Holy crap! How’d I forget to add this to last night’s update?
We got word yesterday via various sources that one of my favorite psyche/folk/rock bands has turned in their new album and it looks to be a slice of awesome. Don’t expect any sort of journalistic objectivity as I anticipate this record; after seeing them again in September I’m flat-out giddy to see this news. Here’s the press release from their label, Dead Oceans:
Finally, after over a month of unanswered emails and text messages, blown deadlines, and pleas to finish and turn in their new album, last week, a large brown cardboard box showed up at the Dead Oceans doorstep. It had “SHINJU TNT” scrawled across the bottom of the box in black magic marker, and the return address read only “AK, Detroit.”
Opening it revealed a sincere but poorly made diorama of futurist swirling spaces filled with toy astronauts and dinosaurs, four blown out song fragments on a TDK CDR in a ziplock bag, three pictures, a track list written in crayon, and a typewritten note from Akron/Family. A post-it on the bag declared that the band refused to send the full album to anyone but the vinyl pressing plant, for fear of leaking and possible lost revenues.
From the note and a short video that arrived days later, we’ve pieced together that the album was written in a cabin built into the side of Mount Meakan, an active volcano in Akan National Park, on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. It was recorded in an abandoned train station in Detroit with the blackest white dude we all know, Chris Koltay (Liars, Women, Deerhunter, Holy Fuck, No Age). Chris, on tour after finishing the record, commented: “This album will transcend the Internet.”
Akron/Family spent the end of 2009 and half of 2010 exploring the future of sound through Bent Acid Punk Diamond fuzz and Underground Japanese noise cassettes, lower case micro tone poems and emotional Cagean field recordings, rebuilding electronic drums from the ’70s and playing them with sticks they carved themselves. Upon miraculous resuscitation of the original AKAK hard drive, the album layers thousands of minute imperceptible samples of their first recordings with fuzzed-out representations of their present beings to induce pleasant emotional feeling states and many momentary transcendent inspirations.
This album is titled S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. We have no idea what that means. These are the beginnings, hell or high water you’ll find S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT in stores in the U.S. on February 8, and March 14 in the U.K.
And here are both the track listing and the aforementioned video:
01. Silly Bears
02. Island
03. A AAA O A WAY
04. So It Goes
05. Another Sky
06. Light Emerges
07. Cast a Net
08. Tatsuya Neon Purple Walkby
09. Fuji I (Global Dub)
10. Say What You Want To
11. Fuji II (Single Pane)
12. Canopy
13. Creator
[vimeo width=”400″ height=”225″]http://vimeo.com/16699048[/vimeo]
Did I mention that I’m psyched about this? Even more so after hearing this clip and recognizing several bits from the last show I saw… Man, this is gonna be good.
[audio:http://www.scjag.com/mp3/do/akak.mp3|titles= Akron/Family – Shinju TNT]