Panda Bear / Excepter: Carrots / KKKKK split 12

Consider this an orange juice and mogadon cocktail. While both pretty distracting in their own way, these two quarter-hour treats — brought together for the latest in Paw Tracks’ sporadic series of split 12” vinyl releases — gain a whole lot from rubbing up against each other as two sides of the same heavily-grooved coin. Animal Collective’s Panda Bear — aka Noah Lennox — rolls out a beautiful medley of sunshiny avant-pop from his latest album Person Pitch, with the emphasis on glitchy electronic textures — shifting seamlessly from a kind of tabla-looped industrial world-music to experimental clip-hop to a dreamy dub, all overlaid with gorgeous, multilayered, Beach Boys harmonies, delivering muffled, just-out-of-reach lyrics that highlight the intention to use vocals as sound not song. New York noiseniks Excepter, for their part, present an intriguingly ineffectual episode that combines ambient noise with formless, rhythmic drifting, soporific heartbeats, electronic drone and oddly incongruous live-show banter — a strangely engaging exercise in going nowhere slowly. You have to wonder who’d win in a fight.