photos by Chris La Putt

melophobe: From your experience, what's the best way to blow away a live audience?

Peter Silberman: Oh I don't know. It's tricky; it's in their hands. I've found that we've had the best experience when we feel connected to the audience and we feel like they're listening. You can't necessarily control that, but you can make the effort. A lot of bands definitely don't acknowledge the audience, they don't seem appreciative of them. And I think it's really important to appreciate the audience. They don't have to be there. They don't have buy tickets, they don't have to buy your record, they don't have to do anything, they don't have to give a shit about you. The fact that they do, is really cool. And it should not go unthanked.

melophobe: And honestly, as someone who is in the audience a lot, it seems like at the end of the day we are all there to share something. It's not just give and take, we all just supposed to come together and have a good time together. And go inside our heads or do whatever.

PS: Yeah. And if everybody feels like they are sharing something, then hopefully that will lead to a good show. If they like what you are doing. And I don't talk a lot on stage. The more I talk the less sense I make on stage for some reason, so I don't really talk that much, but I try to get across that...how important they are to us.

melophobe: What's a perfect record to you and do you aim for perfection when you write?

PS: Let me think for a minute. Well, I would say like Kid A is a perfect record, and that's an understatement. Not just perfect because every song is really good, it's perfect because it achieves this really, REALLY difficult thing of being incredibly strange, but being so listenable. And I've been working on just trying to, I mean I've been listening to that record for so long now. And I'm only now just starting to understand it. And these new kind of revelations I'm having about are making it better than I ever could have imagined.

The Antlers, who you can catch at Osheaga in Montreal this weekend (with Arcade Fire, Weezer, Metric, The National Sonic Youth, Devo, Pavement, The Black Keys, Stars, Owen Pallett, Beach House, Robyn, Seu Jorge, Avi Buffalo, Jamie Lidell and more) played a NYC show with Dinosaur Feathers at Pier 54 back on Thursday, 7/22. A second set of pictures from that show continue below...

Continue reading "The Antlers @ Pier 54 (more pics) (Osheaga this weekend) "

After a decade in which private lives basically became public domain-- think confessional emo, YouTube, reality TV, and social networking updates-- you would think that we'd have become inured to the private pain of semi-autobiographical songwriting. But as the debut album by Peter Silberman's former solo project (it's now a trio) proves, with the right blend of earnest, whispery vocals, delicate, gauzy melodies, and strangely smothering scratchy effects, a desperately delivered concept album about personal loss still has the power to emotionally destroy listeners. Hospice, as its name implies, is not an easy album to take-- the haunting songs' plainspoken prose tells of mental illness, abortion, cancer, and death-- but couched in soaring anthems and swathed in layers of ambient noise, its heartbreaking stories are easy to love. --Rebecca Raber, Pitchfork.com

Peter Silberman of The Antlers answered our end-of-year questionnaire...

Continue reading "an end of 2009 interview w/ Peter Silberman of The Antlers "