Akron/Family are crazy and wonderful. They mix the folksy with energetic and fun post-rock, occasionally visiting hip-hop and world music. Their latest album, “Love is Simple” is out now.
We met with Miles Seaton of Akron/Family shortly before the band’s Brighton gig at The Pressue Point. It was a tiny backstage room covered with gig posters.
Roy: So tonight’s the first leg of your UK tour?
Miles: This is the first day of the UK tour, yes. This is our first tour as a three-piece band, we were a four-piece band for a long time so…
Roy: Is it scarier?
Miles: It was a little. It’s an adventure. It’s good.
Roy: Was ‘Love is Simple’ recorded with the fourth member?
Miles: Yes. Not the best timing necessarily but there’s never a good time to break your arm. He’s actually incredibly happy.
Roy: What’s he doing now?
Miles: He’s just living his life, a little bit more domestic life. He just had other priorities. If there’s anything else you want to do with your life, touring is always gonna be combatting with that.
Roy: Do you tour a lot?
Miles: To us it feels like constantly but I mean, we spend a lot of time working on the energy so there’s a sense of eternally working to try and sort of - be present for this. I feel it’s very exhausting and then we spend a lot of time trying to prepare for it emotionally and a lot of time trying to recuperate. It’s good. It’s kind of the ground of the job. Recording is wonderful. Touring is kind of hard.
Roy: Why the red headband?
Miles: These headbands were actually given to us by our friend Amy Waller, we met through her group, The Lexie Mountain Boys. They recorded with us some of the songs for “Love is Simple”, they’re from Baltimore and she also makes and designs clothes. She made us these headbands for the tour and gave us a really beautiful psychedelic American flag to hang. We’ve been talking to her and we’re trying to get her to design our set so when we get back to The States we’re going to start working with her to get a whole atmosphere for our shows. I really like these headbands.
Roy: Can you summarise what you’re trying to do as a band in a six worded sentence?
Miles: It’s not my sentence but… Connect our dreams to our hearts.
Roy: That’s good. Whose is it?
Miles: Seth’s.
Roy: If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Miles: I think it’ll be quite cool to just be like cupid or something. Go around and make people love each other.
Roy: A bit like Al Green.
Miles: Just like Al Green.
Roy: They were playing him downstairs when you guys were soundchecking.
Miles: He’s so good! We went dancing last night in Belgium and we were trying to find some music to dance to and there was a lot of techno and house and we went to this place that was a shisha bar with people sort of relaxing but there was music playing and it really had a good beat, more electro and we met some people who went to the show. We sort of took over the place and started dancing and it was crazy and wonderful and someone said he knew some DJs across town who spin some soul and salsa and to me, that’s like the kind of music I want to dance to. So we took a cab immediately and danced until seven in the morning and it was amazing. They played Al Green and Nina Simone. It was unbelievable.
Roy: What would you say is the best last song?
Miles: For a DJ set? Que Sera Sera, the Sly and The Family Stone cover.
Roy: Did Sly and The Family Stone do a cover?
Miles: It’s so good.
Roy: What’s next for Akron/Family?
Miles: Well, we’re going to move to a different label so with that we’re spending some time trying to refocus about what we want to do and we’ve been listening to a lot of African Music.
Roy: Such as?
Miles: Ali Farka Touré is a big one for us and then I’ve been listening to Fela Kuti. He’s an amazing Nigerian musician from the 70s. Very political figure. He started this genre called Afrobeat and then you know… we actually just got a really amazing gift of being able to play and share a stage with Afel Bocoum, he’s a student of Ali Farka Touré. His band was performing in this festival in Der Haag and we asked him if he wanted to play with us and he spoke French and he understood that we wanted to get up during his set and play so he gave Seth his guitar and we played his song and…. it was so beautiful, it was the sweetest thing.
Roy: Do you speak any foreign languages?
Miles: Unfortunately no. I can ask for coffee any time.
Roy: Which ones would you like to learn?
Miles: Actually. I’m thinking maybe, I’ve never been interested in French but after hearing all these people from Mali and West Africa speak French, I thought it would be good for me to learn some of that and also Spanish. I think Spanish is beautiful and I love Mexico and Salsa.
Roy: What new music are you excited about?
Miles: Jay Z’s new album is absolutely wonderful, I just heard today and it sounded real good. There’s this band called Dirty Projectors. I really like their album.
Roy: As an arts magazine, we care about the links between Music and other arts like visual and poetry. Are there any direct influences?
Miles: Yeah, especially when it comes to a lot of abstract sounds. I performed a couple of times with dance. At some point, I was living in New York City and upstate two hours north there’s a place called Beacon and they have what’s called the Dia museum and there’s Richard Serra, do you know him?
Roy: Nope.
Miles: He’s an amazing sculptor and his pieces are just massive and completely imposing and they manipulate the space around them so much. They’re just massive blocks of steel sitting at different angles and they’re geometric enough that they’re not nailed or stuck to the ground but they just sit and lean against each other so precarious. People have died installing his art. Thousands of pound of steel, shipped over and forged to his perfect specifications. I think his pieces are really amazing. A lot of harsh and uncomfortable abstract noise came from his sculptures.
I like food… culinary arts. Coffee… I love coffee! Espressos…There’s some place in London called Flat White which I heard is very very good.
Roy: What do you think of Starbucks?
Miles: Y’know, it’s standard. It’s like the Burger King of coffee. Consistency sells.
I love poetry. I’m really into the Sufi poets. I read the famous stuff. Ossian, he’s a good friend of ours, his poetry is great.
Roy: Do you write poetry?
Miles: I dabble. When I’m inspired to do… it’s usually five line poems, I might have one of them I wrote today.
Found it [also published in poetry section]:
Severing ‘neath the greying sky
We whisper and shout several kisses
We wager frolic with folly
AND WIN!
Roy: I like that.
We’re going to play a game. I give you a word and you need to make up a definition for it.
The first word is Esquivalience
Miles: It comes from the greek word esquire and it’s based on a very pompous, arrogant feeling that one has that causes them to act with integrity and passion and decisiveness and do good despite of themselves.
Roy: Second word is Ensourcell
Miles: It’s a new drug. The drug reprograms neural pathways in the brains of meth-amphetamine addicts who have been scarred and damaged through lack of sleep over time. It’s really revolutionary. Ensourcell retrains the mind to be able to focus on things.
Roy: Last one is Emboindpoint
Miles: This is tough. The time of year when the moon is very low in harvest and a certain type of light occurs that brings out the most lightning bugs you can possibly ever imagine only in a certain section of Tennessee. The emboindpoint is that time in late summer when the light is just right for lightning bugs.
Roy: Do you have any cool nicknames?
Miles: Cucumber, because when I’m on tour I feel pickled. Milo, my mum calls me Milo. I can’t believe I’m actually telling you that.
Roy: If you weren’t doing music, what job would you be doing?
Miles: Before I was a musician, I actually did make gourmet espresso coffee for years and…
Roy: What’s your favourite bean?
Miles: There’s a bean being grown in Panama right now. It’s called The Panama Don Pachi, it’s a very small micro-level that they’re growing them and it’s incredible and when you cup it, when you cup coffee you pour water at a certain temperature over the grounds and you allow it to sit for a few minutes and with a spoon you break the crust that comes out with the coffee and you just sip it with a spoon and you spit it out, like wine. It’s got an essence of Bergumunt and different things. The place to buy it is Stumptown Coffee which is in Portland, Oregon. As far as coffee roasters in the world, I’d say Stumptown is amazing, they’re in Portland. There you go.
Roy: What question have you always wanted to be asked in interviews?
Miles: I would like it if people were more curious about what our intentions were. We actually took the time to think about how people felt when they listened to the record.
Roy: What are your intentions?
Miles: This record has the most clear sense of message than any record we made so… people who review it, there’s generally a sense of cynicism and suspended disbelief and they say that “this is actually a bunch of hippy crap but the fact of the matter is that these guys are actually able to play and their songs are good” so that’s just hypocritical and we’re talking about love the way most people feel hate, ok? like, the love that is the force fractalised into being some sort of emotional grasping, that kind of love. There’s still love at the base of that. Love that’s all there is. That’s the kind of love. And that’s very simple but once it becomes a human thing, once it becomes a confused romantic thing then it becomes very complicated so that’s a clear distinction we…
Roy: Do you sometimes worry that people only care about the sound not the message?
Miles: No. I don’t mind. I don’t actually mind. That’s OK. I don’t particularly care if people get it or not but it’s just frustrating when people mistake it for being… “of course love is not simple, I’m heartbroken, I’m sad, every happiness that I have just goes away, it’s not simple”, it’s a little deeper than that.
I also find that English interviews often ask about the person’s life.
Roy: It’s odd. I often wonder why do people care… maybe there’s a bond between the listener and the music and people want to know more on the creator…
Miles: I don’t really like to have a division between stage and people, we work very hard to try and break it down as much as possible and encourage people to not treat live experience and live music like a movie. The reality is that the commercial value of music is depleting, it’s falling away, it’s changing so rapidly.
Roy: It’s all about gigs at the moment…
Miles: Yeah. It’s a little scary sometimes but I feel it’s just the natural course of music going back to its origins which is to express the sound of people, that’s what folk music is. Whatever… it matters if its speaking for every person. There’s a sense of wanting to be with each other. We have the stage and we have the amplifiers and you know, we can’t have dancing without music and we can’t have music without dancing. It’s all just a bunch of light reflecting off itself and a bunch of sound waves reflecting off themselves and the whole fucking room, the walls, everything - its totally not a solid situation. It’s a bunch of whirling pieces, tiny across the sea and when you have the opportunity of manipulating these things by moving your body or by playing, by making a sound, it’s a magical magical thing and that’s so beyond commercial value - it’s so priceless to be in that moment. It’s such a gift and I feel like I want to be able to be a part of that and I know we demand a lot from the audience but we really want them to try to… not trust us to be good but to surrender to this - we all have to surrender together, we all have the same lives, just let it go. You can leave and take it home with your or not but while you’re there it’s ok to be however. It’s ok to be sad, happy, in the corner, off the ground. It sounds pretentious and far fetched but I think the only way to do it is to try.
Bruce Springsteen and some other guys talk about politics and shit and it’s like, man, that’s so late in the game. What about the special opportunity we have to love the people standing right next to us - just let go of the barriers and not be afraid to inspire people. There’s a change that predates politics. I believe that is a special power people have.
The only thing that makes human beings feel like human beings is dancing and music. Art too has that.
Contributors
Roy Marmelstein
Roy is the Editor and Founder of Platforms Magazine.
