As I walked outside the Urban Lounge following the Place To Bury Strangers show, I was hit square in the face by something huge and oppressive. Silence. It was louder than any of the massive guitar freak-outs or minimal three chord ear lobe destroyers I witnessed. A Place To Bury Strangers' head-exploding shoegaze anthems had completely taken up every inch of my capacity to process sound. Beforehand, I sat down with the surprisingly non-menacing NYC trio and discussed Record Label deals, Oliver Ackerman’s Death By Audio pedal co./record label, and the power of noise to transform the communal act of going to a show to a deeply personal experience.

Inyourspeakers: So, you moved from John Whitney’s (awesome) imprint Killer Pimp to Mute Records. How has the transition been?

Oliver Ackerman: It was really easy. The thing is with Mute Records, people keep saying they are a major label but I don’t ever get that vibe. It is just a bunch of people who are really cool, super into music. We deal with the same people who started the label. They put out such great stuff. I think even just signing with them influenced how the record came out, I got a bunch of CDs from them of really early Mute recordings and so I started listening to a lot of the early Mute stuff right as the record was being produced.

IYS: Mute has been around for a really long time. At the inception of all of this was it even in your trajectory to go from a really obscure Brainwashed imprint to a pretty substantial record label?

Oliver: I really wasn’t banking on anything at all. It seemed like it just came along, people started really liking our stuff, and in a way we just said, “let’s go for it”. I have never been in a band or a label as big as Mute, and when given the opportunity…There were labels other than Mute but not only were they decent size-wise, they are rad people and put out awesome stuff. So we were like “why would we not?” you know? At least to try it out. I have been in bands for a long time and always just been silk-screening record covers and pressing CD-Rs and mailing everything out myself and booking really moronic tours. Now when we move to New York everything is just really crazy and really intense and we don’t have a lot of time to deal with all that stuff. If there is anyone who wants to help me out with any of this I am going to take them up on it.

IYS: That seems like a pretty good relationship, a label being there to help facilitate your needs as a band.

Oliver: Exactly, that is why we signed with them. Maybe it was different a couple years ago, you signed to a label because “who could say no to a million dollars?” It is just so nice to have people deal with the crap that you don’t want to deal with. That is almost the most important thing. When you start doing more and more stuff there is legal stuff and all that baloney, and I could just care less. It is important to know what is going on but I didn’t join a band to file paper work.

IYS: Did you have any idea A Place To Bury Strangers would consume your life like this?

Oliver: I would always be playing music whether or not the band was around. I was definitely willing to give this a shot; we weren’t searching for anything in terms of popularity. I love playing shows and the goal was, “let’s play a bunch of shows and travel to cool places.”. We could book stuff just based on our music, I didn’t want to waste time talking to promoters. It was more simple minded, we just wanted to focus on playing music.

IYS: Talking about playing, going into APTBS did you have a set sound that you wanted to tackle or did your influences just kind of come together and you decided to form this amazingly awesome, loud band.

Oliver: It’s a little bit of both of those things. I’ve been to shows that I thought were amazing. I thought, “what would I like to go see at a show?”.

Jono Mofo: Things evolve anyway, you know?

Oliver: We are just into making music for ourselves. But I have been to shows where I was blown away at how they made it all mysterious and shit. You learn why that’s cool. It is almost designed to make us enjoy the show as it is. When you can't quite tell what is going on you are a lot more focused on what is actually important, the music.

IYS: I would definitely view listening your music as an intensely personal act and as loud as you guys get that renders communication impossible. Is that something you wanted to capture? A deeply personal experience at a live show because all other sensory perceptions are totally shut off?

Oliver: The music is written to be very personal. We aren’t here to entertain you. It is an art piece whenever you can have this kind of experience. We wanted to create this kind of thing where it would tap into your subconscious, feelings that you thought were unimportant or things that happened in the past. It is kind of even left open to where people aren’t even going to have the same experience but if you make it your own thing where you kind of just lose your shit and you can’t even ground yourself and you are left with your inner thoughts and your own inner uncomfortableness and having that be part of the experience. It gets something else working at the show other than your imagination.

IYS: I am really interested in the Brecht-ian ideas of the fourth wall where people are so aware of the edifice of the stage and the theater that you actually realize you are watching a piece of art. It creates this separation between this fantasy world going on onstage and you. There are also French noise musicians that are so loud that their show is an act of confrontation with the audience. Is that something that you want to create? Like you are this artifice of this band and we are the audience and there is this wall of noise between us?

Oliver: I guess I could back and forth. It is fun to be totally involved with the audience, we have played some shows where we are right there and we can’t even move and you know exactly what is going on. But at the same time we aren’t going to be like “hey, is everyone having a good time!” So I think that people could, per say, get involved in what it is. But I think it is more of a singular thing where people lose track of where they are, it is kind of like a psychedelic thing where you get fucked up by the experience rather than making it so that what we are doing is so important. It is more about the person who is there, the individual.

IYS: Have there been any unusual reactions to your shows?

Jono: There was a mosh pit in Vancouver which was pretty weird.

Oliver: Yeah, there have been mosh pits, people throwing stuff, people did this whole like tribal prayer. People have freaked out, we have had some people run.

Jono: People do weird shit, they stick their fingers in their ears, some people get crazy into it and shout, shout things at us.

Oliver: We’ve had people jump up on stage and start singing, in Vancouver a guy jumped up and started punching my guitar

IYS: You guys have had some pretty illustrious tourmates with Nine Inch Nails, Holy Fuck, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. How did that happen? Is Trent Reznor a fan of you guys?

Oliver: Yeah, I guess he is a fan of us and contacted our booking agent asking if we wanted to do it and we were like, “no”, and then he emailed back and we were like, “allllright”

Jono: Because it’s you.

Oliver: So that was nuts. The shows were nuts and just off the chain. We played in these huge arenas. I remember our first show this guy came in five minutes before and asked “are you ready?” We were all standing there with our guitars and he was like “ok, you are on in 5-4-3-“ and then they turned off the lights and everybody starts going “whoooooa”

Jono: I don’t know what they thought was going to happen, it is just us.

Oliver: We just went out there. It was ridiculous…looking way off in the distance at Jono. There was one show where this dude was holding his middle finger up in the air and staring me down, so I was staring him down, and then after we stopped playing I was still staring him down and eventually he turned his middle finger into the rock and roll sign. Everyone were super nice and super sweet people. Nine Inch Nails put on an amazing show.

IYS: I want to talk about recording the new album. Did your new signing to a label with a bigger budget influence your recording at all?

Oliver: Not really. This album isn’t very experimental at all. It was all very minimal; it almost sounds live. There are no other instruments besides guitar, bass and drums.

IYS: I hear horror stories about Billy Corgan holing up for weeks recording 100 + guitar lines. How was the process recording all those guitar tracks? Did you record them all yourself?

Oliver: Yeah, I recorded them all myself fairly quickly. I wanted to hear what it sounded like because I was doing this one line and I did two tracks of it, and then I decided it would be really cool if it was like a hundred of those. So I did it all in just one night. It took me like five hours straight.

IYS: So, you run your own pedal company Death By Audio, how does that work going into recording? Do you already have the sounds you want to hear because you can create those?

Oliver: It goes both ways really. Sometimes I will have these sounds that I want to play and I’ll build effects for the sound that I really want to get. I will design something to create the sound I want to make. Other times I’ll be experimenting with something and I’ll be like “This sounds wicked!” and a song will be written around it or something. Sometimes you will try really hard to use a sound and it just doesn’t work.

IYS: And now Death By Audio has turned into something more than an Effects Company. You guys havea little recording studio and community around Death By Audio.

Oliver: We only record our friends for free. We have a recording studio. It is nothing crazy, just a bunch of cheap junk and then some other stuff that I built to mix. We’ve been lucky to be friends with some really cool bands so we’ve had the opportunity to record some really cool stuff. So there’s a recording studio, a pedal company, a record label, a show space. It’s all a bunch of the people who live there

IYS: That’s rad that you can turn a business endeavor into a communal type thing bound together by the love of music.

Oliver: All these endeavors are built around our love of music.

IYS: Well, you don’t have a weapons manufacturing arm yet…

Oliver: (laughs) Well, not yet….