You’d assume that Seth Olinsky, one of Akron/Family’s four multi-instrumentalists, would want to take a break from music. On the back of three years touring as a member of both Akron/Family and label owner Michael Gira’s Angel of Light, and about to engage on a tour of the US and Canada in promotion of Akron’s brilliant new album, Love Is Simple, if anyone is deserving of a slight reprieve it is Olinsky.

Yet when Olinsky answers WB’s phone call an hour late, apologising for his tardiness, it is music that has been keeping him away. Recording in his Pennsylvanian studio where he is working on a new ‘Best of Seth’ album (a release created during brief periods away from the road and band commitments), Olinsky and his Akron cohorts seemingly have an unquenchable thirst for creation – one that is evident throughout the interview as he honestly discusses the artistic merits of their new recording, clearly looking towards his band’s impossibly bright future.

The promo material for Love Is Simple says, Love is Simple: Recording is not. Why so?

It took quite a while, as we spent two weeks in November basic tracking and then we came back to it and wanted to re-work the album. The whole time we were working with a new producer Andrew Weiss (Ween, Gone), so it took quiet a while to get a language going with Andrew and we had all these tours in-between. Coming back and trying to work on the record in my apartment in Brooklyn then going to New Jersey to finish with Andrew, it kinda dragged on for a long time going back-and-forth working on it here and there, finally getting to a point where we were happy with it. We ended up remixing a few of the songs later in Brooklyn. It was a complicated, drawn out process of revisiting it.

Was that helpful?

Some aspects were nice. We got immersed in it and then we got to take some breaks and come back with fresh ears. But the nature of having to work on it in different pieces was starting to get frustrating ‘cause it felt like we never had the time to just dig in and do exactly what we wanted to do.

Did you achieve what you set to do, or could you have had more time?

Well, I always think we could do better. I was telling someone the other day we always shoot for the moon get some distance to it and fall short and then we’re like: “well, next time we’ll get closer”. For us it’s always setting a goal that’s way beyond our means and learning so that next time we’ll get even closer. I think there’s always room for us to do better. But we’re all happy with where we got. I think it’s certainly a step above the other recordings in craftsmanship and clarity and artistry.

Are there any particular improvements you hope to make?

I think next time around we’re going to spend a little more time working on the songs before we record them. All the record’s we’ve done this far have been with a producer, for the next record we might just try and get a really creative engineer, someone less in a producer role and just direct ourselves. In this last one we started to get frustrated feeling like we had a lot of ideas and it was butting heads with the producer. You go through a whole process of making a record and you re-learn how to do that and I think we’ll be able to approach it in a different, clearer way.

Weiss said to you that “the records you loved and grew up on all existed in no place”. What does that mean?

That’s something Miles wrote, he wanted to make a record that sounded like it was recorded in a space, where you could hear the room that it was in or visualise it. And Andrew said that he liked to make records that seemed to exist in ‘nowhere’. He had a more fantastical view of a record opposed to Miles who wanted something more like a field recording of a drummer in Africa; Andrew wanted it to exist in no particular place so that the imagination could fill in the gaps for each person.

One of the album’s big advancements is its tighter performances. Was this an intention?

It was an intention to make the album a little bit clearer, if you hear our other three records they are all over the place. I feel like in each one we were trying to express a different side of ourselves, trying to experiment and understand different things about the band and I think the new one is a maturity, a coming together of ideas where we thought we could express them all at the same time.

It is a natural outcropping of a couple of things. We just got better as a band, playing together. Part of what we wanted to do is to capture ourselves playing together, so every song we played live and just picked out the best takes and that was how we started and I think that’s reflected in the songs, things sound crisper and more clear.

Also Love Is Simple is more hook heavy than prior releases.

That might be true. I think the truth is that some might think we tried to make it more of a pop record but when we have enough time to clearly express our ideas they are kind of more hooky and approachable. The stuff before we didn’t really have the time to see it through to the end.

Was there much of a concept?

Not specifically. For the last few years we’ve been listening to a lot of music that we’d been listening to as kids, The Beatles, Zeppelin and Neil Young and there was a little bit of an idea of trying to make a homage to the classic record – the record you put on and listen to from the beginning till the end, Sgt Pepper’s or one of these great records. Those records that flow from song-to-song and that are about the whole overall experience. There was an attempt to make a classic record in that sense.

I think the concept of what a record is, is going to change pretty soon. So I feel like we were getting in on the last swoop of that and trying to make a classic record, a homage to what has come before us. Now, we can move on and try new ideas and explore new territories?

The marketing and packaging side of albums seems more important now.

Yeah, this album actually has a free DVD included with it. The first 10, 000 copies get one as a way to encourage people to buy it instead of download it.

How will the concept of a record change? Do you think singles will become more prominent again?

Yeah, well there’s that. There’s the sense that when recording first showed up it was just singles. The concept of an album didn’t really show up till the Beatles/Beach Boys, albums were just a collection of singles and then the Beatles released Rubber Soul and Revolver, the first collection of songs that weren’t meant to be singles, they were meant to be an album, a whole listening experience.

Everyone is freaking out about the death of the album, ‘oh no, people download stuff,  but I think iTunes is bringing back the power of the single and the fact people are getting free music from the internet is making more people come out to live shows. The live experience is becoming more empowered, which is a throwback to hundreds of years ago, where it was all about the live experience. That definitely affects us, people like our records and I feel we’ve made good records, but we’ve definitely gotten most of our exposure and acclaim from live performances.

You are right that a lot of your acclaim has come from those wooed by the live show. What makes your live shows special?

Simply, we’ve toured so much. We’ve worked the last three years non-stop apart from releasing records, so I think we’ve focused a lot of attention on developing a live show that is a lot of things: exciting, on-the-edge, we take risks every night, so each night is a little different. We don’t go out and just play experimental music for two hours, we try and draw people in by having people sing-along and clap along, including songs people know and bridging that into something more dissonant. This new record it starts and it ends, and in between this whole experience occurs.

Do you have anything special planned for the upcoming US shows?

Yeah, we are doing a seven piece band for these tours. It’s three guitars, Wurlitzer/organ, banjo and there are two drummers. Everyone plays percussion and all seven people sing. We were having some trouble on the last two tours performing some of the stuff as a four-piece, by the end we were probably only playing three or four songs of the record, it was just really difficult to bring to life all the instrumentation, the changes and the vocals.

Will the set be a collage or mainly newer material?

Newer material mainly, there’s going to be a few new songs we haven’t recorded yet and a few old songs. Night-to-night we’ll change it up a little bit.

With spending so much time on the road, do you find being in a band is like a relationship, with highs and lows?

Of course, you can think of how complicated a relationship with just you and one other person can be and this is a relationship between four people. It’s extremely complicated, it’s a lot of our lives and a lot of our dreams and creativity and now our livelihood as we’ve all quit our jobs in the last year and we’re just doing this.

It’s definitely really complicated and there can be egos involved, but that’s also the beauty in having a band – that from the difficulty of compromising, and creative friction, can arise something that just wouldn’t have come up from one person. It’s something that mysteriously happens, something that is actually a beautifully experience in-between the compromise of four strong creative ideas. Everyone involved is integral to the whole.

Are you fazed by the media hype and feedback?

It’s hard to tell, after the last few records I weened myself off of the reviews and who thinks what. It either bums you out or gives you an ego trip, neither of which is good. Our culture is so media drenched, you’re still trained to think that media tells you the truth, that even when it is your own project you start to believe what they say instead of what you feel.

I’m actually in Pennsylvania right now, I moved back to where I grew up which is a small town. It just started to get a little overwhelming, all the media, all the fashion and all the hype. I made a decision for myself, I didn’t want to go into that with my life, I wanted to have some more rounded expectations.

Has it fared well so far?

It’s been great. When you’re in New York City and you’re constantly surrounded by the new cool thing, every week someone’s saying this is the coolest record that ever came out, the week after there’s another one. There’s a constant stream of fashionably, hyped-up new ideas and you can’t help but be influenced by these because they are constantly around, even if you’re not directly listening to them. Coming out here, there’s not as much of a direct link to those ideas and you can get into your own thing more.

Did the rest of the band move as well?

We all stationed here for the summer to work on new stuff. We had to work on the seven piece band and every tour we make a CD-r that we sell; we make a 1000 copies and we work on that and new material.

How do you write lyrics for this sort of stuff?

We’d been using the Beatles approach to songwriting, where everyone brings songs to the table they’ve written and sings those songs, so it’s kinda different for everyone. For me, this was the first time I’d wrote the lyrics first and music later. It was an outcropping of touring, as I was frustrated that I never had the time to play the guitar by myself and write new songs. One time, after our first or second tour, I was watching Don’t Look Back, the Dylan documentary, and there’s a scene where he’s in a hotel room typing on a type writer and there’s a bunch of distraction going on but he’s just zoned out typing. I thought that maybe if I could just type songs out I could write more on the road. That summer every time I got the inspiration to write I just went to the keyboard and typed it out.

As a title Love Is Simple seems a great contradiction, not only in the words but in the genre-hopping of your band. Was this deliberate?

It’s definitely a contradictory term because if you ask anyone they’d most likely say that love isn’t simple. That’s a song Ryan wrote, it seemed to be so simple yet so complicated at the same time. I think it does capture the play in our music between simplicity and complexity, the things making sense and those that don’t. I think the concept of love is often thought of in a simplified romantic kind of way, what we were trying to get at is that love is more profound and more revolutionary; definitely in partial reference to The Beatles.

Is this love as a social phenomenon?

Beyond romantic and beyond social; trying to approach the idea of a more profound love and the idea of love as human kind.

Check out the review of Love Is Simple here