We are very excited to share with you all some audience tapings from January’s Family Tree Records tour!   Thanks to all those who came out, participated, taped, etc.

If you have any other tapings from the tour, send them our way and we will share them:

• 1/7/12 – Raleigh, NC @ The Pour House
• 1/12/12 – Atlanta, GA @ Drunken Unicorn
• 1/15/12 – Nashville, TN @ Mercy Lounge
• 1/17/12 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout
• 1/21/12 – Brooklyn, NY @ 285 Kent

Listen, share, enjoy.  More to come!

AKAK

Here is our most recent video for “Cast A Net”, directed by Brian Ziffer:

Huge thanks to everyone that’s been coming out to the EU shows, more news soon!!!

11/11 “DESTROY REFINEMENT” EURO TOUR

• 11/15/11: Barcelona, SP – KGB
• 11/16/11: Madrid, SP – El Sol
• 11/18/11: Vigo, SP – La Iguana Club
• 11/19/11: Lisbon, PT – Ze Dos Bois
• 11/20/11: Porto, PT – Hard Club
• 11/23/11: Prague, CZ – Alternativa Festival
• 11/25/11: Metz, FR – Le Caveau
• 11/26/11: Leeuwarden, NL – Explore the North Festival
• 11/27/11: Utrecht, NL – Le Guess Who? Festival
• 11/29/11: Aarhus, DK – Train
• 11/30/11: Copenhagen, DK – Loppen

Much more AkAk news soon!

Family Tree Records release -002.  Each one hand painted, hand numbered and unique.

Improvisation Sound Fields taken from Live shows 2009/2010, ++bmbz++ stlye treatment drum strum full on sound force 2 ENJOY.

Can be picked up HERE.

Shouting, Running, and Dancing (excerpt) by FAMILY TREE RECORDS

What is the < bmbz > project you ask? Read the story: HERE

Want it on 2xVinyl? Get that: HERE

With that in mind, we couldn’t be more pleased to announce our first “official” release, FTR 001, a split release with our comrades over at Dead Oceans:

< < < < B         M         B          Z > > > >

(Feat. Ak Extended family Greg Davis, Fletcher Kaufman, Mark
Lawson, and Phil Cook)

Available digitally today, June 21st, here.

And available as 2xLP here.

Read, hear, and see more about the bmbz project here

***FTR has been hand-releasing limited edition Akron/Family records for 5 years. Stay tuned for an “early years” discography, as well as a handmade live noises record coming soon!***

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