Akron/Family: There’s So Many Colors

By Team JamBase Apr 22, 2008 12:00 am PDT

By: Dennis Cook

Things are not what they seem to be
Nor are they otherwise


Akron/Family
The truth of things penetrates us as surely as any arrow or piece of hot lead. Often we feel the pain of realization long before we understand what’s happened to us. Things that tap into the invisible world that hovers beyond time and space and human motion have a force that’s immediate and irrefutable, even if we’re hard pressed to explain them to others. Music frequently provides the vehicle for such truths, slipping them past our defenses as a melody or lyric and helping us dance our way out of our constrictions. Rarely has a band more actively engaged this deep ground with more gusto and kind hearted spirit than the Akron/Family.

Their sound is a fluid incantation that we’ll let Michael Gira (The Swans, Angels of Light) explain: “They are one of the best bands on the planet. I don’t recall seeing such fantastic live shows ever, except maybe Pere Ubu at the Whiskey in LA circa 1978 or Pink Floyd circa Umma Gumma era 1968/9. Take those unrelated reference points and mix in The Beatles, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Credence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, The Hollies, The Butthole Surfers, Led Zeppelin, and you might get a notion – probably not.”

Gira backs up his boasts with action, using Akron/Family as his backing band in Angels of Light and putting out three albums by the NYC-based band on his Young God Records – their 2005 self-titled debut, 2006’s Meek Warrior and last year’s stunning Love Is Simple. Add to Gira’s laundry list Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, traditional African music, late ’60s John Coltrane, hootenanny folk and a sprinkling of John Fahey and you’re a few inches closer to the mark. That this hyperactive hodgepodge not only makes sense but also shines in a fully integrated way is breathtaking. Seth Olinsky, Dana Janssen and Miles Seaton make freedom music and what could be more American than that?

Akron/Family
“I was asked the other day if we’d be happy being seen in the lineage of jam bands like Phish and Dave Matthews. I actually don’t think we fit very well there but there’s some crossover with The Grateful Dead in that we’re both exploring really deeply American music. It’s blues, it’s hillbilly music, it’s hip-hop, it’s jazz, it’s folk. America has this amazingly rich country and tradition. If you drive around the country, where you’re in the desert then you’re in Big Sur, then you’re the Northwest, then Florida, you find all these different landscapes with such different climates and feelings. The country itself is an epic geographic journey, and sometimes I think one of the things that holds our music together is this kind of American sense of discovery and exploration, with some failure but ultimately the heart at the middle of it is what drives it,” says Olinsky. “A lot of the songs on [Love Is Simple] were written on the road and inspired by the poetry of the American landscape – the scope of it, the wide reaching of it. The more you travel time starts to blur and you see the sameness of the world, in the beautiful way the trees move and the wind blows wherever you go. It’s a little cheesy but there’s beauty to the natural order of things. Traveling America over and over again, you can get into the Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie traditions, the sensuality of the land and the poetry that’s spoken if you just put your ear to the ground.”

Love Is Simple opens with an irony free refrain of “Go out and love, love, love everyone.” These days there’s a reflexive urge to scoff at such unvarnished sweetness but the band rejects that easy cynicism.

Akron/Family
“It’s a very sincere statement. Loving everyone isn’t reasonable because it means you’re going to get hurt, but not loving everyone is also unreasonable because you’ll die with nothing. I can see how that phrase is something to be cynical about because it sounds like a call to action if you take it out of context. It’s really a statement of what we can do, the power we have. Whenever I sing it I’ve always felt it speaks to my belief that the most important thing I can do in any situation I want change to happen in is open my heart to the world. That’s where it’s really gonna happen,” says Seaton. “You can be that change to people. It’s amazing. I see it all the time in New York. I’ll get working and so focused and someone will stop me and just ask, ‘How are you doing?’ It’s a moment that reminds me I’m human, and them taking a moment to do that affects my whole world. Then, I turn around and go to the grocery store and I’m twice as ready to smile at the people there. People don’t realize the huge power this has. It can end up making a difference with wars and poverty. You’re actually making a decision and pointing momentum into a vector of things that feedback on that initial decision.”

This is the Butterfly Effect wrangled into musical form. On a fundamental level, Akron/Family recognizes the cumulative effect of small actions.

Akron/Family
“It’s never in a preachy way for us but making a statement is really intense,” continues Seaton. “In general, the reality is irony is SO delicious. One of my best friends is a brilliant poet and we were discussing how a verb trumps a noun trumps a pronoun trumps an adjective. Irony is the adjective of stances. It tastes so good and you want to crush out on it all the time. But, it’s so brittle, and just as bad is a sort of pious sincerity, which is poisonous as well. Neither of these stances connects me to people. I want to combat irony and cynicism in myself as much as I can. I want to love everybody and touch everybody as much as I can but not in a way that’s always confrontational or feels like I’m judging them or they can’t have an ironic response.”

“We talk about how at shows a band will tell you to snap along or whatever. Whenever we build in parts like that we’ll joke that you can ironically snap. I mean that. If you think it’s kind of cheesy then you can do that because the reality is that unwilling participation will touch those around you,” says Seaton. “I don’t care if people leave the gig and go buy the record. If they have an authentic experience, even if they didn’t really get it, just because 20 extra people snapped the people in front that are really doing it are going to feel it even more. When you open the door and say, ‘Everybody come in’, that means EVERYBODY. The reality is at some shows that’s real uncomfortable. There’s somebody that’s really drunk, pouring beer all over you, and they’re so excited to talk to you about all the ways they ‘get it.’ Or they’re really high on acid and keep hugging you and you’re tripped out and just need some space. When you say, ‘Everybody come in,’ that means indie rockers and cynics and whoever. We don’t want to add to the world’s isolation. We want to inspire the pioneer spirit in everybody and ourselves.”

Continue reading for more on Akron/Family…

 
Historically, this shit is meant to fucking bend time and space and completely disorient a person. There’s no passive listeners, no division between the person with the drum and the person without one. I’ve seen people end up having seriously transcendent experiences at our shows.

Miles Seaton

 
Don’t Be Afraid, You’re Already Dead

“Going up and down, falling apart and coming together, the duality thing is an approach we’ve used. For us, it’s often reflected in chaos and resolution,” says Olinsky. “Having something that’s chaotic and a little out of control, maybe even turns off the audience a little bit with its dissonance, and then resolves into a song that they know or just something sensual and beautiful, gives us ways to draw the audience in and then try and use that energy as a step-off point for something unfamiliar to everyone. Some nights it’s successful, some nights it’s not. We love music. We love chaos. We love pretty things. As we’ve matured it’s gotten more refined but we love wild turns and butt-ending weird things next to each other.”

Akron/Family by Jeff Talbot
This refinement reached a new peak on Love Is Simple, which toned down some of the more outré jazz tendencies, sharpened their songwriting and found them shooting their strange stanzas in widescreen Technicolor while keeping a masterful hand on the camera, at least most of the time. The album is the final bow for the longtime fourth member of Akron/Family, Ryan Vanderhoof, who left the taxing life of a touring musician for a more stable existence. While initially scared about what to do with Love coming out and a tour looming, they quickly discovered Vanderhoof’s departure created space for a larger Family, with one person blossoming into a shifting clan that includes blessedly avant sound warper Greg Davis, the entirety of Megafaun and, on the current West Coast tour, The Dodos.

“The people we attract are just hip to what we do. The Megafaun guys pick up on the more Americana/The Band elements and The Dodos pick up on the more punk rock and African parts. Since the first time we played with [The Dodos] we were all like, ‘Whoa! Meric [Long, guitar] and Logan [Kroeber, drums] brought it heavy.’ We’d have them up to play drums on the end of a song and they were there,” says Seaton. “When Seth and I first got together we were Akron and the idea was we’d have this family, a collectivist, Elephant 6 thing, with all different members and configurations revolving around the core. Then, when Dana came along we had this discussion about going in a more traditional band route. Then Ryan joined and the four-member unit is so classic, and everybody takes up so much space in this band. So, with Ryan leaving, things had to start over in a way with Seth, Dana and I being the core Akron with this Family thing happening very organically.”

“What started out as damage control has turned into this flowering of its own,” adds Olinsky. “Ryan followed his heart and that’s perfect, and we’re finding ourselves in a position where the box is broken open. You get into the four iconic figures, Beatles-esque mindset and [Love Is Simple] is really the plateau of that. We put the walrus skull on the back cover to recognize that records and the concept of records are dying. We’re never gonna be The Beatles or anything like them. That happened and today’s industry is a blank canvas for people like us to do what we do. There are whole new avenues for expression. Even if Ryan had stayed we would have had to spend time developing ourselves at this point. We feel a sense of empowerment in the group right now where we can pull off our dreams and find a way of doing anything.”

The Lightning Bolt Of Compassion

The immortals gently awaken
All possibilities open
Unto one another
And brothers and sisters begin
To see truly through strata

Akron/Family by James Martin
“We got lots of good reviews for Love but they kind of bag on the positive lyrics. It’s unfortunate. I listen to a lot of indie rock records and much of it sounds like a dude complaining or talking about his feelings. That’s fine but I’m not sure if it’s a weird distortion of Bob Dylan, who spoke for many. A lot of the time, people making art is a really self-obsessed act,” says Olinsky. “Our culture is obsessed with newness and genius, and I think people are obsessed with those concepts. A central aspect of our music is joy and the desire to express that in a way that can be shared. There’s little prayers that say ‘I’ but most of them are really an attempt to get past ‘I’. Sincerely, most of the lyrics aren’t about singular emotional experiences.”

Being in the physical presence of their fiercely free, organic music as it unfolds is where the tumblers inside Akron/Family’s schema fully click into place. Few concerts have hit me in the spirit like their performance in San Francisco last October, which transformed this writer from a mere admirer into a full-blown acolyte. They are hell-bent on eradicating any fences that stand between them and those gathered. Not content with mere listeners, Akron/Family summons us into the music, makes us a coconspirator in their machinations, a fiddler at their inferno, a child in their sprinkler spray.

“When I first started making music what I thought was a successful situation was seeing Fugazi and having them step up in my face and tell me to pick up a fucking guitar. It’s so important, and in a lot of ways that’s what we’re trying to bring. Success is inspiring someone to make music, inspiring someone to sing, however it happens,” enthuses Seaton, a huge fan of ritual music of all stripes. “When everybody is singing and moving and there’s this whole undulating thing, there’s a sense that, if it gets heavy enough and you’re focused enough in the moment, you can really forget there’s boundaries between atoms. Historically, this shit is meant to fucking bend time and space and completely disorient a person. There’s no passive listeners, no division between the person with the drum and the person without one. I’ve seen people end up having seriously transcendent experiences at our shows. It’s really audacious in some ways to say that shit but at this point I have to because it’s what I really care for in music. It’s what I’m going for and I don’t give a FUCK if someone thinks I’m a sick bass player. Thank you very much but can we go there together?”

Akron/Family by Deborah Samantha
Understandably, most musicians stay away from this terrain. It’s a tremendous responsibility to be the one with the power rattle that pokes our ancestors and holds up a mirror to our souls. There’s power in being a lightning rod but you can also get your ass crisped. Bad.

“You don’t know what’s gonna happen or what you’re going to bring down [laughs]. There’s a lot of things I go through making music that I don’t talk about. I get off the road and I feel sick for weeks, physically ill,” Seaton says. “I do try to put myself in harm’s way in that situation as much as I can. I feel like putting yourself in that situation is the responsibility of the artist in a lot of ways. For me, and for a lot of people, the heaviest thing they may ever come into contact with is a really profound aesthetic experience. So, in some ways, you’re the intermediary, you’re the host. A priest is not a special thing, they just happen to handle that fuckin’ wafer.”

“With all the changes in the music industry and the undermining of its commercial structure, I feel like music is being returned to the people. I don’t really know what that means,” observes Seaton. “It may mean that I’m out of a job, and that scares me sometimes as an artist in my own little ego world where I want MY voice to be heard. That can sometimes create a little frustration but I can see it happen at our shows that people have enough of an authentic experience that the value of music is increasing exponentially without people really even knowing it. The commercial value is changing, and who knows what that means, but there’s a rift in the matrix that’s making it possible for music to return to folk status. It’s so exciting, so huge. I really want to open myself as much as I can, and having that be more of the agenda than just making great records or whatever matters.”

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