Even though Seth Olinsky has been a founding member of freak folk, experimental rock group Akron/Family for over 10 years, he is not bereft of side projects. With Cy Dune, Olinsky has released an EP, composed a piece that was performed by eight bands simultaneously.
Now, with $22,263 raised from Kickstarter, Olinsky has created Lightning Records. Together with his girlfriend Ali Beletic, Olinsky has corralled musicians such as Sam Amidon, members of AFI, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof to create their own side projects on cassette tapes.
Called “The Lightning 20 Artist Series and Quarterly,” Lightning Records will slowly release five cassettes every four months along with a magazine featuring articles written in a gonzo style.
Olinsky recently sat down to chat about Lightning Records, the traditional music industry paradigm and 2014 plans of Akron/Family and Cy Dune.
There are so many artist sand people involved in Lightning Records, how did you think of this idea. How did it start to germinate?
It came from a lot of different angles. I’ve always wanted a record label since I was a kid. A few years ago I started a record label via my band Akron/Family called Family Tree Records. I started it as a traditional indie label. I had a lot of ideas and inspirations to do something different, but I didn’t quite know what the idea was yet.
I was thinking a lot about it. I was meeting with different record people like Slim Moon who started Kill Rockstars. Just different people from different label backgrounds, asking them about ideas. That was about 3 and half years ago. I was thinking about this stuff, but I hadn’t totally shaped it yet. I ended up starting Family Tree Records, just to do it. I did it and it was fun. I produced and put out a band called Bad Weather California that Relix wrote about. They did an in studio with you guys. I did my first EP as Cy Dune and some Akron/Family stuff in Family Tree. It took on a more traditional shape.
This year, I started thinking more about the experience and getting back to the original idea of wanting to do something new and different. When Ali and I were living in Tucson we’d been doing a lot of different art projects, happenings out in the desert and stuff with Ali’s sculptures. We started bringing these ideas of what we were doing in Tucson together with doing a label. I think this is a totally new thing. Lightning sprang out of that.
It was out of this intention of bringing together art, music, culture and things that are fun—dirt bikes. In Tucson we were experimenting with getting people out of the box, getting them into the desert, to have a happening or go play laser tag. Finding ways to get people to engage in the social experience of having “fun.” All these ideas culminated into Lightning Records.
Another experience I had with my other label too was knowing so many amazing musicians and artists. I really wanted to find a way to work with a lot of different artists as opposed to just the sort of traditional model of releasing one record and letting that go on in a traditional way. Cassettes are actually a great medium for that. You can move quickly and work with a lot of different artists.
Because of the medium you can experiment with different ideas and there’s not as much financial pressure on the artists so they can be more, not necessarily more avant-garde experimental, but they can let themselves go. They don’t have to put as much pressure on themselves, it doesn’t have to be their brand statement. They can try something. It’s more when you’re playing live you can experiment a little more or go out on a tangent a little more live than on a recording.
All these ideas were floating around and they just congealed. It’s been great. All the artists I’ve asked has been so excited to be involved. Setting out on this journey to try to find a new way to things for musicians, a lot of musicians are feeling that, and no one knows the answers. I think there’s something really strong in the idea of bringing a bunch of people together and setting out on the journey to look for a possible answer.
We’re not trying to say we have the answer, it’s our proposed theory or possible solution. If we rally a bunch of musicians to work together as opposed to competing with each other and do really cool stuff, maybe something that feels progressive will come out of that.
Nominally, Lightning Records sounds like a record label, but to me it sounds like a collective or a group of people working together to try something different.
Definitely. It has that mentality. It’s funny because as an artist and musician growing up I had a love for the idea of these labels. I loved all these labels from Chess, Stax, Discord or even like Elephant 6 which was Neutral Milk Hotel and those bands. That was sort of a collective, beats label. There all these sort of ways that people have approached these ideas. Now that the landscape of the music industry is changing so much and records are changing, I think that the whole environment is changing for musicians as well.
If you zoom out and look at the world and see where everything is going, music is the tip of the iceberg. I think what’s happened with music downloads, “piracy” is probably going to happen with bicycles at times and heart surgery in the future. If you zoom out this is an exciting moment where musicians are on the forefront economically as well as artistically. If you set out with a group of friends trying to be really creative with the mystery and problems at hand, maybe there’s some things that might apply to a much broader economic sense to the world in the years to come.
The Internet has really democratized the way that people produce music which probably helps Lightning Records. There are even labels like Communion and even a collective like Wu-Tang Clan. What you do you think the rise of these record collectives say about where the record industry is going as a whole?
I don’t know. When I switched gears to Family Tree and starting to think about Lightning Records, I went back to some of the people I talked to originally about Family Tree as advisors.
One of the people I contacted was James Toth who goes by the name Wooden Wand. He’s released hundreds of records over the past ten years. He’s just the most prolific song writer I know, he’s so amazing. He’s been on Nonesuch, Young God, Ecstatic Peace! and tiny bedroom label. He’s been on a ton of different kinds of labels, so I thought he would be a good guy to ask about the difference between these labels, what are the strengths, weaknesses, etc.
At the end, he said, “Ultimately Seth, you’re an artist, probably deep down what you’re craving the most is what other artists are craving from a label too right now.” I thought that was a really profound perspective. I thought about that and I think that’s the thing about Lightning has been so exciting so far and I think is part of the reason why artists have been so inclined to get on board an participate even though it has an open ended structure. It hasn’t taken shape yet. People are so excited to participate because I think it is striking a chord with where artists are.
There is this feeling right now where, I think labels…I have nothing bad to say about labels. I’ve been on really great labels and the people work really hard. The majority of my experience of people at labels is they really, really believe in music and want to support. It’s just that things are changing so fast it’s really hard for them to change and know how to support and invest in an artist.
I think that makes it hard for both the labels and artists right now. Part of the exciting thing about Lightning is that there’s a wont to participate in something significant. I think the music industry and the “mediazation” of music has made things sort of a little has minimized some of the more important things about music, the spirit, power, social, community and tribal aspects. Music has only been on compact disc and records for a hundred years, but music has existed for thousands of years. It has always been a powerful medium for human expression and important to the tribe, community or village.
I think the music industry and the industrialization of music on the recording side and live side has become really codified. Musicians feel it and audiences feel it. They want something different. They want something that’s in a different context for the thing that they loved since they were kids.
People didn’t necessarily sign up to play guitar or be in band because they wanted a streaming MP3 with a lot of clicks on SoundCloud. It was deeper and more poetic, whether they came from a Phish or Grateful Dead background or a Fugazi and punk type world. There was a more communal, social happening. We certainly don’t have it figured it out, but we’re trying to create something that’s contemporary and has some of that spirit in it. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. And why not try something different?
The worst thing you can do is fail. It’s weird because now that things are so mediated and things happen so fast that it can create a heightened sense of self-awareness in our culture. It’s easier to try things, but it’s almost harder to try new things, where you might fail just a little bit because everyone is going to know and you will feel sensitive to it.
On the one hands it’s like why try. People get scared to try. Things tend to have a real momentum toward the middle ground these days. That was the spirit. It’s was like what if we could a bunch of people we admire and respect from different fields. We know our friends over here are special at desert architecture, what if they wrote about music? What is musicians wrote about poetry? What poets over here can interview the architects?
Traveling around the world we met all these amazing subcultures of amazing thinking and creative people. How do we find ways to flood them all into each other and let them get excited about what they’re doing? Sometimes the subcultures get detached from each other and are operating in their other spheres. That was the way the journal came into it, finding a way to put things together and trying to channel the Stuart Grant. Trying to bring that in a way that helps feed a rock and roll subculture.
You have a pretty extensive roster of artists. How did you reach out to them?
It was a lot of different ways. 99 percent of the artists were all artists that I’ve known for a while in one capacity and have met in my travels playing and recording with Akron/Family for the past ten years. It’s weird, if people look at the list the through line might not be apparent. To me, it’s very obvious in a way. But I don’t think there’s a stylistic through line. It’s just these people I’ve met along the way that I really admired something about their spirit, something that they do that I feel is very exciting that I don’t see other people doing.
Even though musically, you may have a more songwriter with Wooden Wand or Sam Amidon interpreting a folk thing and then you have Taliban who are the farthest out insane Brooklyn experimenters. There is a real through line of people that I’ve met who I’ve been really inspired by. I always go back and revisit their work to see what they’re doing. I think that they’re on the forefront of this music from different angles as this meeting place.
Musically it’s all over the map. It wasn’t a genre defining thing. Although the label is inspired by the root spirit of rock and roll. That power and meaning of rock and roll to the world. We’re still trying to find a meeting ground between those two ideas. Like I said, I think the spirit of where the artists are coming from is still potent and moving to me. It’s trying to take that highlight it and show it to people.
A lot of the projects Lightning Records will put out are side projects. From fan’s perspective, sometimes side projects are feared because they’re going to lose their favorite band/song/sound what have you. Do you think the perspective on side projects has changed?
I don’t know the fans’ perspective. I would look at that more from an artist’s perspective. The natural cycle of creativity isn’t necessarily to make an album every two years and then tour and play that show for two years. That’s not the natural cycle of creativity. I think that’s the way things ended up getting structured in the music industry. So many artists I know have a wide pallet of expression, taste and different angels from which they’re creating from.
It’s not that we set out to do side projects, but we have been trying to encourage our artists to take chances, not necessarily things that are more avant-garde, but I was talking to my friend Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs) the other day, his project is called Night Mint. His project isn’t all electronic. He does all these crazy vocal harmonies and it sounds like a vocoder or harmonizer, but it’s him doing hundreds of tracks of him singing over himself on a cool reel-to-reel tape recorder. It ended up sounding more electronic or drum machine. I was talking to him and he was really exciting that I was encouraging him to try something a little different. He was exciting about doing something more rock and roll. It wasn’t necessarily more experimental, it was just getting to show a different side of his background and musicality.
It’s almost about expressing yourself in a different way.
Exactly. That’s something that’s cool about tapes and the way we’re approaching it. In terms of pressing vinyl, it’s pretty expensive. You’re really dealing in a situation where if you are going to make vinyl, you have to invest all this money upfront and you have to sell 1,000 copies upfront unless everyone is going to lose money.
You end up consciously or unconsciously boxing yourself in artistically because you need to make sure you’re selling something. Tapes are a really cool thing to encourage the ability of an artist to experiment which I think is really important. In any culture or any climate where you want new ideas to come out of. You need a climate that’s supportive of people taking chances and failing a little bit. If you can’t fail you’ll never really take chances. That was really cool, having that conversation with Dave. It was less about having a side project, it was just giving him a platform and a context to explore a tangential idea. Or go a little bit further with something that he wouldn’t risk doing in a traditional label setting.
I think that’s really exciting from an artistic point of view. For the audience, I think they are going to get something that’s a bit more risky, but more fun. It’s less of a safe bet. In that sense there’s more fun to be had. Maybe there will be a few things that aren’t successes, but there will be things that will be a wild ride. A lot of people will be given the opportunity to have more of that dynamic experience. I think people can get interested in that if they let themselves get out of the box. And if not, we’ll just shoot them with paintball guns (Laughs). Loosen them up.
What’s the Kickstarter specifically raising money for?
It’s for the production of the cassettes, magazine and few other things. We are going try to build some custom dirt bikes and surfboards. We did sell one dirt bike. The main thing in the Kickstarter is we have this first series lined up with 20 artists and we’re going to make cassette tapes. We are going to make journals. We have contributors lined up. Hopefully we’ll get more as we get into production. The Kickstarter is basically just raising money for funding the manufacturing, design and mastering of all that stuff. It’s the bare minimum to get us through the first year of this.
We have a lot of ideas of different things we want to do. But we wanted to just first jump into this first project and year from now see where we’re at. Kickstarter is really cool. It’s been a humbling and awesome experience. As much as Akron/Family is a pretty DIY band and we’ve had a lot of direct experience with our fans, we were still selling our records through stores and labels and in between. This Kickstarter has been really humbling, overwhelming and so directly communal. Directly reaching out to people for support and having them come up and say, “I saw you play one time and it really moved me” or “I used to listen to this record when I was falling asleep,” it’s been a real intimate economic experience. It’s been really cool.
A lot of people have been signing up based on the trust of feeling that I’ve know you over the years and like what you do artistically. They like the idea and want to see where it’s going to go.
On the Kickstarter page you mention that artists are asked to contribute “a unique side project or edgy creative statement.” What does that mean exactly?
I’ve been leaving it open for the artists. With cassette tape you can do anywhere from 20-90 minutes. For the $5 to $6, that a cassette costs, from the listener’s side, for me it’s less about the minutes making the purchase valuable. It’s an exciting forum for a mood, statement or something specific being explored by the artists.
If someone wants to do a long drone that’s 90 minutes, I’m down to support it. If someone wants to do ten punk songs that are one minute long, we can that also. We can put the same ten minutes on the A side and B side. It’s definitely less restrictive to EP, LP and more about the artists using the forum to get at some new idea.
There are so more traditional projects as well. Wooden Wand just sent me his record. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s songs that he’s written, about ten songs, thirty minutes long. It’s a great record, great songs and him singing. It’s not all experimental by any means. The songs are excellently written, amazing songs.
How involved are you in the actual production of the music?
The way we have it set up now, the artists will record and mix it. We’ll help master it. As I said earlier I was talking to David the other day and I said I wanted to play guitar on some tracks. He said he would be in LA at the end of the month, so we might end up meeting in my studio and collaborating. It’s pretty open ended. Some people will do it all on their own, even master it.
It’s pretty natural these days for musicians are capable to do real good recordings themselves at home with their own gear.
When are you looking to have the first cassettes out?
The series is a quarterly series. We’re going to do five cassettes/albums every three months and a journal. The first series will go out in March. And then June.
Besides Lightning Records, anything going on with Cy Dune? Do you plan on releasing anything with Akron/Family or go on tour?
Akron/Family is actually going to take a break. We’ve been hitting hard making ten records in the past ten years and toured insanely. We just got back from Japan, which was our third trip. It was amazing. Touring Japan is hard to describe, it’s so fun. But we’re actually going to take next year off. We’ve taken little periods off in last ten years between recording and touring, but some side project comes up or some show comes up. So we decided to take a year off to explore side projects.
Miles is finishing a record now, Dana has the Dana Bouy project and he’s working on another record. I’ve been doing this project Cy Dune. I just finished a record. I have one thing I’m working on for the subscription series for Cy Dune that will be a tape. I also have a full length that will probably come out this year on Lightning. I’ll do some touring on that.
I have also been doing more composing. Last year, I wrote this piece for multiple bands to play simultaneously. I did the debut performance at Hopscotch Festival in September. We shut down the street and set up eight bands going down the street. We rehearsed it in the morning and then I conducted it. It was a minimalist piece bringing together some of my experience with Rhys Chatham’s guitar orchestra and some of the stuff The Boredoms do with the Boadrum Project, but it’s written for any band.
I’m going to try to perform that at a few more festivals this year with 10-20 bands. It’s cool because you can adapt it to different spaces. That time we did it in the street and set everyone up in a long line. But I’m talking to a festival in Boise, ID for March called Treefort. They have access to a big skate park so we’ll probably set up bands more scattered around the skate park. It’s all composed and you can explore the different tambours. You can hear all the different qualities of the bands, but they’re all playing together. It’s really cool.
I’ve heard Hopscotch is really fun. The Triangle music scene is great.
I totally recommend going to the festival. It’s so cool and the curated is really good. It’s all the clubs downtown and you run into people you know. It’s like a very small version of SXSW but with really awesome bands and all your friends. It’s not overwhelming at all. You see all these bands you love and also get exposed to all this cool stuff.
I don’t think people realize how vibrant that whole Triangle scene is.
We toured with Megafaun in 2007, they played in our band and that was really our introduction into that scene. We know some really amazing people and musicians who live down there. They are always doing really cool stuff down there. It’s really mind-blowing.
