Experimental rock tie-dye for
The Age
Friday December 4, 2009
Akron/Family have flagged their re-creation of themselves, writes Craig Mathieson. OUTCOMES rarely match beginnings: in September 2007, Akron/Family, the US experimental-folk outfit, shed a member with the departure of founding member Ryan Vanderhoof. Reduced to a trio with a new album, Love is Simple, to tour, they worried that there was one less visual element to their performance. A partial solution, according to vocalist and guitarist Seth Olinsky, was to make a stage backdrop.On commission, a friend produced a psychedelic US flag with a tie-dye splatter replacing the stars. The band liked it and mounted it behind them before each show. After a year on tour the flag was battered but it had character. When it came time to record the group's fourth album, this year's Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, they hung it in the recording studio like a regiment's standard they rallied to. Eventually it was photographed and used as the record's cover image, released just as Barack Obama was inaugurated as the country's 44th president.It was considered a political statement, one to be divined and determined. "It was less about concepts of America and more about the process we'd gone through of re-creating ourselves," explains Olinsky, calling in from his new home just outside Portland. It's his latest stop after New York, where the group got their start in 2003, and a more recent tenure in rural Pennsylvania. "One of the reasons that I wanted to leave New York is that you're so hyper-aware every day of all the new ideas that are happening," he says. "When I first moved there it was inspiring but after a while there was so much going and so many cool things that you can be distracted or subconsciously start borrowing them."Like its cover, Set 'Em Wild is a record where small decisions reveal telling details. The band €” drummer Dana Janssen, bassist Miles Seaton and Olinsky €” have an affinity for the freak-folk scene but they're also interested in fertile rhythms and luxurious pop harmonies. Their music jumps around with grace as opposed to frenetic disregard."We're definitely packing a lot of ideas and concepts and sounds into one place and using different techniques to make it more enjoyable," Olinsky says. "Live we put off more energy, almost in a punk rock way, which is easier to relate to for a listener €” 'I'm getting excited!' €” and then you can work in more complex sounds or abstract transitions than people might usually relate to."Olinsky studied jazz, immersing himself in it so completely that at a certain point he no longer heard the sounds, just a breakdown that consisted of form and theory. Soon after he discovered punk rock ("it sounded very refreshing") and he's been soaking up the quicksilver techniques of African guitarists such as Mali's Ali Farka Toure."The guitar playing is just beautiful and what you have is that a lot of African guitarists learn different parts from their culture but then they were also into Jimi Hendrix, so it's not merely this pure lineage €” it has a modern edge as well," Olinsky says. "It's opened up my playing."The vast jazz canon, however, has left one abiding lesson with Olinsky."In rock music there's a belief that someone's main creative arc is over by the time they're 30," he says. "For us everything we're doing is a learning process and I don't think we've reached our potential yet."Akron/Family play the Corner Hotel on Thursday.
© 2009 The Age