Part experimental film, part extended music video, ODDSAC is the result of four years of piecemeal recording, videotaping, editing and tinkering by director Danny Perez and pop-experimental band Animal Collective.

Animal Collective is a band known for its offbeat sounds and sensibilities, while Perez has made a name for himself as a music video director—a longtime friend of the band, he's directed two of their videos—and an avant-garde video artist. With ODDSAC, they deliberately shied away from constructing a narrative, yet relished the opportunity to dabble in their favorite genre: horror films.

ODDSAC Trailer
Trouble seeing the video above? Click here.

Band member David Portner notes, "We were always into horror movies like The Shining or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Our music is inspired by the scores of those films, and enjoying that music pushed us into the experimental direction you hear in our music."

Perez concurs. "We all have the same taste in movies. I'm a firm believer in the idea that everything's been done before, and all we're really doing is reconfiguring the ingredients. You can easily piece your way through this thing and find a dozen obvious influences, but it's been filtered through a mutated sensibility."

By way of illustration, the film opens with a montage of flame-dancing villagers cross-cut and superimposed with footage a wall bleeding viscous oil onto a girl. Beneath all the bizarre imagery, music undulates, crescendos, buzzes and screams in and out of synch with the action. There's a long stretch of pulsating static and white noise. A wraith-like creature traverses a vast field of rocks. It constructs a drum set, plays a solo. Band member Brian Weitz stands underneath a waterfall and yells at the camera. Then a vampire with a topknot rows a canoe down a dark river. A family camping trip turns into a night of horror, and so on.

Exclusive Interview with Animal Collective from ChangeUpMag.com on Vimeo.

The members of Animal Collective worked separately, from their home recording studios, sometimes scoring Perez's edited sequences. Conversely, Perez, working with Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects, sometimes tailored his timeline to whatever sounds the band recorded.

"In this way, Danny was like another band member," says Weitz. "When we're working on a studio album, we try to follow certain guidelines, like rhythms or the key of the melody. With ODDSAC, the visuals were just another ingredient in the recipe."

The entire experience runs nearly an hour long: in those 54 minutes, time and reality stretch, compress, twist and turn almost as much as the visuals. ODDSAC was shot with a Panasonic AG-DVX100A and up-resed to 1920x1080.

"ODDSAC really is a 21st century work as far as the way these guys approach music and how I approached my editing," says Perez. "I just wanted to make the kind of movie I thought we'd would want to watch, and I feel honored to be able to do this with them."

• Brian Weitz (aka Geologist) on ODDSAC, Horror Movies, and the Darker Side of Animal Collective, by Ashley Simpson, May 25, 2010, BlackBook
• ODDSAC: A Review, by Mike Mineo, March 4, 2010, Obscure Sound