Akron / Family / S/t

Young God

Akron/Family came to NYC in 2002 to make music, hoping to find a thread of real magic still winding through The Big Apple’s music scene by retreating into a tiny Brooklyn apartment, where they made their own world instead, in complete and stubborn isolation. They grew alarmingly long beards, developed a playful but hermetic, quasi-religious, sonic worldview / creed known as “Ak” or sometimes “Ak-Ak” and recorded on crude home equipment at least three albums’ worth of material, which they compulsively chop, splice, and orchestrate into fractal jewels of song and schismatically opposed atmospheres. The music veers from gentle American country folk to unabashed electronic noise, to gathering and erupting crescendos, to extended skronk improvisations that suddenly cut to an LSD version of a backwoods barbershop quartet or a Louvin Brothers spiritual - sometimes all within the course of one ridiculously long “song.” Their enthusiasm for pure sound too is evident in instances such as a squeaking chair played by Miles Seaton, all four Akrons simultaneously violently beating their chests, the resulting percussive sound being the air released from their mouths with each beat. As the band recorded with Michael Gira and Jason La Farge, a song would sometimes be described as “too red” or “not aluminum enough” or some other arcane reference, but inevitably, corrections made with the aid of a screwdriver or maybe the sanded metal rails of a staircase resulted in an unpredictable but “correct” result. When the pure and sonorous voice of Ryan Vanderhoof, who sings lead on most of the songs, slides up to the higher registers, it inevitably evokes comparisons to angels and elicits uncomfortable feelings in girl and boy alike; when they all sing together its like the goddamn Beatles or Beach Boys or maybe an eerie and twisted version of The Band.

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