Akron/Family Launches Record Label

Family Tree - "a new home for outsider behaviors. First signing is Denver's Bad Weather California.

By Blurt Staff

Akron/Family has now made the unofficial official with the inauguration of their Family Tree Records. In 2012, the label will issue Sunkissed by the Denver misfit band Bad Weather California, produced by Akron/Family's Seth Olinsky. Check out this video of BWC:

$$$ BWC SUNKISSED PROMO $$$ from J Logan Corcoran on Vimeo.

Family Tree Records follows in the footsteps of John Fahey's Tacoma Records, Elephant 6 and Young God Records (the band's first home), artist-run record companies born from a desire to create their own context to more truly reflect their music and artistic vision, driven by a sense of independent thinking, ideas, and values.

Right from the start, Akron/Family was inspired by the likes of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Grateful Dead and Wu Tang Clan, and envisioned operating as a group of friends and artists, creating in ever-shifting combinations, drawing on an ever-widening circle of collaborators. Since Akron/Family started exploring music in 2002, their penchant for the unpaved road has brought them opportunities to collaborate onstage and in the studio with musicians from their own free-jazz heroes Hamid Drake and William Parker to legendary Japanese free-shredder Keiji Haino to the members of Woody Guthrie's family to the several thousand people who have been invited (either by the band or by their own excitement) to sing with the band at live shows. Family Tree Records will be the home for the sound documents produced by this process.

All along Akron/Family has collected recordings outside the norm of what appears on more commercial albums. They have edited together limited-run releases from live performances, dimly lit, all-night home sessions, and/or field recordings of wind and insects. These were lovingly hand-packaged and sold primarily on tour. Over time, these were referred to as their "Family Tree Records."

Family Tree Records started this year with the co-release (with Dead Oceans) of <bmbz>, a musical survey and documentation of a Banksy-an Internet prank where Akron/Family's latest album was demolished and reconstructed by seven different artists, then leaked online throughout the Christmas season.

In celebration of 2012, the year of the Mayan calendar's solar cycle prophecies, Family Tree Records is releasing Bad Weather California's Sunkissed. These Denver-based street partiers have been playing house shows and biker bars out West for years and are ripe to enter a wider world. Sunkissed features  exquisite beached out, afro-cana punk anthems with ripping guitar and street wise lyrics, all dedicated to the cellular source of life on this planet - the Sun! This skater-friendly, hippie/ punk aesthetic hearkens back to the glory days of early 80‘s SST Records:  the Meat Puppets (who've they've worked with), Minutemen and early Flaming Lips. Those bands emerged at a time when the punk tenets of artistic freedom  and militant individuality had gone out of fashion, only clung to by the most dedicated of outsiders.

The label has many other plans in store for 2012. Miles Seaton from Akron/Family is producing a record for Ju Young Lee AKA Praything, a wunderkind outsider-pop luminary who surfs the waves of Bruce Springsteen and Laurie Anderson in the Magic Kingdom of Orlando, FL.  There'll be a vinyl- only release of visionary electro-acoustic drone poet Greg Davis' Full Spectrum series.

Also in the planning stage is a touring performance series using portable, custom-built venues. There are plans for releases of Akron/Family side projects and previously un-issued band recordings.