There are no facts.  Time isn’t real.  Neither is our language.  Everything has been invented and accepted by us as humans.  For all any of us know, we could be sitting in the corner of a mental institution drooling on and talking to ourselves.  It’s all an illusion.  Maybe we’re already dead.  Who knows?  This could all be an experiment by an alien master race.  Maybe we’re all just mold growing on a sandwich or a venereal disease on a giant scrotum.  Remember that time you knew you were losing your mind?  Maybe you DID go over the edge.  Remember that time you ate all of that sugar cube in science class?  Maybe you never came back.  This tangible world will never be as “real” as the intangible one in which we actually “exist” and experience everything.  I get it, but as much as this physical world, your job, and material possessions don’t matter, neither does the bullshit and abstract ideas about perception that you’ve spun around in your skull, which give you a mutated sense of accomplishment for doing nothing but sitting in your own filth and living off your baby’s mama, whom you yell at for walking in front of your XBOX screen.

I get it.  This type of spiritual exploration and questioning of our current civilizations and constructs are essential components of the human experience.  This inquisitive rebelliousness is the type of thing that actually moves us forward as a people.  If no one ever risked death and/or exile to question such things as the shape of our planet or the possibilities within it, we could still be living in a world where we cut ourselves to allow the demons to sail out with our bloodflow.  On the flipside, the world might be flat after all (I’ve only seen “flat” pictures of circles).  I get it… I get it…  The point is that you’re not the only one who’s ever questioned anything, eaten hallucinogens, read an Aldous Huxley book, or watched an episode of the Twilight Zone.  The sheer fact that you are even cognitively reasoning things out in the manner which you are is enough evidence to prove that you are still working within the parameters of the world that’s been handed to you.  Sure, such things as time and language are human constructs and aren’t necessarily “real”, but they are still useful tools.  Show up late or not at all to work and see what happens.  If you think you’ve reached that level of super yogi, then don’t eat food and mind over matter that pain Mahatma-style (I wish you luck… seriously).  Our language is an agreement so that we can communicate with each other and, if you choose to invent your own language to prove some kind of point that no one cares about and nobody else can understand it, it kind of defeats the purpose of language altogether.  Ever get yelled at on a random street corner for not understanding some self-congratulating, yet hardly functional, wingnut who’s invented their own meanings and terms of communication?  I have.  Maybe I’m a square, but, at this point in my life, I’d much rather hang out with George McFly than the Crispin Glover who lost his shit on Letterman and I’d rather smoke a spliff at home and watch the Mighty Boosh than to ever try to buy a sack again from a tweeker with weapons in their house and a lifetime’s worth of conspiracy theories built around the synapses in the human brain and ley lines.  I just don’t give a fuck.  Indulge yourself, but cross me off for the updates.  This stance doesn’t just apply to the everyday delusions or god complexes either.  Music is just another language and one thing that I really have no interest in is your shitty, contrived, “experimental”, and poorly crafted future music.  Sell it to the fucking tweens, before they start eating their own drugs and realizing that your noise was just another marketing ploy; not all that un-similar to KE$HA‘s.

Back in November, we featured a post about the upcoming AKRON/FAMILY release, S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT.  If you read it, you probably know that the trio had actually refused to deliver any actual tracks to their label DEAD OCEANS, for fear of having them leaked.  Instead they provided a barely coherent type-written letter, along with a blend of fragmented sample clips from the tracks that they had apparently recorded.  There was information that they had written the album in a cabin located in the side of an active Japanese volcano and recorded it in an abandoned train station in Detroit.  Everything that they tried to explain felt like it was warped behind the opaque veil of a mescaline bender.  The more information that was available, the more mystery that the project actually seemed to be shrouded in.  Were they losing their touch with reality and, if so, was it in a “productive” way?  Was the album going to be listenable or was it just going to be one long “bleeeeeeeeeep”?  Basically, what we wanted to know was if it was gonna sound like that recording that you make where everyone’s zapped out of their gourds, only to realize that it never actually sounded as “amazing” as you all advertised to the friends that you crunk dialed that night at 4:30 am.  When it was all said and done, you were actually just recording a muffled disaster.  The thing was, we miss the old album recording tales about David Bowie being so freaked out on coke and the occult that he was sent into a state of “psychic terror” or Keith Richards anti-socially locking himself in the bathroom with a bunch of smack.  We liked the mystical and unorthodox recording venture that A/F was taking, but just weren’t sure that it would yield such positive results as their 70s predecessors.  We weren’t sure if it was eventually just going to result more U2 style self-indulgence, where, even though they might convince their fans to accept their own delusions of grandeur, the product actually turned out to be a lot of super contrived mediocre trash.  We weren’t sure… until now.

Below is “So It Goes“, the  first track/video from Akron/Family‘s new album and, as you will soon discover, it’s sounding pretty great.  There are definitely interesting experimental elements to it, but they sound fresh and actually contribute to the track, rather than unnecessarily weigh it down, dampen, or confuse it.  Whatever they did, seems to be working and we can only hope that the rest of the album will be this good.  The video itself, is a little wacky, but there’s no need to adjust your screen.  Any glitches and shifts are purely intentional.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/18476077[/vimeo]

S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT still has a release date set for February 8th, but Akron/Family is finally ready to start letting the tracks out of the bag immediately.  This upcoming weekend, several listening parties are scheduled around the country.  Please check the dates below, to find out where you can catch one of these events and hear more of the album (who knows?  Maybe the rest of the albums IS just composed of bleeps.)

LISTENING PARTY DATES:

AKRON/FAMILY TOUR DATES:

*All dates with Delicate Steve