 |
Interview with Seth Olinski from AKRON/FAMILY (August 2006) |
Murao : Are each member's taste for music different? or do they have similarity? Please let me know which music, movies or books do you guys like. |
| Seth: We certainly all have different likes and dislikes, but there is definitely a lot of overlap. Miles and I often talk about how it is easy for us as a band to get caught up focusing on all the places where we individually disagree on things like taste or aesthetic, but really it is quite amazing how we all agree so much on what we like and what we want to do with music. A lot of this is intent and direction, but there is certainly a lot of agreement in taste as well. That said, I have recently been developing a taste for new age and world musics that I am not so sure how well it will go over with the band. |
| Murao : It is mentioned that you recorded about at least 3 albums worth of songs at the tiny apartment in blookyn/NY on Young God records website. Did you all live in the same apartment? |
| Seth : Dana and I moved in together, and then Ryan, and then Miles, so at one time, we all lived in the apartment for 3 months together. |
| Murao : If you have some memory of the apartment, please let me know about it. |
| Seth : It was just one big open loft space, 1000sq feet, and so we lived in this without any individual rooms. It was kind of terrible, but somewhat sweet looking back. It was very cold in the winter, and extremely hot in the summer, and we weren't allowed to play loud there, so we mainly wrote and recorded acoustic/electronic music on the computer. |
| Murao : And in this connection, the your photo in the artwork of the first album, was it taken in that apartment? or different place? |
| Seth : No. That photo was taken at a really fantastic venue here in Brooklyn called Pete's Candy Store where we played quite often, and also where Michael Gira first came out to see us. |
| Murao : Please tell me about when you met Michael Gira first time. Have you known about him before? What was your first impression of him? |
| Seth : We sent Michael cds that we were recording at the loft, about 3 over the course of a year, and finally he came out to see us play. We did not know that much about him, but were certainly intimidated from the stage seeing the shadowy cowboy hatted figure in the back; though he encouragingly hooted the whole time. We were not sure if he liked us or had had too much to drink( turns out it was both). |
| Murao : Were the songs from "Meek Warroir" and "the split album with Angels of light" developed from many materials which you had recorded before ? Or did you creat new songs for those cds? |
| Seth : The split was mostly songs that dated back to before the debut cd, but we just had not really developed them. Touring for 6 weeks in support of the debut cd really gave us a chance to work out this material which is more live based. The songs from Meek Warrior were for the most part, songs we had worked on or recorded at home on our own over the past year. We kind of threw these together for the most part the few weeks before the recording when we found out that we would have two days to record with Hamid Drake in Chicago. |
| Murao : I think that your music is based on accoustic sounds and also took in electoronic sound, and the balance between them is really superb. What kind of influence did you get from electronic music or experimental music? |
| Seth : We are for the most part influenced by acoustic music, including rock music. We are all in turns rooted in classic rock, jazz, punk, folk musics, etc. We have certainly been exposed to some electronic music, but the electronic aspects of the debut cd are mostly because of our limited resources for recording the band, and therefore having to record and chop things up bit by bit on the computer. As for experimental music, I would say that personally I am more influenced by free jazz/free improv musics, and older drone musics, including Feldman, Riley, Niblock.....etc, as opposed to more computer based musics. |
| Murao : I also think it is impressive that your music boldly took in editing by computer. What is your attention when you arrange or mix the songs. |
| Seth : A lot of the computer work comes in on parts that are open or improvised live, that maybe don't capture the same immediacy in the studio, so we mess with them at home to come up with something interesting to listen to on cd. I liked when Michael on first hearing the cuts of Blessing Force compared it to some of the cuts on Miles Davis' On the Corner. |
| Murao : I feel that Akron/Family's sound is designed very carefully and at the same time, i also feel strongly it is improvisational. In your music, is improvisation important? Maybe it is important only for playing, but also does the improvisational reflect in mixing and arrangement? |
| Seth : I think that improvisation is incredibly important to us as a band and individually as people and musicians. We try and incorporate it in many ways live and in the studio. Sometimes just purely improvising, other times in just taking new approaches to older material. In the studio often times arrangements and layers of orchestration happen quickly and spontaneously, though doing a lot of actual improvising in the studio is still something that we want to do sometime. |
| Murao : Your accoustic sounds and beatiful harmonies attract me a lot... What kind of influence did you get from roots music? |
| Seth : Like I said before, we are all into and influenced by many different kinds of music, and roots music is certainly one. American folk and pre war blues are definitely big influences on me, and also on a lot of other music that I grew up with. I think in general I move back and forth. Like finding Zeppelin or other 60's rock, then getting into Muddy Waters or old chess recordings in relation to htis, then finding all the 1920's acoustic blues and then listening to Muddy Waters again and having a whole new understanding of what he is doing electrifying this older acoustic sound. In fact, I find it increasingly beautiful how one can enjoy certain recorded music in one way, then discover other influences, learn more, experience more, and then bring all this new information back to discover something all over again. For example, I just recently got into Gram Parsons for the first time, and I feel like it has brought a whole new level of understanding to Dylan and the Dead. |
| Murao : "Meek Warrior" implys about you guys? What kind of image did you have when you named this title? |
| Seth : It was originally just the name of one of the songs on the album and then we decided that it would make a great name for the record. I don't think we meant for it to directly relate to us in any way, but it certainly is a very powerful idea and says a lot about a very little. |
| Murao : The song "Blessing Force" or "The Rider", they sound like more jam session or all of you playing together than previous stuff. Please let me know the background of those song were created. |
| Seth : " The Rider " was really just a riff that Miles came up with and that we went into the studio without too many ideas. Miles kind of directed us a bit with Hamid, and later the words and vocals were added. Yeah it was built more or less from a jam in the studio. "Blessing Force" came about a little differently. I had recorded a very short version of it at home, that we then took and worked out as a band, and it eventually grew into what it is. |
| Murao : If you have something strong memory or impression when you recorded "Akron/Family", "Akron/Family & Angels of Light" and "Meek Warrior", please let me know. |
| Seth : It is all a fog. I'm really not quite sure what I have been doing for the last year of my life. |
| Murao : Lastly, if you compare Akron/Family to some animal, what you would be? |
Seth : Supposedly the tiger is considered the meek warrior. But Akron/Family, we are certainly Bear-like in that we like to sleep a lot and eat fish, and scratching feels good.....hmmm? I don't really know. All the animals I keep thinking of seem so much more graceful than we are. Humans and their endeavors, though beautiful, seem so flawed, and animals seem to have such a simple grace and function. I think bands are a truly human dysfunction. If there were animal species like bands, they probably would have died off long ago. ok, ok,.........caribou! |
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