All in the Family
They don’t have beards anymore, but they’re still a community of modern hippies
John Kendle

On the basis of their promo photos, the guys in Akron/Family are the sort of freak-folkies with bushy beards who seem to emerge from nowhere at folk festivals or solstice celebrations.

Furthering the New York quartet’s nouveau-hippie-weirdo image is a sound that is so unvarnished, so uncalculating and so exuberantly of the moment that the group has developed a tremendous buzz since its self-titled debut album was released a year ago.

These days it’s definitely the band’s music, rather than its hirsuteness, that keeps turning heads. As the group heads east on its first cross-Canada tour, bassist Miles Seaton reports that there’s nary a beard in sight.

“No, there’s not much facial hair anymore,” Seaton says prior to a Vancouver show.
“We sound way more psychedelic than we look.”

Still, Akron/Family is an act that plays live while seated in a semi-circle and whose members switch instruments regularly and speak unabashedly about adding the word ‘Family’ to their name because of its communal connotation.

“We thought of the group being like a family, having people coming in and playing and joining for a while,” Seaton says. “It’s sort of an idyllic thing, really, but we kept talking about ‘the Akron family’ and it kind of stuck.”

Guitarist Seth Olinsky’s mother suggested using the slash, so that ‘Akron Family’ becomes a meaningless juxtaposition as ‘Akron/Family.’ People have to to think beyond the literal to get it — which is the way they sometimes have to approach the group’s otherworldly arrangements and its occasional forays into primal scream ragas.

The band is nominally based in Brooklyn, though none of its members is a native of N.Y.C. Seaton and Olinsky met through their jobs at a coffee shop and were soon excited enough about a musical partnership that Olinsky convinced hometown friend and drummer Dana Janssen to move up from Williamsburgh, N.Y.

They completed the quartet after playing a gig in upstate New York (when known simply as Akron) and convincing singer/guitarist Ryan Vanderhoof, the solo opening act, that he should join their band.

Seaton says the communal sound of this group of kids in their mid-20s comes from a shared love of classic rock combined with a love of jazz and new music.

“We like Zeppelin, Dylan, the Dead, all the classics,” he says. “But we also listen to Coltrane, Terry Reilly, Lamont Young and Steve Reich.”

Both Olinsky and Vanderhoof have formal guitar training, while Seaton and Janssen are self-taught. But Seaton says the urge to unlearn formality is at the heart of the songs.

“Both Dana and I are impressed by the way those guys sound like idiot savants when they play with us,” he laughs as his bandmates shout ‘Hey…’ in the background.

“A lot of what we do is in the way the songs are developed. We like breaking things apart and putting them together again, so a lot of our compositions are fairly weird — but they don’t feel weird to us.”

Signed to Young God Records, a label founded and run by former Swans frontman Michael Gira, Akron/Family has become Gira’s band when the post-punker performs as Angels of Light, the moniker of his solo projects since 1999.

Akron/Family’s second release lof 2005 was a split CD featuring eight of its own tunes and five from Angels of Light.

“We just love everything Gira does,” Seaton says. “We love him and we think he’s amazing.”

Seaton may be mock sucking up, but he really needn’t bother. It’s his band that’s being called amazing these days.