Akron/Family

[Michael Gira | Swans]: It was a century ago when I first saw Akron/Family perform, in the tiny back room of a bar in Brooklyn that held perhaps 20 people. Akron sat in chairs on a small stage festooned with red velvet and small theater light bulbs, their plentiful gadgets and musical toys littering more than a few tables – always seemingly on the verge of collapse. The young men awkwardly held their guitars in their laps or gently played drums/percussion, apparently trying not to knock anything over (to disastrous results) mid set. Cables and extension cords laced through their legs, they proffered a sort of delicate, improvisational experimentalism, laced with occasional rock grooves, but most extraordinarily, often punctuated with beautiful 4 part harmonies... Time passed, and I recall seeing them at a sold out show somewhere in Europe and thinking “Wait! This is fucking Led Zeppelin!” - and that is a huge vote of approval. They sounded nothing like LZ of course, but something about the supercharged commitment and force of the sound evoked a similar full blooded ROCK, albeit with an adventurous, skewed bent and a marked tendency to let things suddenly collapse into utter chaos then snap back just as quickly into focus in a moment of pure, unabashed sonority. Absolutely thrilling, stunning, and great fun, too...

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[Seth Olinsky | Akron/Family]: The album started with visions of large monumental sounds inspired by Heizer and Turrell; American works on a grand scale, monuments, dirty hands and an epic American masculinity. Dust, Stone, Sky, Earth. These broad, bold strokes would come to pass but not quite as expected. A Sci Fi aesthetic narrative emerged. Tackling distant pasts and future humanism, the pain and idiocy of our contemporary culture. How to deal with it open heartedly? The boredom, the sadness and speed. The plots within plots of Dune mirrored in many layers of sound. Creating 3D sonic atmospheres that our songs and singers inhabit. Our story, a story, all stories. Told in verses, in underground language, in sub frequencies. Not audible, only felt, intuited, imagined in some deepest psychic space that you are yet to know. A strange story. Of the future, of yourself. Of everyone. We are all we are, only this and yet we move forward. Along some line to somewhere. And who knows? 

[Miles Seaton | Akron/Family]: As with other Akron/Family records the Idiomatic perspective shifts restlessly. From Shamanic hypno-mantras to Noise-damaged Soul anthems to North african street frenzy, from Droning Microtonal Balladry to modular synthesizer destruction to Lynchian Doo-Wop and back again. The sound is propulsive and driven by its physicality, and a disciplined acknowledgement of Lineage. Akron/Family is here, with drums and guitars like divining rods calling on Sonny Sharrock and Link Wray, on Elvin Jones and John Bonham, on Jimmy Garrison and Aston Barrett. But when we sing we are calling on ourselves, on the deep river of inspiration that connects the whole. We are singing Old Stories. The narrative thread is one of the Desert, that ancient ocean floor, long dried to reveal a barren expanse of scorched fossils. Of Life and Death and Time, of a vision of a people, weary and traumatized - driven from their nobility and sense of purpose to the brink of total nihilism under the lash of information overload. Intelligence giving way to remix culture, nothing to do but blindly live as customers, stumbling, content drunk through the digital bazaar. A bunch of fucking Payers. All of us. The hot wind is blowing hard on us and what is there to do but turn our face to it and sing?