So, let’s say that you were a little kid once—most people were—and let’s say that your littlekidhood was followed by a drug-and art-damaged adolescence, which was followed by the beginning and premature end of a college career, and then a string of dull day jobs that at some point became adulthood. And let’s say that somehow through it all, you maintained a focus on—even a near-obsession with—those years you spent screwing around in the city parks and suburban woodlots that pass convincingly for endless forest when you’re less than four feet tall, pretending that you were all sorts of things you hadn’t yet learned didn’t really exist in the late 20th Century: a pirate, a knight, a cowboy. By this time, you’ve replaced your given name (Dave Portner) with a mildly absurd variation on it (Avey Tare) and you’re playing guitar and singing in a band (Animal Collective) with people who share your obsessions—some of them actually knew each other when they were less than four feet tall and one of them calls himself Panda Bear. You start cranking out records with the speed and aesthetic sensibilities of a hyperactive six year-old with a box of crayons. They have hand-scrawled artwork and song titles “Who Could Win a Rabbit” and “Doggy."

This leads, paradoxically, to a lot of not-very-childlike situations, like a show in a converted church in Minneapolis where some of your fans eat an acid-laced pizza and try to take your socks off while you’re playing. But you sense there’s some sort of payoff coming, one your sub-four-feet self would recognize, and one day the phone rings. A guy says he has a pirate ship in France that he’d like you to play on. Bingo. But early in the evening of August tenth, Portner, the other three Animal Collective members and their sparse entourage—a girlfriend, a sound tech and a French filmmaker with a Super 8—seem too exhausted and irritable to really grasp the appropriateness of the show they’ll play in a few hours at La Guinguette Pirate, a Parisian club housed in a replica of a Chinese junk called La Dame du Canton and anchored below the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand on the Seine. Because it turns out that pirate ships present a lot of technical difficulties you don’t think about when you’re seven. The boat rocks in the wake of the barges that navigate the river at regular intervals, knocking Portner off balance during soundcheck. And it’s a French pirate ship, which is a problem both because nobody in the band speaks much French and because there’s a 110-volt gap between the American and European electrical systems, causing La Guiguette Pirate’s fuses to blow with a loud pop every time Portner tries to plug in the tools of Animal Collective’s blurry psychedelia—amps, chains of effects processors, a sampler, a row of minidisc players, a homemade circuit blender. The sunlight that spills across the Seine in the early evening makes for nice photographs and paintings, but it also makes the inside of La Guinguette Pirate feel like an unventilated attic in August. And when the band tries to work out a setlist before the show in the cramped upper compartment of a nearby double-decker bus that has been transformed into La Guinguette Pirate’s crepe stand, a cook angrily stomps up the steps to tell them not to move around. They’re shaking the bus and ruining his crepes, he says.