed it more. My main memory was that with such a large group of people who had been eating unhealthily on tour for weeks, you could clearly hear way too many stomach noises. It felt like test taking at school where the room is silent except for that and everyone is on edge about their own stomach making a sound.