Deakin

Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Dibb, who performs as Deakin, first rose to notice in the early 2000s as one of the founders of the experimental indie group Animal Collective. Together with his childhood companion Noah Lennox, known onstage as Panda Bear, Dibb started making recordings while still young; the pair later connected with David Portner, who records as Avey Tare, and Brian Weitz, who records as Geologist, during their high-school years in Baltimore, Maryland. Even after Dibb and Lennox moved to Boston for college, they kept working with Portner and Weitz, and the four eventually began issuing their projects under the collective name Animal Collective. The group blended elements of psychedelia, Krautrock, electronic music, and pop, and its flexible structure gave the members freedom to record either together or in smaller combinations while remaining under the Animal Collective banner. Dibb himself stepped away from the project on multiple occasions yet has always been regarded as a permanent participant. He was on one such hiatus when the band issued its breakthrough album Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. During that interval he launched a solo career under the Deakin moniker, supplying remixes for Phoenix, Goldfrapp, and Ratatat. He also launched a Kickstarter campaign that financed an ambitious debut release—comprising both an elaborate book and CD—and supported the charity Temedt, which assists enslaved Tuareg communities in Mali. The recording process stretched far beyond the original timetable, and it later emerged that Dibb had given the bulk of the raised funds to Temedt while ultimately covering the album’s costs himself. In the same stretch he returned to Animal Collective, appearing on the 2010 visual album ODDSAC and the 2012 release Centipede Hz before departing once more in 2013. His long-delayed solo debut, Sleep Cycle, finally surfaced in 2016 on his own My Animal Home imprint.