The Antlers’ Peter Silberman: “I Want People To Hear What’s Underneath The Fog”

The Antlers began as the lo-fi solo project of Peter Silberman, around the time he moved to Brooklyn. Now a three-piece, the band released their fifth studio album Familiars in June, and are set to play headline shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in February, as well as a show as part of Perth Festival.

Silberman has slowly brushed away his lo-fi fog over consecutive albums, making Familiars The Antlers’ most sparse-sounding release to date. But despite having wrapped up tours of North America and Europe only last month, he’s already sketching new musical and lyrical ideas.

Chatting with Music Feeds recently, Silberman discussed the ultimate futility of songwriting and the “inner-critic” which made Familiars such a weightless, almost minimalist record. We also talked about the surreal feeling of having his own lyrics recited by a Twitter bot, and the beauty of “deep” Simpsons references.

Music Feeds: Whereabouts are you at the moment?

Peter Silberman: I’m at home in Brooklyn.

MF: Nice. Just relaxing post-tour?

PS: Yeah, just taking some time off. We got home about a month ago, so I’m pretty settled back into life at this point, which is pretty cool.

MF: That’s good. What have you been up to since touring wrapped up?

PS: I’ve been working on switching around my apartment. One of my roommates moved out and two new roommates moved in, so the whole place has really changed. Other than that just catching up with people and writing a little bit, just passing every day a little bit differently, I guess.

MF: Sounds good! You mentioned you’ve been working on a little bit of material. Did you work on much during the tour or do you tend not to do that?

PS: I don’t really do that. When I say I’m writing it’s not necessarily working on new music, it’s just collecting ideas and sometimes just writing text. I try to do that on tour but it’s less of a creative thing and more of a journaling process.

At home, I have more of a studio setup here, so I’m able to spend a day just working on things that I’m writing and editing and just getting ideas out. Assembling and disassembling.

MF: The Antlers’ sound already crosses a number of genre boundaries, but are there any other genres or tones you’d like to delve into a bit more in your writing?

PS: I don’t know. Right now, I’m just trying to work on the songwriting without worrying too much about the genre or style, but just seeing what it’s like when I give myself the simple task of writing a song, which I haven’t really done in a little while.

It’s kind of like a little practice. Kind of the way I might be practicing guitar throughout the day, I might practice writing a song — “how far I can get in 30 minutes?” or something like that.

MF: Wow. It sounds very structured. Is it like that all the time?

PS: It probably sounds more structured than it is. It’s kind of just a way to pass the time, giving myself little prompts and exercises to occupy my time and my mind.

MF: When you’re doing that, would you say you’re very critical of your own songwriting? Or have you become more critical of it as the years have gone by?

PS: I’ve become more critical. It’s kind of a balance between being critical enough of myself to write something and know whether or not it’s actually good or whether or not I like it, and also not letting that critic get in there too early, because that can really prevent ideas from getting out.

MF: I imagine so. Was that a problem for you on Familiars?

PS: Sure. I think that critic — not exactly a filter, but an editor — is always there when I’m working on stuff. There’s no way for me to really work without it. It’s about negotiating and managing my relationship with it in the way that I edit myself.

I think with Familiars that editor was maybe kind of overactive, definitely getting a workout, partly because I wanted to really edit everything I was writing, I wanted to edit and rewrite it to death, I wanted to get the ideas out.

It was really a matter of writing something, getting ideas out and then fine-tuning them and changing them and transforming them over and over and over again until I got it close to what I thought it ought to mean and what I felt it should mean, how I felt like it should sound and flow and all of that.

MF: Did you go into the whole process with a preconceived idea of what you wanted the album to be like and then work from that?

PS: Kind of. I get a lot of those ideas at the beginning of a project and throughout a project, and they continually steer in different directions for me. Really, the idea I begin with is the idea I end up with.

Watch: The Antlers – Hotel

MF: The beautiful lightness and calmness that Familiars has, was that a conscious counterbalance against the underwater imagery of the Undersea EP?

PS: Undersea never felt heavy to me. It actually felt probably more weightless than other things we’ve done before. But with my contributions on this record I was very intent on clearing away some of the fog… I want people to hear what’s underneath the fog and underneath the haze, and wanted to make something that was cleaner-sounding and more pure in my mind, even though that’s a value judgement I don’t really want to make on it.

I didn’t want it to be pure in the sense of being more true or clear, but I wanted to expand on what was at the root of everything that I was writing.

MF: Do you feel like you got to that root of everything?

PS: I think I did, but I also think maybe there isn’t a root. There isn’t an ultimate root, an ultimate basis. You can keep clearing things away and become more and more minimal, and never quite find what you’re looking for.

MF: You guys are returning to Australia in February for three headline shows and an appearance at Perth Festival. Why only Perth Festival? Were there any other festivals on the cards which didn’t come through?

PS: There were more festivals, which we’re always aiming to be a part of, but it’s really just a matter of which ones are interested in booking us in any given year. We’ve never played Perth Festival before, so when the offer came through to do that we were very excited, especially because we had a couple of shows booked for the Australian tour already. So it seemed like a good way to expand it. We haven’t been there for three years now.

MF: Do you remember much from last time you were here, for Laneway Festival in 2011?

PS: Yeah, I remember bits and pieces of it [laughs]. It was definitely a really amazing but also tiring trip. Our schedule was pretty rough, but it was made completely worth it because the shows were so great and the festival was so excellent, and Australia was just so beautiful and so kind to us.

I remember the good times. I don’t remember how I felt when I was exhausted, which is good because I don’t want to remember that. I just want to remember the good times, and there were a lot of them on that trip.

MF: Well, hopefully there will be more next year! On a different note, The Antlers took part in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session earlier this year. How did you find that as an experience?

PS: It was awesome. So many more people participated than I expected. I thought we were going to be on there waiting just for people to ask us questions and it would be just tumbleweeds and crickets, but it was actually way more questions than we could answer. I was on the boards just flipping through all of them and trying to answer them as quickly and as best as I could. But it was really cool!

People had a lot of good questions and there were a lot of questions that I wish I’d had more time to answer. We were originally planning to do it for an hour, and I ended up staying on for three hours [laughs] because by the time I reached our established time, it felt like it had just gotten started and I was just getting into the rhythm of answering everything. So I would say that Reddit session was definitely the bee’s knees.

MF: Do you remember any questions that stumped you or stood out?

PS: The first one I’ve thought of was a Simpsons reference that somebody made, and it was kind of a deep one [laughs]. I was very pleased with that. I don’t remember the exact wording, but they said, “You’ve been referred to as ‘the funny one’, is this reputation accurate?” That’s from the Be Sharps episode of The Simpsons where The Be Sharps are being interviewed by someone. I was just very pleased to see that amidst the actual serious questions.

MF: I’m pretty sure in that AMA someone mentioned the Twitter account which has been posting an Antlers lyric every hour. Were you aware of that Twitter account before the AMA?

PS: I don’t know if I was aware of it before then, but I think it had just been set up at that time. I think either the person who made it sent it to us or somebody who found it sent it to us.

MF: Is that weird, as a concept, that someone is just posting your words once every hour?

PS: It’s weird in the best possible way! It’s very surreal, I guess.

MF: And it would be even weirder if you followed it and read it all the time.

PS: [laughs] Yeah, well, I know all the words already so I don’t really need to. But I guess you could think of it as, “This is the future, where the people who write the words aren’t the ones who recite them, the machine is.”

MF: That’s pretty deep.

PS: [laughs] It’s a little scary, but I’m not actually concerned.

The Antlers tour Australia in 2015. Details below.