Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free: A Talk With Miles Seaton of Akron/Family

Like you can use music, almost in a Rumi sense, as an ecstatic way to transmit good, and to transmit it to the people who want some brand of spirituality in their lives, but feel like they’re torn between mythological belief structures and some sort of sappy new agey thing.

Yeah, and that alternative is important, that questioning. I think it was Suzuki-roshi who was speaking at a university and he would speak and every few minutes he would just go into silence, shut his eyes and just sit, and sometimes it would be five minutes and other times just a few seconds, and somebody in the audience asked him, When you shut your eyes and are silent are you meditating or are you sleeping? And he said, “Yes.”

Oh man, really it’s just a slippery slippery stone, just no footing at all.

That idea, Neither yes nor no, but yes and no—all those paradoxes.

Oh god, that’s the quote, that’s the quote, that’s one of my favorite quotes. And Seth drops that idea in “Phenomena”—things are not what they seem to be nor are they otherwise. I love that one. But that’s another thing, too—as a band it’s really important for me to want to talk about this stuff as a person and have that stuff, but not really advertise, or make it seem like there’s some sort of religious agenda in our music, mostly just because I feel like people need to feel like they’re making decisions for themselves and not feel like I’m trying to shove anything down their throats. Not music that tries to convince people of some kind of political agenda, because that’s just so distasteful to me.

So you’ve said in the past that your concerts never actually get as fucked up as you like. I was wondering what your idea of the perfect audience or perfect show is, what the hell would happen.

You know, it’s tough, I definitely could come up with an answer for that, but if it happened, I think I’d feel it didn’t actually get as fucked up as I wanted it to. Fucked up is a strange thing, that ideal. The last time we played in Austin things went off pretty crazy, but everybody in the band has a different notion of what the perfect show is. One guy, two guys, whatever, after the show were like “that was amazing,” and the other guys were like, “yeah, I didn’t really feel it, I don’t think that was really working.” But my general love of an audience is people who just want to go for it. An audience that when we’re playing something delicate, they’re down to listen to some things, but when we’re getting crazy they move, they’re ready to totally participate and let go and not just have a completely passive experience.

Yeah, not like a movie. I say that a lot at shows: this is not a movie. You can move and there’s a level of we’re up there kind of pouring and I’m working more and more on being more transparent, well, not really transparent, but kind of like a window, allowing light to shine through what I’m doing more so than me trying to be a light bulb and generating that. But there’s a level of the whole room being responsible for the experience getting off the ground, so to speak, or not. The ideal audience is the people who are open-minded and excited and want to hear new things and are okay with us failing and also are excited to be a part of whatever success occurs.

Your live show tends to be pretty damn raucous, and your albums too, they feel very in the moment, ironically enough, that notion of moment, moment, moment. And you have this really great quote I came across where you say “the clock is the only arbitrator” to make the energy stop. So to bring that back around, how do you guys revise? Or is revision even really a significant part of the picture?

Our studio experiences completely vary. This last record there was definitely a sense of us revising revising revising until the point that the clock did come into play, but really for the most part that was the major production decision we made, that we were going to spare no expense or time to continue to revise until we felt like it was right. And in some cases I feel like we didn’t actually get it right, but in some cases I think we definitely did. And there were a few different lead vocal tracks that were cut in the last few days of us editing that to me are some of the better performances that we have committed to tape. There’s one particular vocal take that Seth did where he did a few takes and it sounded great and we were really happy with it and then at the last minute we were listening to it and he said, you know, I just want to try something on this in-part, and he ended up just feeding the whole thing through and it was so beautiful and so perfect, and I’m so happy that we just continued to have an open mind to revising.

What song is that?

“The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen.” I love that take and I love his singing on that. And there was one song, “Many Ghosts,” that we definitely built up as a band, and just were like, whoa, this is not what we’re thinking, this is not right, and we totally ended up starting it over from just a straightforward drum machine pulse, Boom Boom Boom, Boom Boom Boom, and that was it, and we just built everything on top of it. But it all happened a lot like our first album where it was just constant doing-something-else. Okay, well, try this and what about that. I think we definitely spent a lot of time, we recorded several times and played them at several shows to the point where, okay, this has head nod, it has that quality, and now we’ve discoed it out for twenty minutes, let’s go in and play it.

Your sound has evolved a lot from album to album, but now we’re seeing a lot more outside stuff— you guys get Megafaun on stage, sometimes other people, you’ve got strings and horns on the new album—are you going to be incorporating a lot of that into your tour, or doing more of a trio thing, especially at South by Southwest?

South by Southwest, for lack of a better term, can be kind of a harsh toke. There’s a lot of being really intense and really just kind of wanting to get all of our bros and sisters when they’re there and just come and contribute to the racket and make it into as much of a party as it can be, because the din of commercialism and the hopes and dreams of every single person there, not to mention the kind of vibe of spring break for the music industry, and I’m not even dissing people but it’s just a really intense thing you’re coming up against, and even for us who I consider to be somewhat easy going there’s still a little feeling of being crushed by it, like, do I really even want to be a part of this? Fuck! Ah!

That’s why we’re glad you’re playing the Austinist show: no wristbands required, real people present.

Yeah, and I’m really excited about that. And I don’t know what’s going to happen. We have some friends who are going to be down there and I’ve been writing people off and on to see who’s around...and I personally feel really excited about horns in general. I love wind instruments. And I’ve really fallen in love with the way a horn can amplify a harmony as opposed to a guitar, it sounds great with a guitar but when the horns do it, it just has some kind of interesting angelic harmonic gospel reverie about it. It just feels like you’re somewhere special. I’m hoping to be able to do some work with people who’ve got that, and the same thing with rhythm collaborators and people just to work with us on percussion. There’s a lot of collaboration that’s occurring with us outside the trio whether we’re just three or whether we’re as many as we can. But ideally the band expands to being every single person in the room.

Just coming around full circle to the whole nonduality thing…do you think human beings are going to figure this thing out?

I’m optimistic. But it’s interesting, the whole situation. I don’t want to talk a whole lot about politics, I personally don’t follow much politics anymore and I haven’t for years, but in the last few years I’ve really fallen in love with America as a land, and I connect a lot with this place as a cosmic melting pot. What I’m saying is that this election was kind of weird for me—I voted, relatively hesitantly, not in a negative way but I was kind of not into it, but I was out to dinner with a friend and we were walking around and stepped into a bar in the East Village to look at the election stuff rolling in.

Miles, Dana, and Seth pic from band MySpace