Based in Portugal and no strangers to each other’s music, Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Peter Kember (Sonic Boom) first began working together on the former’s Tomboy album in 2011, with the duo also co-producing Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper four years later. Having forged an enduring partnership, it was only a matter of time before they would fully collaborate – aprocess instigated amidst the isolation of the 2020 pandemic.
At first, Kember began re-familiarising himself with his long-lost collection of ’50s and ’60s American doo-wop and rock-and-roll LPs. Crafting song-length loops from classic intros to tracks by Eddie Cochrane, The Troggs and The Drifters, Lennox then added his own vocal observations to create fully-formed songs. A truly unique-sounding album, Reset’s happy-go-lucky demeanour is nevertheless contradicted by its lyrical cynicism at global events.
So take us back to when you guys first met?
Noah Lennox: “The first interaction we had was over MySpace actually. Pete’s friend had played him an album of mine and in the liner notes I’d written that Spacemen 3 and Sonic Boom were one of my influences and he wrote back to say he thought the record was cool and maybe we could work together or play a show at some point. I wasn’t touring at the time but I did have a bunch of tracks recorded for what eventually would become Tomboy, so I asked him to mix the recordings and since then we’ve grown closer, professionally and personally.”
Pete, you also co-produced Noah’s album Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. What was your early experience of working on those projects?
Peter Kember: “It was a good experience. I mixed Tomboy, which I thought was an awesome record that had a really strong, intense vibe, and so I naturally have some really good memories of that. Grim Reaper was more of a production role. Noah had sent me some skeletal demos that I really liked, so there were more conversations about what we were going to do together and I was down for the whole journey.”
You’re both based
