A Wall of Sound and Destruction

A Place To Bury Strangers Interview

Photos of A Place To Bury Strangers backstage/gig in Paris, 2011 by Patricia Falchi for Echo Magazine

IN July 2011 Echo Magazine’s editor Alex Hancock conducted an interview with A Place To Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann at their home studio in Brooklyn. The vocalist and guitarist spoke among other things about his interminable love affair with the city, the band’s notoriously frenetic live shows and his penchant for setting amplifiers on fire. In the interview he also revealed the plans for the group’s upcoming third album and gave the low down on their split from a well-known label.

Part 1: Get on the Train

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds” - Arthur Miller, Death of A Salesman

Exiting the subway wiping off the drips of sweat running down from my forehead to nose I step out into the typically morbid humidity of a New York summer evening. The atmosphere comes dense and clinging. I walk through the blocks on Williamsburg’s South Side moving hastily along under the overpass into the neighbourhood’s alleyways, observing children’s tricycles left abandoned in the road, curbside hustlers leaning in through car windows to talk business, old women hunched and weather beaten pushing trolley carts full of worn pieces of curtain fabric material slowly towards the warm scent of laundry. The shouts of a young couple heard and then seen through an open apartment window with their hands and fingernails raised at each other. Greased-up men wearing narrow vests and drinking warm brown beer from thin brown paper bags play card games outside on the iron steps kept radiated by the solar warmth. A sign that reads ‘No Soliciting’ hangs loosely above their wares spread out in front of them on a rug – bathroom appliances, frying pans, children’s clothes, antique books about medicine and novels in Spanish, each object from the dismantled pieces of people’s households. A cop car siren rings in the distance and fades into the relentless, humming ambience of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, which washes out across the East River twenty four hours a day.

I then reach the heights of Williamsburg’s urban cool, graffiti chasing the brick walls and former industrial buildings out of sight, art studios, yoga and pilates classes popping-up behind former shop fronts, hip cafés full of poets and writers scrambling notes together at vintage typewriters, dazzling eateries serving heart of palm and other procured exotic delicacies atop wooden bar tables beyond capacity and photo booths tucked into every available enclosed space now canvasses for straying marker pens or stencils. Warehouses opening their doors to gigs of dangerously passé synthesizer lounge-pop for half-interested audiences, their brows disguised by lensless spectacles verging on self-parody. You wouldn’t think that this thriving area of gentrification, comfortably middle-class, would also be home to one of the most destructive and unscrupulous bands of the last decade.

I arrive at the door of a warehouse, the last building on S 2nd street before a derelict sugar refinery building looming sideways and angled outwards like a broken industrial age dinosaur cuts it off from the Demerara coloured river.  A great metal shutter for trucks, seeming out of proportion beside the smaller human entry-door, stands imposingly against the front of the building. I check the address with a couple of plaid-shirted scenesters walking towards a bar on the opposite side of the street to make sure that this is the right one. Fixed onto the wall a buzzer with no name on it offers a null invitation. The door swoops open before I even get a chance to ring it. “Hi there. Is this Death By Audio? I’m here to see Oliver Ackermann.”

“Come on in,” a girl replies casually from inside “It’s through the doorway at the end of the corridor.” I thank her and step into the hallway. The clinical ceiling, walls and floor, each white, give it the disinfected charm of quarantine in a laboratory. Following the laser of burning strip lights along to the end of the corridor and through the doorway I’m confronted by what looks like an apocalyptic hideout bunker – it reminds me of the sci-fi hover ship interior in The Matrix. A wall of bicycles and mechanical parts stretches out in a long chain to my left, paired up, a couple of battered leather couches draw the eye away from the dusty concrete floor and a small utility kitchen sets itself away in the corner. The space is not so much a habitat for artists but a passageway through the jungle with cables hanging like creeper vines from branch-like brackets, a large net drooping from the ceiling for catching falling objects or people from the mezzanine level. Dominating the centre of the overgrown room is a heaped graveyard of used guitar amplifiers, some cut through the middle, their canvas screens torn and sagging like sad wrecks of mutated plastic and metal. The luxuries of comfortable living here are kept to a survivalist’s minimum.

Peering around a corner to the right is a small monitor room with a glass window through to the adjacent studio. Oliver is sitting back in a leather office chair, the others stand behind, one resting his arm over the back of the chair and pointing at something on the computer screen who I recognize as Dion Lunadon – the band’s gritty bass player. The other one looks familiar but turns out to be a Travis, frontman of the band Grooms, who I’ve never met before. Oliver spins around in the chair to face me and after a delayed moment of recognition enthusiastically sweeps up onto his feet with a look of joyful excitement on his face, “Hey man! Yeah I know you! You’ve been around for a few years now! How you doin?”

The warm welcome lasted for minutes as he quickly showed me around the headquarters – studio, living space, music venue and pedal workshop next door where the reputable Death By Audio effects units (used by a full classroom of rock’s most famous guitarists) are designed, tested and hand-built by Oliver and co.

It was too fast paced an introduction for me to take in, and one which went hand in hand with their jagged reputation for hyper-intensity and unpredictability. In contrast my jet-lagged brain, having arrived on a cross-Atlantic flight the day before, had spent the last 6 hours being dragged around Manhattan cooking in the heat and was beyond any kind of preparation. “You have a great set up here. I wish I’d brought a camera with me.” – “Hey! Yeah! Wow no worries man. We’ve got a camera you can use. Hey Dion, where’s the camera?”

When the mini-tour was completed I gulp down a whole bottle of water to refill my dehydrated body and instantly feel the thirst again. “Hey do you want anything to drink?” Oliver asks politely “Yeah, I could do with a cup of tea.” But there doesn’t appear to be any tea or even a kettle. Hoping he would offer me a beer instead, we sit down on one of the worn-out couches empty handed. After a brief catch up I take a cigarette from him and start the tape rolling.

Oliver sits back relaxed with his arms outstretched. Wearing a strikingly eccentric look of late – a tremendously bushy moustache in combination with a squirrel-tail mullet – much different from his usual flopped-over mop of brown hair, he still retains his characteristically chirpy and excited teenage-lad mannerisms beneath the vast growth of his facial hair, itself a nod to Stalin. He answers my questions with the composed reactions of a man who plays with pit vipers for a living and seems to know what to say before I even ask. I start again from the beginning as my exhausted brain begins to slowly shut down. “So.. err.. tell me about New York.”

Part 2: All Tomorrow’s Parties

“I think there are still a lot of places you can go with a guitar” - Kevin Shields at APTBS gig in 2009.

My route into the world of A Place To Bury Strangers originally came by Myspace back when it was still a popular, functional and relatively painless way of listening to music from new and unsigned bands. The first track to appear on the playlist button happened to be just the kind of mind-erasing, violently ecstatic music that had appealed to me after I first cut my teeth on My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno’s no-wave punk compilation No New York. To Fix The Gash In Your Head’s jittering drum patterns, stunningly fierce textures and distant monotone vocals compressed under walls of high-gain fuzz and nerve scraping distortion were constant personal bliss. When I later played it at clubs and parties it cleared the dance floor like a swarm of wasps.

It was a fender bending work of outsider art, a third generation take on the pop formulae bent by the Ramones, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Joy Division. While the raucous energy of The Velvet Underground’s European Son, noise rock still in its raw primitive and embryonic stages, The JAMC’s Upside Down, the feedback-laden debut single that the Reid brothers thought would turn them into an overnight pop sensation, and the dissonant slam, right-up-to the catastrophic descent into weightlessness, of My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise, all mashed the boundaries of the avant-garde and rock ‘n’ roll into a shape which paved the way for this band to exist, A Place To Bury Strangers dared to push beyond the limits that rock music had been previously.

“On the first album almost all of the songs were like demos” he notes, astutely downplaying their self-titled, DIY debut released on indie-label Killer Pimp. Yet all of their material since has shared with it a predilection for pop melody crushed under the enormous weight of skyscraper-depth noise, mostly down to Oliver’s fixation with distortion and building his own effects. His preliminary band Skywave were just as impressive in that respect but he hasn’t looked back since forming A Place To Bury Strangers in 2004 after moving to the Big Apple from the small town of Fredericksburg, Virginia – where, he says, “Making music was something I did to fight against the boredom of suburban life”.

The forward-going momentum, changing fronts of development and the speed, pressure and restlessness of which New York is famous for seem to be synchronized with the front man’s personality. He talks about the city as home and inspiration, the perfect place for him to start a band like A Place To Bury Strangers. “Even before I came here I wanted to make big music, stuff that was off-the chain. Then I moved to New York and it had that in magnitude. The intensity, the skyscrapers, the fast living, the hugeness of it all. All those things that attracted me to the city.”

In their early days the band received the accolade “the loudest band in New York”, something which Oliver has since publicly shown contempt towards. Whether it was originally coined by a lazy journalist or by the band’s agent, it has effectively obstructed almost everything that has been written about them since. By taking it for granted or at least trying to prove it otherwise, journalists have continued to fall into the trap of pigeonholing the band as just that. In reality it’s a claim which is highly likely to be true but it says as much about them as “the noisiest band in Brooklyn”, which is probably more accurate. It’s something however, which the band is unlikely to lose any sleep over – their live performances fully outweigh that slogan.

Part 3: Lose Your Mind

“For some performances, blinding Halogen lamps were pointed at the crowd, [or] at others strobes flashed constantly and a huge wall of mirrors at the rear of the stage forced the audience to confront themselves.” – Journalist on Throbbing Gristle concerts in the 1980s.

The first time I saw A Place To Bury Strangers, a multi-syllabic mouthful to this day, there being no abbreviated forms that do it justice, was in a former morgue, fittingly freezing cold and sparse. At every show since I’ve witnessed a highly volatile fusion of unstable and antagonistic energy on stage. Everything is thrown in the faces of a usually tense and standoffish audience, who either capitulate in violently tempered manoeuvers in the dark or stand there dazed and motionless for an hour like a mass congregation of depleted souls.

The intensity is taken up a notch by their disorientating visual stage effects – refrigerator-size dry ice machines, which pump out enough smoke to fill a venue in minutes and epilepsy-inducing strobe lights that make their gigs a heavily tripped-out, hallucinatory experience even without drugs. Depending on the band’s mood or the patience level of the sound engineer, the audio mix ranges from a bass heavy dancehall sound to a bright, refined Fender amp punch. During other times, particularly at festivals or venues with poor systems, it can just be an assault on the ears for 40 minutes. Their unpredictable nature has been observed between two shows in the space of less than a week.

“We set it up in such a way that you’re not exactly sure what’s gonna happen. Sometimes it may take you some place you’re not expecting to, or we’ll blow an amp up and all of a sudden you better be ready to think of something to make it sound cool. You have to be quick on your toes.” Oliver explains. I ask him if he can hear what the rest of the band are playing through the massive sound debris and whether this isolates him from the music at times, “We try and make things more and more blurry. It even gets to where there’s a sound within sound. I hardly use the monitors and sometimes the sound man will get pissed off so I’m having to keep a close ear on things all the time. But I can definitely hear what’s happening in there.”

And then there are the on-stage theatrics – a band manager’s worst nightmare. Towards the end of a set he might wildly swing his guitar around by the strap over his head and then drag its corpse into the backline, deliberately snap through the remaining strings on its neck before scraping them up-and-down against the pickups, or force the vocal microphones up against the speakers of his amplifier and strike the snarling, broken and neglected guitar into emitting a wail of terrifying ear canal blistering feedback.

Despite the seemingly high degree of chaos and the loose cannon feel to their gigs, there have not yet been any serious accidents. The guitarist revealed that his actions are a more calculated risk than you would think. “There’s never a moment when it gets beyond my control. Even if I throw an amp through the air, I don’t want to kill or hurt somebody. I’m aware of what’s around me so I know where that’s going.”

For a band whose reputation for high energy and high cost gigs proceeds them (they recently had to pay out to a festival for allegedly breaking some equipment, which Oliver claims to be bullshit) they have played a daunting number of shows each year for the past four or five consecutive years. Now reaching his mid-thirties, Ackermann no longer drinks but still smokes regularly and is only too aware of the burnout from enduring a rigorous touring schedule. “We did the US for 6 weeks and the Europe for 5 weeks. No breaks. You lose your mind a little bit. You go everyplace and everybody wants to party with you like it’s the end of the world – when you’ve been partying like that for the past 3 months!”

Part 4: Departure

“Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?” - John Cage

The band’s second album Exploding Head was released on Mute, but even a label with a heritage spanning from Fad Gadget to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Oliver incidentally remixed a track for Nick Cave’s Grinderman) wasn’t able to tame them for long. Both band and label have since gone their separate ways. Oliver gave me the low down on how things eventually derailed. “They’re a massive label with a great history and everything but they’re still kinda old school in a way. They weren’t really thinking like we were in terms of moving forward so it was disappointing.”

With his effects company recently breaking a distribution deal with a national music retailer in the US and a new label Dead Oceans set to release their third album, things are looking like spring on the horizon for the unashamedly driven frontman. Ackerman is currently working on their next record with the group’s new member Dion Lunadon, previously from New Zealand. Dion joined after former bassist Jon Mofo left in 2010 to spend more time with his family (he has now opened up a bar in Manhattan’s Lower East Side) and Oliver was quick to make clear that there was not a drop of bad blood over his decision to depart. On the arrival of the bassist he admits to a change in the group’s approach to making music: “Dion and me have been writing most of the songs together. In a way it changes what the band is. It’s the same aesthetic but obviously it has made things different and they need to be adapted.”

The frontman explains that on this record he’s interested in experimenting with what an amp sounds like when it’s being thrown across a room – hence the rope safety net suspended from the first floor of the warehouse. “It’s the craziest stuff we’ve ever made before. We’re recording with really weird techniques and doing stuff just for the fuck of it – capturing what it sounds like to be playing guitar through an amp on fire, playing guitar underwater, or playing drums in the back of someone’s van.” His logic is simple: “When you’re playing guitar and the amp is on fire then you better play! You’ve only got one shot to get it right. It sparks that bit of energy that you lose when you record digitally. We want to recreate the buzz you get hearing a Ramones single for the first time so we’re going to try to combine the craziness our first record with the hi-fi of the second.”