The pothead pixies in Gong, the Celtic field hippies of the Incredible String Band, and the psychedelic hooligans from the early Grateful Dead are among the eccentrics who have influenced Akron/Family since day one–and it shows. So it's surprising to learn that hardcore legends Minor Threat had an equally big impact on New York City's rising sonic shamanists, at least in terms of their desire to deliver uplifting and transformative live shows.

"I feel like somebody extended that hand to me with punk rock, in a way," contends bassist and singer Miles Seaton, on the line from his home. "I remember seeing the video Another State of Mind, and there was this footage of Minor Threat playing at a house show when the PA broke. There were like 150 kids smashing this room, and they were singing the song so loud that you could hardly hear the instruments. It was this amazing thing where there was no division between band and audience–it just happened that there were three guys on a stage, making the background music."

Substitute the scent of patchouli for the smell of teen spirit, and you get the ambiance of recent Akron/Family concerts, which Seaton suggests have turned into the kind of freeform freak-outs not seen since the Merry Pranksters left their bus Furthur to rot beside an Oregon swamp. The bassist, his guitar-playing colleagues Seth Olinsky and Ryan Vanderhoof, and drummer Dana Janssen began by inviting electroacoustic composer Greg Davis and avant-hillbilly trio Megafaun to join their touring posse, and at this point their guests have pretty much been absorbed into the family.

"When we play in Vancouver, it's going to be kind of a big-band experience," Seaton promises. "We thought, 'Well, we could bring these guys on the road with us and they could just play here and there,' but when we started rehearsing we just realized that it would be really great to have the whole thing going the whole time.

"We've also had different experiences where we've decided that we wanted to have half the audience up on-stage," he adds. "So we just bring everybody we can up and give them maracas and whistles and tell them to go crazy while we play. And, you know, sometimes it's successful; sometimes it's a mess."

A similar aesthetic prevails on Love Is Simple, the new Akron/Family release. What began as a collection of guitar-driven songs soon turned into something much stranger, with free-jazz horns spilling across the Albert Ayler–inspired "Of All the Things" and a phalanx of happy-go-lucky banshees turning up on at least two separate occasions.

"What happened is we got stuff kind of to a first-draft stage, and then we were like, 'Wow, this needs to be injected with some energy from somewhere else,'" Seaton reveals. "So we invited the Lexie Mountain Boys, a really amazing group of female improvisers from Baltimore, to get involved, and they completely went crazy. On 'Ed Is a Portal', you can hear them bringing the cheerleading, party atmosphere that happens in the beginning of the song, and then on 'New Ceremonial Music for Moms', they're the warrior princesses that sound like they're going to eat us in stone soup. All we did was set up some microphones and try to control the levels the best we could."

Akron/Family plays Richard's on Richards next Thursday (October 18).