Fans of fuzz and feedback rejoice! A Place to Bury Strangers, the Brookyln-based project of Oliver Ackermann – founder of both the Death by Audio guitar pedal company and Dedstrange Records – often acclaimed as one of the world’s loudest bands for their effects-drenched punk shoegaze wall of noise, have returned with Rare & Deadly, a collection of obscure and unreleased tracks from the past decade, released across four formats, each with a separate track-listing.
As anyone familiar with APTBS would expect, it’s a dark and stormy place in there, full of fog-shrouded nooks and electrifying eruptions of noise, with guitars mutated into strange shapes by Ackermann’s army of pedals raining down on our fortunate ears.
Across the course of Rare & Deadly we get guitars that sound like express trains, guitars that sound like a dentist’s drill, guitars that sound like a rocket launch, guitars that sound like the sea (both calm and stormy), guitars that sound like bursts of fireworks, guitars that sound like industrial machinery and guitars that sound like the alarm that will ring out on the day of armageddon. They’re backed up by driving basslines that sometime favour pounding on a single note and sometimes go a bit melodic and (Peter) hook-y, drum machines that range from stark and utilitarian to crunchy like gravel underfoot with Ackermann’s vocal seeping fragile humanity across it all through a gauze of reverb.
Being a collection of rarities and unreleased material, we get a real range, with some songs pushing to the extremes, almost to breaking point, of what APTBS could be, teetering on the verge of descending into a pit of amorphous noise without ever quite falling in, while other skirt closer to a more standard post-punk template than you’ll find on their regular albums. It’s a compelling glimpse into things that might have been and there are plenty of tracks that hold much more to discover than this simple intrigue.
We caught up with A Place to Bury Strangers frontman and Dedstrange Records founder Oliver Ackermann to find out more about the collection.
Rarities albums are something of an unpredictable entity and come about for all kinds of reasons. What is the intention behind releasing these tracks, many of which for myriad reasons didn’t see the light of day when they were first recorded?
Yeah I feel like I’m pretty critical of my own work and pretty protective of a lot of it that I don’t really feel comfortable sharing with people. This record just had some of those tracks that I really liked but needed time. Some were written about strong feelings of dislike or deep mourning loss and sometimes it just hits too close to home to even work on the track for any longer so it gets either put away prematurely or just doesn’t quite fit with anything else. At some point those feelings become a little easier to take or other pains and frustration gets so big it has dulled the pain.
These sorts of releases often give a glimpse of alternative paths that a band’s sound could have taken. Listening back as you were compiling these albums, are there any routes that you wish you had explored further?
Some of these tracks have a real pure abrasive noise sound to them that I don’t know if I have the guts to always totally destroy tracks like that. Maybe I’m the only one but I often listen to music through effects, like adding layers of distortion or reverb onto the Stooges or the like. I have this old Orange Juice record that I bought second hand and whoever owned it before me must have played it a thousand time because it sounds all fuzzed out and fucked up and by the sound of it I think I thought I loved Orange Juice more than I do.
Are there any songs amongst the collection that evolved into tracks that went on to feature on an APTBS album, or that inspired decisions made on one of your records?
Those decisions are usually based on some sort of ambiguous feeling or technique and there definitely is a lot of connections. Everything is always almost on a record and there’s lots of blurring between A Place To Bury Strangers tracks. Like every song has a piece of every other song inside of it. A fractal of our lives. What we are doing today wouldn’t be here without doing what we had done in the past. It’s like taking step after step further down into hell.
Rather than releasing this as a single album or box set, Rare & Deadly has been shared in four different formats, each with featuring a different set of songs. What was the thinking behind this?
At first I just thought I could so I did it. Seemed like a good way to destroy the precious idea of a format but then when I started assembling everything a strange thing happened where I arranged the tracks like I would want to listen to a record for the record format, a mix tape for the tape format, a cd like a cdr of burned tracks and no thought whatsoever with the digital arrangement.
With songs recorded across such a broad period of time, sometimes with different band members and perhaps recorded with different standards of equipment, how did you go about trying to create cohesive albums? What was the thought process when selecting which song appeared on which release and its place within the tracklisting?
All of these tracks all the parts were played by me with the exception of Paul Jacobs playing drums on the end of the track ‘Heartless’. All of them were recorded with a wide variety of equipment and in different places and in different times where my connection with the band was doing better or worse. All of this wasn’t really considered when arranging the track listings, I just went on impulse. Time is short, sometimes it’s best to just let the music make the decisions.
Despite the different track listing on each format, all four versions open with ‘Song for Girl from Macedonia’ – what is it about this track that makes it so focal to this set of releases?
That’s kind of the track I wanted to do all of this for. I always thought that should be on a record. It’s a sad song that is really meaningful to me and expresses the fragility of life.
How did it feel trawling through your archive of recordings? Were there any particular memories or feelings evoked by what you heard?
Yeah I kinda started this for a few tracks and found a whole ton more looking back. Some of those tracks like ‘Where Are We Now’ is one of those tracks where I was so sad writing that thinking about all the missed and dropped connections in my life. Some of those times so great and fun and there’s a ton of people I will never see again and I must have been feeling really lost at that moment but I still do often wonder. There’s never enough time to see and reconnect with all the people I want to.
What’s coming up next for A Place to Bury Strangers?
We have a few tours this year where we’ve built a ton of cool things to make the shows really special but I have to be vague because I like surprises so I force that on everyone around me. We are working on a lot of new music and that seems to be forming into an album. We shall see.
The albums are being released via your own Dedstrange Records imprint – what else is going on at the label that we should be looking out for?
There’s a new Data Animal record, Future of Ghosts comes out May 22nd and the new Plattenbau album Cursed that came out earlier this year is soooooooo sick. But what can I say, I love those bands.
Rare & Deadly is out now on Deadstrange Records. Get all four versions: vinyl, CD, cassette and digital download via Bandcamp
A Place to Bury Strangers: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Dedstrange Records: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Article by Paul Maps
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