Granola & Yoga may not be the excesses that you'd expect from a Rock n/ Roll band on tour. Yet the health conscious Brooklyn-based quartet, brothers Calvin and Cayce Pia, Blake Charleton and
Eli Silverman that make up Akudama swear by these essentials to keep things moving in the right direction while enduring life on the road.
This summer the band packed their PrimeTime Dodge Ram B250 conversion van with trail mix, fruit, burritos, and a couple hundred Magnum condoms to take their eclectic 50¹s style Rock tunes to fans from Kentucky to New England.
AP: Your sound is improvisational, buoyant, soothing & expansive - is your audience as eclectic as your music? Akudama: Our music draws from retro/50s-style influences to more upbeat danceable Rock music and we have an ambient melodic side that comes through in much of our writing and performance. The audience we commonly attract is east Asian paraplegics, drug addicts, and your grandma's idol in second grade.
AP: With 4 members in the band, 2 of whom are related - how do you share the business load? Akudama: We split responsibilities unevenly between the four members of the group, with a heaping load of bullshit on our wonderful manager David Buivid and Eli but a sliver of responsibility on Blake (with the exception of keeping the Kool-Aid kool). We don't have a booking agent, so aside from setting up shows locally, we divide the country up by states and try to contact the people we know in our respective regions. Reluctantly, we use myFace and Spacebook to get in touch with bands and friends of ours through the interwebs.
AP: You play small basements & larger venues & have shared bills with notable acts like Arcade Fire. How you decide which clubs to play? Akudama: We make sure there's at least one PA speaker, a sound guy named Ratboy… Also, we make sure that the drive from venue to venue isn't over 5 or 6 hours because our van eats gas pretty hard. We like to get on bills with bands that we know or have a similar sound to ensure we can maybe get a new fan or two.
AP: How far away from your home state will you tour? Akudama: We're based out of Brooklyn, NY and we made it as far out as Louisville, KY and Chicago on that first long leg. We may go down to North Carolina, but that’s up in the air.
AP: Did you have to make any budget adjustments for this summer tour? Akudama: We did a rough evaluation of what kind of things we'd have to spend for, but we really have just been going off the cuff. We were fortunate enough to have paid for almost everything based on show revenue alone.
Every once in a while we'll take a look at gas prices online to know which states we should aim for to get cheaper stuff, but other than that we just take what we can get. For the second half of the summer we're going to stay more in the northeast though that wasn¹t completely because of gas prices.
AP: Are you hitting the road with another band? Akudama: On our first tour leg we played with the incredible edible Kentucky Nightmare from Bloomington, IN. Now, at the end of the summer, we're flying solo.
AP: What are your most popular merch items? Akudama: We would have to say that our EPs are the most popular item. We ask for $3 as a suggested donation but we're willing to work with people...often people at shows will hook us up with $4 or $5 just because they like us an know we're on tour. And we give away stickers, signed baseball cards of Danny Glover from his days on the set of Angels in the Outfield, and EPs if they don't have the wet wet cash!!
AP: Are you finding that audiences are getting smaller because less people can afford to go to shows? Akudama:We've heard that attendance at arena shows has recently gone down about 6%. This might be due to the struggling economy/gas prices, but it can also be attributed to people not wanting to spend a lot of money to see acts that aren't willing to try something new (as is often the case with bands that have been around for a long time). Also, we think that in more metropolitan areas, because of mass transit, gas prices aren't considerably affecting attendance.
AP: Do you record your shows, if so what equipment do you use? Akudama: We bring a video camera and still camera to every show and sometimes find someone in the audience to take video, stills or both.
AP: Do you think that live music is thriving or just surviving? Akudama:The way we see it, live music is absolutely thriving. With the ease and accessibility of studio recordings, seeing a group perform has become much more desirable. Additionally, for most artists, live performance brings in a huge part of our livings. In our experience, there is still a massive amount of people getting excited about seeing shows.
