Joshua Dibb sits cross-legged in his mother's secluded home in Owings Mills, takes a moment, and marvels at how quickly his life has changed in the past month.
For nearly two years, Dibb, a founding member of the indie rock band Animal Collective, has been something of a recluse. He took an indefinite break from the grind of touring and performing with the band in 2007 to focus on his personal life. He moved from New York, where the band is based, to Owings Mills, where Animal Collective once wrote and recorded. He built a barn for his mother. He helped his friends in Annapolis build a house. One thing he didn't do much of was record or perform music. Until now.
About a month ago, Dibb was offered the chance to play a set at the Festival au Desert, a yearly event being held this week near Timbuktu in Mali in Western Africa. Dibb was surprised at how excited he felt about the opportunity. He accepted the gig, and set about preparing a set of original solo material to perform there. He is raising money for charity, and now plans to compile a book documenting the journey and record an album in the near future.
Not only is Dibb, 31, finally moving forward with music again, he's thrilled with the prospect.
"I feel like I'm 18 again," he said. "I don't feel like I've been doing this for 10 years. ... I'm on totally uncharted territory."
Dibb has known fellow Animal Collective member Noah Lennox since elementary school, and met and began playing music with Brian Weitz and David Portner at the Park School. Each of the band members came up with a pseudonym (Dibb is known as Deacon). They took an interest in swirling psychedelia, and began assembling a sonic collage of sounds, melodies and rhythms. They released their first album, "Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished," on their own record label in 2000, and booked their own tours.
After a couple of more albums, Animal Collective began to receive a stream of positive press, and gather an audience at home and abroad. The band developed a dedicated - by many accounts, rabid - following.
Animal Collective was on tour during the summer of 2006 when Dibb's father died. The news stunned Dibb. Though he and his father had a strained relationship, he said, he wanted to try to turn it around after that tour finished.
"I went on that tour with the plan of coming back and flying out and spending some time with him," he said. "It would have been the first time I'd seen him in a positive way in years. ... I was not prepared."
In the months that followed, Dibb began to reassess his priorities. Since he didn't own a house or rent an apartment, he had been staying at friends' places when the band wasn't on the road. He realized that the rigors of touring and making music had taken an unexpected toll on the rest of his life.
"I was so focused on my desire to be doing music, I had lost touch with the things that inspired me to make music in the first place," he said.
Not long after Dibb went on hiatus in 2007, Animal Collective hit an all-time high. Their latest album, "Merriweather Post Pavilion," took the indie music world by storm. For many critics, it was one of last year's best albums, and made Animal Collective's members stars on the indie scene.
When he looks at the success Animal Collective has had while he was away, Dibb said he feels bittersweet about his decision, but stands by it.
"There are definitely moments where I'm really sad," he said. "I've missed a lot of things that have happened in the past few years. But I knew there was no way I could have done that. There were too many things going on in my life that I had to take care of."
Dibb might not have toured with the group or worked on the music behind "Merriweather Post Pavilion," but he didn't completely remove himself from the group. He worked on editing the music for "ODDSAC," a nearly hour-long film featuring new songs from the band and video from director Daniel Perez. The band sees "ODDSAC" as more of a video album than a stand-alone film. Later this month, it will debut at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
"ODDSAC" eschews a more traditional narrative, Dibb said, in favor of a series of more abstract scenes linked through the music. Animal Collective has spent a good deal of time on "ODDSAC" - some parts of the film date to 2007 - but when Dibb screened the film all the way through for the first time, he was pumped.
"I'm really psyched about it," he said. "I have no idea how people are going to react to it. ... When we make records, there's not a through-line. You don't listen to 'Merriweather' and go, 'Oh, I get what this story is.' It just is what it is."
The gig in Africa was initially offered to Animal Collective as a whole. Exhausted from touring in support of "Merriweather Post Pavilion," they declined. Dibb said he'd be open to the idea, and was shocked when the festival offered him a slot.
Dibb set about writing and recording music in Owings Mills, building jams through looped samples and guitar licks and adding vocals. It's the first time he has brought his voice to the forefront in years. The new music sounds "Animal Collective-y," he said.
"To me, it doesn't feel polished at all. It feels very raw," he said. "It's been necessary for me to let things be that way. When I start to overthink them, I get really confused."
When his record label, Paw Tracks, agreed to fund the trip to Africa, Dibb and his mother, Jessica, organized a drive to raise money for charity to help end slavery in Africa through her business, Inspiration Community.
Initially, the idea of raising money daunted Dibb. He had never done anything like this before - never associated himself and his music with a cause quite like this.
"To me, that's always been what Bono does," he said, referring to the lead singer of U2. "It's never hit me in this way. It just suddenly made a lot of sense."
After Africa, Dibb will play a few dates in Europe. He hasn't planned much after that. Right now, he's just glad to return to writing and performing music again. He doesn't feel as though he is coming full circle - he feels as though he is resuming something he left off years ago.
"I'm not really sure what it's for or where it's going to take me," he said. "So many things are changing for me really rapidly. ... I'm giving in to whatever is coming, trying to do the things that are in front of me and hoping they'll take me somewhere."