[photos courtesy of John Ruscher at Eardrum NYC]
Akron/Family live shows are always tribal full participation events. The band encourages others to become involved with the show, but at Thursday night’s show at Knitting Factory it became part of the performance. After an absolutely raging sixty-minute main set, the forty-minute encore/second set began with artist Aki Sasamote decorating the stage and when the band returned, she rapped them in tape and painted on Seth Olinsky’s back. While the art was performed, the band played an alternatively quiet and noisy jam segment while accompanied by a three-piece horn section. The horn players seemed to be following a choreographed dance around the stage while they played. The set then segued nearly into a four song segment that began quietly (“Fuji II”, “We All Will” and “Dylan Pt. 1”) before crashing into the finale with rousing eight-minute version of “Light Emerges”. Two of those songs appear on the band’s outstanding new album S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT (Dead Oceans). The first set of Thursday’s show was dominated by songs from Shinju, including highlights “So It Goes” and “Another Sky” (streaming below). But the peak performance of the first hour was the remarkable A/K staple “Raising The Sparks” which endured for eighteen jam-filled minutes, and presaged the wonderful strangeness to come. The Knitting Factory show was the first date in Akron/Family’s extended tour which returns to NYC for a March 5 date at Bowery Ballroom.
I recorded this set with the four microphone rig from our standard location in the venue, and the sound quality is quite excellent. There are segments when the band is extremely quiet on stage (often off-mic), and during those points the noise in the venue (bar, audience, etc) can be heard. Enjoy!
Stream Complete Show:
This Recording is now available for Download in FLAC and MP3 at Archive.org [HERE].
Akron/Family
2011-02-17
Knitting Factory
Brooklyn, NY USA
Four-Track Digital Master Recording
Recorded from Front of Soundboard Booth
Neumann KM-150s + DPA 4021’s > Edirol R-44 (Oade Concert Mod) > 2x 24bit 48kHz wav files > Soundforge (level adjustments, mixdown, set fades) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > Flac Frontend (level 7, align sector boundaries) > flac
Recorded and Produced
by nyctaper
2011-02-19
Setlist:
(thanks Jesse and Seth for setlist help)
[Total Time 1:40:13]
01 [introduction/Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing]
02 Island
03 A AAA O WAY
04 So It Goes
05 [banter]
06 Another Sky
07 Raising The Sparks
08 Say What You Want To
09 Silly Bear
10 [encore break]
11 {bmbz}
12 Fuji II (Single Pane).
13 We All Will
14 Dylan, Pt. 1
15 [banter2]
16 Light Emerges
If you email nyctaper for access to this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Akron/Family, visit their website, and purchase Shinju TNT from the Dead Oceans Records website [HERE].
That wasn’t Dylan pt. 1 in the encore. I think it was the untitled song at the end of the first album.
Well, I trust Jesse’s setlist expertise, and I also checked it against the songs identified as “Dylan Pt.1” in the Amoeba video
http://www.amoeba.com/live-shows/videos/akron-family.html
So I’m pretty sure its correctly labeled in the setlist.
It’s the same song.
It appears more commonly in setlists as “Untitled” because that’s what it’s called on the first album, but it appeared on the Eskimo home recording (pre first album)as “bob dylan sits and thinks pt. one”.
Joseph, you may be thinking of “Dylan Part II” from the Angels of Light split? That btw also appears on Eskimo as “dylan pt. two new thoughts”.
THANK YOU!!! ALWAYS WELCOME!!!!
Saw them the day this show was posted in Toronto, Canada at the Horseshoe Tavern – they started the show with “We All Will” and several abstracted lullaby-like songs, and proceeded to rip through what felt like a very organically developed jam session hinged, on brief occasions, by familiar songs. One particularly sweet moment came at the beginning, when someone on stage played what sounded like field recordings from an African lullaby that became sequenced, beautifully off-time, against whatever melange of song they played over top!
Fucking awesomely surprising band, these guys. Wish they’d record and release at a decent price the whole tour.