< bmbz > released digitally today on Family Tree Records —–> HERE!!!!!!!
–bmbz—
Christmas Eve, 2010. Here goes nothing.
A small group of musicians, engineers, insider journalists, and G.F.S.M.S.A had been enlisted the week before to “leak” distorted fantasy noise bombed out versions/perspectives of our new record onto the internet, that our friends and fans and enternet enemies would be able to download Christmas morning, thinking it was our new album. And it worked! Posted on Sordo, picked up by magiska, then leaksallday.com–I’d never been so excited to have an album be listed on leaksallday! All this along with versions leaked into super elite file sharing communities by our Christmas spies. A fun way to start the new year. We’d held off for weeks and weeks on letting anyone hear the real record so that people would be able to download these noise records and only have their own ears to judge them by. The first 2 versions posted on xmas eve 2010 were 1/6 by our friend and modern day electro acoustic luminary Greg Davis, and my version, 2/6.
In many ways, hearing Greg’s version weeks before was a lot of what spurred the whole project forward. We originally had the idea to have friends distort stereo files of the record and leak these on to the internet as a joke. But when we got back Greg’s version, we couldn’t believe our ears.
Greg had just had a baby girl and was at home in the cold Vermont winter, in full new parental bliss. And perhaps even unbeknownst to him, this bliss poured off into his bmb creativity. His bmbz version of the record was like the psychedelic alter-ego aura of the “real” record we’d made. In fact, we all stepped back and questioned what the “real” record was. It was as if he cracked open our record’s shell and revealed some of the glowing fuzz lights we had initially planted and wished to grow inside there. Here was a perspective, as if a photo taken of Shinu TNT’s glowing aura at early dawn before you can really see, or maybe more closely a photo taken of Shinju TNT backlit by 1000 strobe lights, that spoke to some of our original visions for the record more then the record itself. It was as if Shinju TNT were a place, and these were the different perspectives of looking at it – from different characters eyes, or points of view.
For us an album has always been a snapshot of a thousand inspirations and expressions frozen in time, and many times that frozen perspective does not quite capture and reflect all the ideas that went into it. Sometimes a rough mix is all the more creative, as you hear it with that sense of potential to go in multiple directions, all the possible mixes that exist as possibilities. The final mix sometimes feeling flat for its singular conclusion.
And here was an exploded perspective of the statement that rang equally true. I remember the first time hearing Greg’s version on headphones after he sent it over. A chill ran up my arm just knowing immediately that he’d nailed it and that this was not just a prank or any simple remix, it was not even a revisiting, but a forward visioning. A new life for the whole statement.
This gave us the freedom to de+reconstruct ourselves. No remix but a re-envisioning. A new sense of possibility.
This set off a chain reaction. Miles, Dana, and I all started pounding out our own versions, and we enlisted our friends to make some too. No longer precious the stereo files were torn apart a thousand different ways. Phil Cook from Megafuan was brought on to do a piano version. Fletcher Kaufman from Williamsport decided to take one on, making his skewed outsider version, and Mark Lawson contributed a track from Montreal. Tommy Yasuhara made a bmbd video take on his own So it Goes video. It was all conducted in the true spirit of fun. As much as I’d like to look back and say there was a master plan—there wasn’t. It was a bunch of friends, playing against the world a little bit, having a laugh, and in this simple freedom getting to stretch the sounds a little further as they went.
A few weeks after Christmas, we followed up with version 3/6 by Dana. We loved the bmbz music so much that in the meantime we edited and compiled a <bmbz> double vinyl, where record one starts mainly with Greg’s versions and then takes off into the stratosphere with record 2. We lovingly decorated the art with all the hilarious statements of online chatter declaring our lunacy, idiocy, and genius as they heard these bombed versions of the records for the first time.
By the time we were ready to drop 4 and 5 on the internet world, Shinju TNT the “real” record had already been leaked. So there was no fun in trying to fake that anymore. So as a tip of the hat to the old culture jammers who started the Napster Bombing years ago (yes, that’s where we got the name), we decided spread the fun and plant 4 and 5 in zip files as other artists yet to be leaked records : Cass Mccombs, Beastie Boys, Battles, The Strokes, Death Cab for Cutie, Panda Bear, Pony Tail, Bill Callahan……..I’m not sure how far out these ever made it, internet literacy being so much higher now then in the days of the ‘ol culture jammers, so I have streamed these versions below along with other dig artifacts of the bmbz times.
Now looking back, there is already a little nostalgia, but there is not much to make sense of, and no point to prove. Ultimately know this:
IT WAS FUN
Hartford Advocate Gives Shinju TNT Album of the Week-Accidentally Reviews a bmbd version from the Internet
They gave it album of the week, but the reviewer must have accidentally downloaded one of the fakes off of the internet to review. And now they have taken down the review. Wish I had saved it.
Solid Little Rock Jams – bmbz essay I
Live Blogging The New Akron/Family Thing
Part I: 1/6 & 2/6
A few months ago, a representative of Akron/Family’s label Dead Oceans announced that that band’s new record would be titled S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT and that the band members recorded it during a period of time spent living in the side of an active volcano in Japan while listening to underground noise cassettes. You can read all about the care put into the album’s delivery method elsewhere. Note that Dead Oceans did not even receive a copy of the full album, only samples on a CD-R and a promise from the album’s producer that it would “transcend the internet.”
And yet, a few days ago, on Christmas day, a leak of the record began circulating and nobody really questioned it. Obviously the music took some people aback because if the leak was any evidence, Akron/Family were gearing up to release a noise record, full of blown out brutality in addition to gorgeous ambient passages, but little in the way of the psychedelic indie folk tendencies that many of their fans go to their music for. The only identifiable moments that fall into that category sound heavily edited and distorted, endlessly remixed and buried under mounds of noise and effects. But there was very little talk of the skull on the cover art that came attached to the files… or the presence of the numbers “2/6″ and the color alterations of the cover art from what had been originally revealed months earlier. Or the song titles that seemed to have been written using some kind of pseudo witch house/2010 M.I.A. aesthetics.
I played the leaked record twice, the second listen much louder and more enjoyable than the first. I liked that they went as far as they did. For most of the time that I’ve spent following them (since 2005), I’ve known that they are some of the most peerlessly freaky motherfuckers making music in the western world. Without penning a massive treatise laying out all the reasons why I like them, I will say that their versatility had me stunned from the beginning… creating an hour long melodic folk masterpiece here, unleashing some of the most electrifyingly assaultive classic rock freak-outs of the modern day there. On Meek Warrior, I found out that they were into free jazz and were comfortable with releasing a heavy psychedelic stomper about riding dolphins. On Love Is Simple, I found out that they really are hippies who are here to make all my Crazy Horse/Dead/Yes/The Band dreams come fucking true. Seeing them on that tour, I realized that they are incredibly funny gentlemen who will do just about anything to make their performances more amusing for themselves. As I might have guessed from hearing the records, they lacked the highly reserved qualities of many artists and writers associated with independent music. They have loads of humility and an appreciation of the absurd, which is a lot rarer than it should be. Sometimes they write embarrassingly simplistic lyrics communicating embarrassingly simplistic messages, sometimes they kick out the jams and melt the unsuspecting freak folk audience’s face for an entire show, sometimes they slip in a couple Dead covers because why the fuck would a band get up on stage and not blow minds with an extended take on “Turn On Your Lovelight”? They’ve gotten increased exposure over time, sure, but I wouldn’t say that they’ve “crossed over,” oh, no. Definitely not, which is a bit odd for a band whose debut record hit so many indie rock sweet spots at the time.
I say all this because I’m not sure if many others have really caught on at this point. With the records that they’ve done since 2005, I’ve encountered a lot of statements saying, “They’ve lost it” or “This album sucks” or “They’ll never match the s/t” or “This is their best since the s/t, they finally have it again,” with the most oddly polarizing release in their catalog being 2007′s Love Is Simple. The detractors miss the humor, the classic rock references, the impressively carried out avant-garde leanings, the way they seriously jam as an ensemble and how that sets them apart from the accepted images of precious bearded indie folk wieners… put these things together and you get a band that far too few people actually give a fuck about, whose general excellence is not reflected by their position in the current critical discourse, too weird for indie fans, too direct and song-oriented for the noisy psych crowd.
S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Let’s assume that that title is meaningless bullshit. It is an articulation of the concept of their new record as laid out in their message to Dead Oceans, built around a goofy as hell exaggeration of the cosmic “hippy” persona. I’m familiar with their performances. They’re hysterical. They play the theme from Top Gun while the short mustachioed bassist waves a Confederate flag. They fill their set on the “Folk Stage” at the Metronome Festival with screaming and effects pedal wankery and end it all by leading the crowd in a chant of “CIRCLE! TRIANGLE! SQUARE!” while some guy working at the festival gets on the drums. They play a show at the London Astoria the same week as a regularly occurring “gay night” and insist on turning on the big neon sign that flashes the word “GAY” behind them as they perform. They are not beyond seeing being in a well liked band as an opportunity to do stupid shit just because it amuses them.
Which brings me to the situation surrounding their upcoming record, as it stands, right now. Several hours ago, on December 28th, I came across a second leak of the album. The song titles were slightly different on this one. Even the album title tag was slightly differentiated from the first (“and” was now “adn” and the “< sbmb >” between the words “of” and “Shinju” was replaced by “< gdbmb >”… I had to add spaces into those because as written, they fuck up the HTML tagging. Blog terrorism!) On the cover art for the new leak… “1/6.” The musical content? Similar idea to “2/6″, but where the general sound of that one often brought to mind the sounds of indie groups dabbling with noise textures (Fuck Buttons, HEALTH, Animal Collective, etc.), this one most often resembled a full on abrasive headfuck, mining the kinds of territory that nobody but the most extreme harsh noise and sound collage artists ever even bother with. Who would have thought that the nice boys who sang “I’ll Be On The Water” would one day be channeling Kevin Drumm, Merzbow, and To Live & Shave In L.A.? It’s almost too gloriously unexpected to be something that would actually happen. Even I doubted that they were capable of pulling off such abstract brutality with this much ease.
And I say this with the full knowledge that there are doubters and that we have no idea what this music is or what the new Akron/Family record actually sounds like. I have a hypothesis that has only been strengthened during the past eight hours since it was formed. I believe that this is Akron/Family’s idea of what happens when an album “transcends the internet.” It is the ultimate way for these guys to just fuck with people and the very idea of internet based music culture. The endless message board discussions and shitfits that ensue with every move that a band makes, the excitement surrounding leaks, witch house… the entire S/T II project is an enormous cosmic joke on anyone who buys into these things. Or maybe that’s not it at all. A friend of the band did confirm that the to-be-released product has not actually leaked yet and that what people have heard are in fact head splittingly noisy deconstructions of the finished album that have been assembled and unleashed by the band members themselves as a “prank.” But the fact that he felt the need to provide such reassurance just proves that whoever the hell this guy is, he doesn’t really get it and he’s not combatting anything. The mighty Ak Ak cannot be stopped. During this same night, the band’s Twitter was updated with this mysterious and highly unrevealing tweet: “Omg! YouTube new acorn/factory leak! Holy balls. Awesome!!!” Select “Get Info” on a song from either leak and you’ll see that under “Composer,” it says, “‘S BMB +++{{{Giant amazing ACIPD PUNK MIND BMBEd MEler FACE}}}+++” and under “Grouping,” the words “U BN BOMBD” (surrounding by multiple “<”s and “>”s on either end but again, I couldn’t post them properly here without the formatting getting screwed up.)
What I’m trying to say here is that whatever is going on here, I have faith that one of my favorite bands actually did go to this much trouble for a ridiculous internet prank. And I am genuinely impressed by what has leaked so far, no matter what we end up referring to these recordings as in the future. For a band that has always expressed a fondness for fairly out there musical stylings, they sound shockingly adept at the arguably against type sounds that they’re exploring here, particularly on the “1/6″ edition of the S/T II leak. My ears aren’t broken. I can make out the source material bubbling up to the surface every now and then, and I can also hear that there was some genuine effort put into the arrangement of these sounds. Saying, “It’s a prank!” doesn’t matter because they’re pranking listeners with some damn fine music. If this plays out in the way that I think it’s been doing, Akron/Family will be essentially controlling the leak of their album in a way that is as comically frustrating for some fans as it is rewarding for others, all while taking the inevitable concept of the “leak” period as an opportunity to create more art that stands on its own. And when you consider that at least the first leak has probably already been posted to private torrent trackers as an official rip of the completed S/T II album, the Akron/Family members’ efforts to make a gigantic mess of their album’s web presence is basically foolproof until the to-be-released version somehow makes its way onto the internet.
Maybe I’m biased because last year I spent several days of my life lovingly piecing together a fake leak of an upcoming Vampire Weekend album that got about 5,000 downloads in a little over a month before finally getting taken down. But I think that no matter what S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT sounds like and no matter whether or not Akron/Family dumps four more 50 minute long wacked out noise records onto the internet within the next five weeks, this whole ordeal is fucking brilliant. And dare I say innovative. And I couldn’t be happier that Akron/Family is the semi-high profile band that’s bothering to carry it out.
And all while having this music associated with a label that releases Bishop Allen records.
