With the announcement of this year’s Substance Festival at the Great American Music Hall, we here at SF Sonic wanted to highlight some of the bands and artists playing over the three nights, whether they’ve been around for years or are early in their musical journey. A Place To Bury Strangers is one of the former bands. For over two decades, the band has been creating some of the most unique and confrontational music on the planet. Lead by Oliver Ackermann, the New York trio is set to play Substance Fest in San Francisco on Halloween, and I had the chance to sit down with him and pick his brain about the festival, the band’s most recent album Synthesizer, and the art of choosing the perfect setlist.
Tyler King: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
Oliver Ackermann: Of course!
TK: You’ve just finished a tour in Europe and are about to start a second leg of touring North America. What do you do between tours to keep the momentum going and energy level high to jump back into doing shows?
OA: It’s always more hectic being home than being on tour. All of a sudden you’re thrown into a whirlwind of all of these projects you were working on that had to be put on hold that you have to get back into. I’m starting to prepare and plan for this next tour and we’re throwing all of that stuff together. Fixing a lot of things, printing t-shirts, all sorts of stuff like that. The tour is almost in some ways the easy part, or the more relaxing part!
TK: You just released a couple of really great new songs over the last couple of weeks, “Let It All Go” and “Make Me Feel Anything,” on split 7-inch singles with the two bands that will be opening for A Place To Bury Strangers on this next tour, The Serfs and The Mail. Last year the band did an entire series of 7-inch singles called The Sevens. What is it about that format that appeals to you so much?
OA: It’s a lot of things. There’s the nostalgic aspect of finding cool 7-inch records in record stores, and I like extra tracks from bands that you can’t find anywhere else. Back in the day bands would come out with CD singles and 7-inch singles and all of these different formats, extended 12″ EPs and things like that, and I always viewed them as interesting ways to find new music by these bands and artists. For me as a musician there’s also the fact that the band creates more songs than are even going to be put on an album, so I think it’s an interesting way for us to put those songs out, especially if we think those songs are worthy of being put out. There’s nothing worse than getting a terrible 7-inch, so you have to make sure there are cool songs put on it! And the last thing is that as a DJ it’s way more convenient to carry around 7-inch records than entire vinyl albums, so if you can put good songs on there for DJs to spin, that’s cool too.
TK: So were these two songs recorded with the intent to potentially be put on the album Synthesizer, or were they always going to be these separate releases?
OA: The one that has more production on it, “Make Me Feel Anything,” was one of the Synthesizer demos. And then the other track, “Let It All Go,” was just something that John Fedowitz, our bassist, and I recorded after I got this Sansui 6-track cassette recorder. We were just excited to use it so we recorded three songs the day that I got it. And that was one of the three tracks, I thought it was cool.
TK: Will the other two songs get released at some point?
OA: I don’t know! [laughs] One of the songs wasn’t that good, so probably not that one, but the other one was really cool! I think the vocals need to be re-recorded though. We wrote and recorded those three songs in the moment, being maniacs and doing weird experimental shit.
TK: The most recent APTBS album, Synthesizer, came out last year. I’ve been listening to you guys since 2008 and it quickly became one of my favorite albums by the band. The songs “Disgust” and “Join The Crowd” immediately jumped out to me, and every time I put the album on they still do. Would you be able to talk about the creation of those two songs?
OA: “Join The Crowd” was one that was made early on, and it was one that the whole band worked on together. We have these sessions where we all just sit in a room and see what happens, and that was one of those songs that was written like that. It was sort of done in a fashion that maybe wasn’t so smart, in that it was just a stereo track that I was recording. So the basis of the whole song has improvised lyrics on it, which are kind of nonsensical, and because the recording captured so much of the moment of what that vibe was with the band, the real lyrics that are on the record that I wrote later on had to phonetically fit with the live recording. There’s this feeling of singing along with someone who isn’t making a whole lot of sense. But because of the moment being captured so perfectly I couldn’t stray away from that! There are some tracks you record where it captures a feeling, here’s all of us together in the moment in a dark room focusing on what’s happening documenting where we are in our lives, and that was “Join The Crowd.”
“Disgust” was one of those tracks where I was trying to record and write a song that uses almost all open notes on the bass, because in this old band I was in with John called Skywave we had this song where almost all of the riff was these two open notes, so I had this moment where I could play with my fist in the air and just play the bassline to it. [laughs] So I just thought to myself that it would be fun to write a song which uses those notes so anyone in the band is free to do whatever they want. If you’re on the ground and one hand is holding on to something else you can still kind of play the song. It wrote itself as some sort of really crazy intense thing that was about certain sounds and a certain pulverizing feeling and the fun and the ease and the freedom of playing it. I think that sometimes when you give yourself over to writing something that’s very open and simple there’s something else that shines through, which is maybe the human element of it all.
TK: You have such an extensive back catalogue, not just of studio albums but also the songs that appear on the exclusive 7-inch records and other songs that float around outside of your records. What is the difficulty with choosing what new songs to play live and what old songs to leave behind? And what has the audience reaction been to the new songs?
OA: People really love them. I think it’s really cool. It’s exciting to be starting a song where you don’t know if anyone’s even heard it and then the crowd starts cheering. When it comes to choosing the setlist it’s a combination of things. We always like to keep things fresh and play songs that we haven’t been playing for a while, so we’ll always write the setlist right before we go out onstage. But then when choosing those things, I try to focus on what I think are the strengths of who is in the band. Certain people make certain songs their own in really cool ways. But I also like to throw a wrench in the whole system and mess with the other members and throw a song or two in there that they might be uncomfortable with. [laughs] It’s good to play songs that you’re kind of familiar with and excited about first to set the tone. I always try to do that.
TK: The new album is called Synthesizer, and generally when people think about A Place To Bury Strangers, you guys have always built up this image of a chaotic guitar-based band. When is your history with synthesizers as an instrument, and what is your approach to playing them versus playing a guitar?
OA: I’m not really great at any of those things, so I just attack every instrument with how I feel. I’m not a synthesizer player, but I do like to play them. I’ve owned some throughout the years and I think that synthesizer-based music is amazing. I’ve always tried to make it a point of A Place To Bury Strangers to be a guitar-based band and make all of our sounds with guitars. I’ve been anti-using synthesizers until pretty much this point. There must have been one on a song or two in the past, but not many! But building guitar pedals is essentially the building blocks of building synthesizers, so in a way this whole time we’ve just been taking guitars and turning them into synthesizers.
I’ve always thought that there’s something about the interface of a keyboard that is stiff and stagnant in a way, and maybe there’s something about a guitar that’s more loose and chaotic where there’s all of these notes in between notes and other stuff that’s easier to tap into. I was always more attracted to playing an instrument like a Theremin, where it might make you feel a bit uneasy and it goes to places that aren’t so predetermined. But as I play more and more synthesizers I’ve started to find more of those musical openings. The synthesizer that we made to be the album cover for the record that we ended up playing on all of the songs on Synthesizer is a pretty messed-up noise synth and not your standard one with a keyboard. I think it fits neatly in the realm of all of the chaos and not-so-uniform musical ideas that I have.
TK: On Halloween you’re going to be playing Substance Fest out here in San Francisco. When I saw A Place To Bury Strangers on the line-up, not to sound rude, but you guys stuck out a bit like a sore thumb because historically Substance Fest has been geared towards synth pop, new wave, and more electronic-based genres. Of all of the larger bands on the bill, you guys are the only guitar-based band. How do you think A Place To Bury Strangers lives in that musical area with those more electronic bands?
OA: I think we go hand-in-hand with that stuff. I’m just such a fan of that kind of music. Those bands absolutely match our aesthetic. The Sisters Of Mercy, Ministry, The Cure, all of that stuff has been such a big influence on us as musicians and is really the basis of where we come from. Other people brought in other instruments in those kinds of bands in the past, like saxophones and things like that. And I think that with a lot of bands that are synthesizer-based have someone in the band who also has played electric guitar, which creates a cool contrast in the music sometimes. For instance, I grew up loving drum machines and you can hear in the A Place To Bury Strangers beats that often I try desperately hard as I possibly can to record a drum kit to make it sound like a drum machine.
TK: A Place To Bury Strangers is at a level now where with festivals like Substance Fest you’re able to essentially be headliners. But are there still moments where you’re star struck or are taken aback by other bands that you’re playing with?
OA: Totally, that still happens all of the time! It doesn’t even have to be with the biggest bands or musicians. Even on this tour in Europe that we just went on with Madeline Goldstein, she was amazing and I didn’t really know her music that well beforehand, but I asked her to go on tour with us and I was stoked seeing her play every night. We’re about to be touring with The Serfs, which is amazing. It brings a great energy playing with bands like that, where you want to perform at their level. Even with Substance Fest, we’re playing with ADULT. who is just amazing, I love that band. I’m lucky in that I’m already a fan of these bands most of the times and I’m honored to be playing with them. There are some shows and tours where it’s hard to believe that I’m even in this position with some of these bands.
TK: When you’re playing a festival months in the future, are you thinking in advance of what songs you’re going to be playing? Or is it like what you said earlier where you’re writing the setlist in the dressing room before you go onstage?
OA: Yeah, we’ll still write it right before we go onstage. Sometimes the other band members make fun of me for this, but I like to know what the vibe of the room is. I think that’s really important when playing with a bunch of different bands and seeing what they bring to the table. It’s the same thing as being a DJ and picking the next songs. Are you going with the grain or against the grain?
TK: After this next North American leg that’s about to happen and beyond Substance Fest in October, are you already looking ahead to what’s going to be the next A Place To Bury Strangers album?
OA: I have some stuff I’m working on. We have a bunch of fly-in dates to play some different festivals as well, and while we’re doing that we’re going to try to record with different friends in different areas. That’s something that we haven’t done in a while, so we’re going to try to make the next thing we do a bit more collaborative and see if that pushes us in a different direction. We’ve been doing this for so long by ourselves, and when you go into a different environment you come up with different stuff so we’ll see what happens.
TK: Earlier you mentioned ADULT., but are there any other bands that you’re playing with at Substance Fest that you’re excited to see?
OA: Totally. Qual will be amazing, but I think they’re just doing the Los Angeles date, and so is TR/ST. I’m just psyched to even be on the same bill as them.
Tickets for Substance Fest can be purchased here
