Mixin' with Akron/Family

Akron/Family are a New York-based group who occupy a difficult-to-describe position in the folk and experimental music world. The folk influences are real: acoustic instruments, harmonic singing, a relationship to American traditional music that is not ironized. The experimental dimensions are also real: extended improvisation, noise elements, structural approaches that have nothing to do with song form.

The combination is not always comfortable, but when it works it produces something that would not exist without both halves.

The Freak Folk context

The phrase "freak folk" was coined in the mid-2000s to describe a cluster of artists working at the intersection of American folk tradition and experimental music. Akron/Family were part of this cluster along with Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and others.

The freak folk label was useful for a moment and became limiting shortly after. What it captured was the combination of acoustic folk instrumentation and performance approaches, communal recording contexts, and a general rejection of the pop songwriting framework that characterized the work of several acts simultaneously.

Akron/Family's approach

The group's records move between intimate folk-song structures and chaotic ensemble performance. Live, they extend this range further. The communal performance model — several people playing together, the music finding its direction as it goes — is central to their approach.

The influence of American folk music on Akron/Family is structural: the harmony singing, the acoustic instruments, the approach to song forms. But the tradition is treated as a starting point rather than a constraint.

The Mixin' With note

This entry is an introduction to an act that was, in early 2009, receiving critical attention but not yet widely known in the folk and Americana listening community. The connection to that community is real if not immediately obvious.

Related: Mixin' with Hoots and Hellmouth. Full Interviews index.