Crib Notes

By Julia Reidy

“They’ve been saying the album is dead for a long time,” says the Fiery Furnaces’ Matt Friedberger. “I don’t know why they want to kill the album.”

To the New York brother/sister duo, it seems alive and well. Famous for spectacular, keyboard-heavy, live performances and eccentric, virtuosic recordings, Fiery Furnaces released their eighth record I’m Going Away July 21 via Thrill Jockey Records. But they didn’t stop there. In reaction to the supposed demise, Matt and his sister Eleanor are putting together a “silent album” — a songbook that will be made up of sheet music, instructions and other visual representations of songs that fans (or non-fans, Friedberger makes sure to point out) can use to recreate musical on their own.

“Obviously we’re going to continue to make the conventional and supposedly obsolete ‘with-audio’ records,” Friedberger says. “But in the meantime, we wanted to ‘record’ a ‘record’ that responds in an appropriate way to this situation.”

Just as the Fiery Furnaces are responding to supposed industry change, they’re reacting to each other as well. The Friedbergers temporarily parted ways to reenter the studio, each recording a cover album of <I>I’m Going Away</I> by themselves. The project arose after the band asked fans to describe the forthcoming album before hearing it, which resulted in submissions they titled “Deaf Descriptions.”

“None of them are really like the record, as is appropriate,” Friedberger says. “And so we thought since people spent all that time doing imaginary alternate versions of the record, that we should make actual alternate versions of the record to match the involvement that people made in it.”

But rest assured, the Fiery Furnaces’ live show won’t be silent or individual; they want fans to get their money’s worth. Abandoning a keyboard-centric format, they’ve adapted their set — much of which will cover new material — to a guitar, drum and bass setup. “We’re giving them something new, not just what we’ve played on the record before,” Friedberger says. “Because that’s a terrible rip-off, to do it the way the record sounds. People should be ashamed.”

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Tags: I'm Going Away, silent album, The-Fiery-Furnaces, Thrill Jockey Records, Variety-Playhouse, White Rabbits.