This year’s Australian tour sees A Place To Bury Strangers playing only three shows along the east coast. Though, they’ve performed over 150 shows already this year, which is no small feat.
“Sometimes it gets pretty crazy, you’re so tired you can’t even bear to go on,” says frontman Oliver Ackermann says. “Other times you’re so excited to be in these places. It sort of goes up and down. As you would imagine, it’s very physically demanding to be doing this stuff, and as you get older you start asking, ‘Fuck, I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to do this,’ but you’re going to keep on trying. When the show starts, you feel like you could break a pick on the world. So as long as we keep playing shows, we’ll be all right.”
Ackermann takes a hands-on approach to the band’s sonic special effects, which constitute a large part of their identity. As the founder of the Brooklyn-based company, Death By Audio, Ackermann has made effects pedals for bands such as Lightning Bolt, Wilco, Nine Inch Nails and U2 – along with his own band, of course.
“We make tons of stuff, and it totally makes all this [band success] possible,” he says. “Stuff like building drum effects, the lights, making videos, all sorts of stuff – as much as we possibly can. It’s fun to do all of this stuff, so why not? Then you can really be in control of what you want to do. It makes you think of other ideas for songs and for a really interactive show. It’s the way that the world should work – if you can bring something cool and interesting to share for other people to see, I think that’s an awesome thing.”
Initially, there was a specific pathway that drove Ackermann to experiment with noise. “I saw tons of crazy shows when I was younger, growing up out at Providence, Rhode Island back around the time when Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Forcefield were around and playing. I saw bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Even just getting a guitar and an amplifier, hearing how awesome it sounded to turn it up and hear these great noises you can make – all of these things influenced you to keep those feelings alive.
“As time goes onwards with drugs and experiences and all sorts of stuff, your memories get hazy. You’re going on with what you remember of these ultimate shows and ultimate experiences you experienced, and build on those ideas. You bring upon a dream world on other people. It’s hard to even tell if it translates. I can’t go to one of our shows. You just do what you can to make a crazy experience that moves you, I suppose. You’re just … challenging yourself to do things you think warp space and time.”
Prior to his involvement in A Place To Bury Strangers, Ackermann played bass in post-punk act Skywave; a band cut from similar cloth. The formation of each group was very different, however, with location being a major factor.
“Being in Skywave, I was in a band with my closest friends from Virginia,” he says. “We grew up discovering music together, we were on exactly on the same page when we were writing. So when you come to New York it’s a whole different thing. Everyone comes from so many different places that you get this patchwork quilt of people coming together. It’s learning, growing – it creates things differently for better or for worse. There’s nothing else I could imagine now, though.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
