akron family

They accrued at least 3 albums worth of music in this obsessive manner. Along the way, they sent me the increasingly compelling results. Soon I was completely won over – stunned in fact – by a show at Brooklyn’s Pete’s Candy Store, where the music veered from gentle American country folk to unabashed electronic noise to gathering and erupting crescendos, to extended skronk 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! Ryan, who sings lead on most of the songs, has one of those pure and sonorous voices that when sliding up to the higher registers inevitably evokes comparisons to angels and elicits uncomfortable feelings in girl and boy alike, but when they all sing together it’s like the goddamn Beatles or Beach Boys or maybe an eerie and twisted version of The Band.


	AKRON FAMILY
			They accrued at least 3 albums worth of music in this obsessive manner. Along the way, they sent me the increasingly compelling results. Soon I was completely won over – stunned in fact – by a show at Brooklyn’s Pete’s Candy Store, where the music veered from gentle American country folk to unabashed electronic noise to gathering and erupting crescendos, to extended skronk 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! Ryan, who sings lead on most of the songs, has one of those pure and sonorous voices that when sliding up to the higher registers inevitably evokes comparisons to angels and elicits uncomfortable feelings in girl and boy alike, but when they all sing together it’s like the goddamn Beatles or Beach Boys or maybe an eerie and twisted version of The Band.
	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.
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