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Akron/Family’s newest album, Akron/Family II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT, is as wild and freaky as the title suggests. The unashamedly joyful record brings together electronic experimentation, fuzz-?guitar freak-outs and pastoral folk to great effect, and is already a strong contender for 2011 year-?end lists. We asked multi-?instrumentalist Miles Seaton about the recording process the live show hits the Horseshoe Sunday (February 20).
How are you approaching the live show these days? Is it possible to approximate the sound of the new material as a trio?
Well, trying to approximate the sound is a little less of a consideration. I think that we are more concerned with trying to achieve the highest level of feeling when it comes to expressing the material. Our live shows have always been varied but an in-person performance has a lot of advantages that a recording doesn’t. Just the fact that it’s happening in present tense goes a long, long way. Eye contact, improvisation, etc can all potentially help communicate the feeling of the material to even a greater extent than the recordings.
Also, this record actually has less overdubs than probably any other record for us. A lot of the perceived layers are just crazy harmonic overtones created by different distorted sounds interacting – more a function of complementary timbre than mass. Ideally we’ll be able to achieve a lot of the sonic qualities of the record with just the three of us.
Can you describe the songwriting process for the new album? Did it come out of a lot of jamming, or do individual members bring songs to the rest of the band?
A lot of both – a lot of writing happens for us while we are on our own, and then we spent a fair amount of time just playing the music together on tour. Some songs were born out of just jamming, and then forms, lyrics, and orchestration just evolved over the course of us performing them in different contexts. As the narrative emerged, it started to collect songs to communicate itself, and songs started to serve the narrative. Writing is a constantly evolving process that usually keeps going even after the record is mastered and turned in to the label.
What kind of effect does not living in the same city have on the band?
There are ways that it’s been great for us to all take time to focus on our own lives a little more, but it’s hard for me being the satellite out here in NYC sometimes, just because I love the other two guys so much. I think that over time, it will help us to develop much more individually, which will in turn make the group much more dynamic and artistically successful in the long run.
What was the deal with the strange press release about the new album – was any of it actually true?
Of course it is, and it isn’t, and why does that really matter much? How does one tell the capital T truth about inspiration or love or the feeling of what it’s like to be alive? There is a fantastical element to the way that the record has been presented, but for me, it feels like a duty to talk about the world in fantastical, magical terms. Because life is magical. What does anyone get out of a dry, boring, factual, nihilistic account of life? Shat does an artist who tells that story about themselves to themselves get out of it? Not inspiration. I feel a little impassioned about this, but the reality is that the more fantastical we are, the closer we are to the truth of how it actually felt to travel to Japan and feel swept away in inspiration, to go to Detroit in the summertime and witness nature reclaiming that city through the bones of the crumbling industrial landscape. It felt magic, so why empty it of magic before we share it with the world? If anything, it’s more responsible to pour more magic into it.
It seems like you guys seem to poke fun at your hippy tendencies just as much as you embrace them – is that an accurate assumption? Are you ever uncomfortable with that aspect of your image?
Sure, sometimes I’m a little uncomfortable with it. Ss a kid I was really into crazily aggressive hardcore music as much as I was into Hendrix or the Dead, and I was into LSD as much as I was into speed and fortified wine. It’s all part of the anything-goes situation. A lot of the enduring messages of love and revolution from that 60’s stuff makes more sense to me today as I grow further away from being a drug-addled, cynical, angry teenager. I feel like it’s comfortable in the indie landscape and in life to guard yourself and to make witty intellectualism the highest form of expression. It feels to me that sometimes the whole reason that we get called “hippies” is because we don’t really buy into that so much. Not because we can’t – I love irony and wit as much as the next person. But I understand how I can hide in them as a person or as an artist, and i don’t want to bring some half-assed version of myself to the table when it comes time to express something. Call me crazy, but that feels a lot more radical and rock and roll then the other option.
You guys have collaborated with Toronto’s Do Make Say Think a few times – can you tell me how that came about, and what kind of connections you see between the sounds of the two bands?
We loved DMST for a long time, and when we first came to Toronto on tour with Angels of Light, I looked out and saw Justin Small in the audience. After the show I went and gushed to him a little, and apparently flattery got me somewhere. Actually, we all ended up talking, hanging out and realizing that we had a lot in common and that we should just hang out together sometime. As we played more in Toronto and visited more, it just happened pretty organically that we started to work with one another. It’s been something that I look forward to every time we come through town – we love those dudes!
Despite the explosions of noise, this album is still very easy to listen to, and very “big” sounding. Did working with Chris Koltay have a lot to do with that aspect?
I think that Chris Koltay is an incredible recordist, and he had a major part in the production process. I feel like we communicated really well to him as producers about what the sound we were looking for was, and he was incredible at helping us to achieve it. Part of the reason it sounds so “big”, is (as I was talking about earlier), that there is a lot more space in the music, so we could “push” the recordings harder and make them more distorted, making the whole thing feel much more immediate and larger than itself. The distortions resonate, and harmonics appear in the resonance. It has a cumulative effect, a lot like light – you can’t “see” all the colors of the spectrum but you sense that they are there. Chris really understands how to make things feel heavy and large. He also likes the low end a lot.
You recorded in Detroit, which doesn’t have a reputation for being the most cheerful place, and yet the album feels very joyful. How did the recording location impact the mood?
I think I touched on this earlier, but there was a major inspiration in the way that nature is reclaiming Detroit. It was also summer, and we are also all in love. We were very excited to make this music, and there was a real sense of freedom that felt ever-present in Detroit. A lot of people living with abandon and on the margins of society in the best possible way – “the skyscrapers are all vacant, what do we do? Let’s start a skyscraper climbing club!”. This is the vibe there, and it doesn’t get a lot more joyful than that.”
