INDIANAPOLIS — A Place to Bury Strangers’ brand of strafing sonance isn’t just bursting eardrums. It’s connecting with an audience that appreciates aural masochism.

“Ever since experimental music has become more popular, things have been a lot better received,” said Oliver Ackermann, singer/guitarist for the New York-based trio. “People are getting more into this stuff, which is pretty cool.”

It wasn’t always so. Back in the late ’90s, Ackermann was crafting a similar motif with a group called Skywave in his native Virginia. The stentorian sonics had a tendency to alienate its intended audience.

“We’d get club owners threatening our lives,” Ackermann said. “Sometimes people would get really (mad).”

And why not? As the name implies, A Place to Bury Strangers’ withering squalls could conceivably emanate from a serial killer’s cavernous basement. Much of the group’s credit for its reputation as the “Loudest Band in New York” goes to Ackermann’s Frankensteinian effects pedals. Years ago he started tearing apart his own and putting them back together any way he could. Fueled by an interest in electronics, he came up with his own effects pedal, which he called Total Sonic Annihilation.

“It’s a feedback looped pedal,” Ackermann said. “You can run your own effects through a feedback loop. It’s a common idea, just nothing that no one had ever really come out with.”

That led to the founding of his own company, Death By Audio, in 2001. Since then he’s sold specialty pedals to fellow travelers like Wilco and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Currently Ackermann’s building a custom pedal for Trent Reznor. He considers his inventions crucial to A Place to Bury Strangers’ sound.

“Having the knowledge to create effects gives you the knowledge to understand what all different effects are doing, and how you can use them to create different sounds to push and pull and bend the sound spectrum,” Ackermann said. “Even after a show, if perchance I wanted one of my effects pedals to do something different, I could always modify it. A lot of musicians don’t even have the ability to do that. It gives us hands-on abilities with our sound, so that we can constantly change it and create new effects.”

And then turning it up until the meters hit red.

“It ties into the idea of being in complete control over all your senses,” Ackermann said. “That’s what we do — envelop your whole body with really loud sounds and have them vary and build.”

As anarchic as their music may sound, Ackermann and cohorts (drummer JSpace and bassist Jono MOFO) exercise a considerable amount of oversight with it. Ackermann calls what they do “controlled chaos.”

“We’re working with things like feedback, where you can’t always predict what’s going to happen,” he said. “You just have to kind of go with what noises you hear and develop something out of that. It’s a constant play back and forth between what you hear and what you’re doing.”

They still let it take on a life of its own.

“That’s half the fun, and why we do it,” Ackermann said. “I’ll sometimes feel too self-conscious if it’s not getting off the hook at all. You kind of become hyper-aware of what’s going on if it’s really controlled. It’s a lot better when you push those boundaries.”

Given the enervating power of A Place to Bury Strangers’ music, it’s reasonable to derive a host of emotions from it. Ackermann says reactions have always varied. He doesn’t really call what you feel.

“As long as you’re feeling something.”



Wage Coggeshall writes for the Hendricks County Flyer in Avon, Ind.





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Online:

www.aplacetoburystrangers.com