The point of crowdsourcing seems straightforward: Give someone money, so they can make something cool. But not every Kickstarter or Indiegogo has a tidy ending. The internet is littered with stories of well-meaning entrepreneurs who raised large amounts of funding, only to disappear with no product to show for it.

It had seemed like this might be the case with Animal Collective's Josh "Deakin" Dibb, who in 2009 raised nearly $26,000 to fund a trip to Mali to play a music festival, which would then serve as the inspiration behind a solo album and an accompanying book of artwork. By 2012, the promised rewards hadn't surfaced, leading some backers—to say nothing of the internet's judgmental hordes—to complain, and accuse Dibb of ripping them off. In an interview with Pitchfork conducted that year, Dibb apologized for the delay, which he attributed to his "fatal perfectionism."

More than three and a half years later, Dibb has—as of this week—officially released the solo album, which is called Sleep Cycle. Before that, he mailed out the promised rewards to all of the project's Kickstarter backers that he was able to track down. There were some small differences: The album was initially intended to be a CD, but with the revival of arcane audio formats ever upon us, it became a cassette, inspired by Dibb's experience in Mali where cassette stores are still widely prominent. But it was an album of music, an accompanying book of photographs, and assorted footage from the festival, just as was promised back in 2009. More importantly: It's good, brimming with pastoral and melted melodies combined with field recordings taken from his Mali trip, and steadied by Dibb's increasingly confident voice and songwriting perspective. Animal Collective fans who cherish the band's freewheeling Feels and Strawberry Jam records—both of which Dibb played on—will surely appreciate it.

So, what began as a question of whether Dibb was ripping people off has turned into: How long is too long for an artist to take when he's using other people's money? As it turned out, all but $1,500 of the raised funds went to TEMEDT, an NGO that works to end slavery throughout Mali. The remaining money partially funded the cost of manufacturing the album and book, which were otherwise funded by Dibb's own finances (which was money he'd saved up from record sales and touring with Animal Collective). It's hard to complain about this much money going to a noble cause. But some will ask: If Dibb was able to eventually fund the album on his own, why do the Kickstarter to begin with? To make sense of this, and everything that happened with him between 2009 and 2016, Pitchfork hopped on the phone with Dibb to speak about the long process of bringing Sleep Cycle to life.

Pitchfork: You last talked to us in 2012 about the status of the album. What's been the timeline of getting it out?

Deakin: I was struggling with the music aspect of it for a really long time. In the middle of 2014, I put together a couple of posters that I ended up sending to as many people who had responded with addresses from the Kickstarter as possible, and gave them an update at that point. [Animal Collective] had stopped touring for Centipede Hz at the end of 2013. 2014 came around and we as a band made a decision to take a full year off. The combination of me going through my own doubts plus my ongoing considerations about the music for [Sleep Cycle]—I hadn't really dug into it the way I meant to in 2013.