Akron/Family

Akron/Family are four extremely nice, sincere and well-mannered young men from rural America who came to NYC (in 2002) to make music, hoping to find a thread of real magic still winding through this city's music scene. They certainly did just that, but they did it by retreating into a tiny Brooklyn apartment, where they made their own world instead, in complete and stubborn isolation. They proceeded (while simultaneously growing alarmingly long beards and developing a playful but hermetic quasi-religious/sonic worldview/creed known as "AK" or sometimes "AK-AK") to make several albums worth of recordings on crude home equipment, the material compulsively chopped, spliced, and orchestrated into fractal jewels of song and schismatically opposed atmospheres.

They accrued at least 3 albums worth of music in this obsessive manner. Their music veers from gentle American country folk to unabashed electronic noise to gathering and erupting crescendos, to extended improvisations that then 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," ha ha! When they all sing together it's like the Beatles or Beach Boys or maybe an eerie and twisted version of The Band.

www.akronfamily.com
www.myspace.com/akak

“A dynamic, experimental, wholly unpredictable indie-folk racket, with influences as disparate as classic rock, psychedelic guitar, found sound and gospel.”
-NPR

“Onstage, the Brooklyn quartet resembles a campfire folk circle where the players suddenly go up in flames, their sets marked by a series of light-switch flips between harmony and anarchy.”
-Pitchfork Media

2008
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