The Band Members: Oliver Ackermann, guitar, vocals, bass; John Fedowitz, bass; Sandra Fedowitz, drums.

The Storyteller: Oliver Ackermann

The Song: Composed with swirling, spellbinding sonics, Slowdive’s “Jazz Odeon” unfolds like an ever-evolving auditory drift — waxing and waning, dissolving and returning. Long coveted as a captured live rarity traded on cassettes and limited-run CD-Rs, the track circulated through the close-knit shoegaze community, a ghost signal passing hand to hand. As one of the many shimmery, shivery standouts from the Reading, Berkshire-based band, it solidified Slowdive as preeminent authors of ethereal, dreampop soundscapes.

The Background: Before forming A Place to Bury Strangers, Oliver Akermann was already chasing elusive sonics percolating within his subconscious through his Virginia-based noise-gaze project Skywave. Built on dense, controlled distortion and heavily fuzzed-out melodics, the band gained traction within the tight-knit yet far-reaching avant-garde nu-gaze network.

In this pre-streaming DIY ecosystem, hand-traded cassettes and limited-run CD-Rs shaped an underground culture that valued the thrill of discovery. Music existed in fragile circulation — a landscape of ghosted artifacts where recordings were prized precisely because they could vanish if a tape or dub was lost, mislabeled, or damaged. These songs felt like sonic artifacts; flickering transmissions, unstable and sonically alive.

When Skywave dissolved after Ackermann’s move to Brooklyn, that same instinct for sonic excavation carried forward into a new phase: A Place to Bury Strangers. Here, he shifted from chasing sound to constructing it from the ground up. Through custom circuitry and his pedal effects company, Death By Audio, Ackermann learned to shape feedback, distortion, and chaos into instruments of control — pushing tones to a breaking point or deliberately collapsing them. The result became the band’s signature: a physically overwhelming wall of searing atmospherics.

Now, often described as the “loudest band in New York,” A Place to Bury Strangers revisits their origins with Rare and Deadly (April 3rd, 2026, via Dedstrange), a collection of songs that loops back into that same underground culture of exchange — an archive of accidents, fragments, and hidden gems.

Ackermann reflects on how a Slowdive rarity inadvertently burned itself into the DNA of APTBS today.

The Story: Ackermann first encountered Slowdive’s “Jazz Odeon” not as a formal release, but as a trace — a copy of a copy circulating within the shoegaze exchange culture. For years, it existed in a superposition-like state: a recording that felt both real and unreachable, with elusive sounds that had to be hunted down.

That search ended during a backpack trip through Europe, when a contact at Allison Records dubbed a mixtape of unreleased tracks for Ackermann on the spot. “I was super excited because my friends and I were always chasing down music,” he recalls. “That was one of those tracks I thought I would never be able to get any other way.”

The moment stuck. It wasn’t just about finally hearing the song — it was about the medium. Even years later, Ackermann describes it as something preserved through distortion and duplication. He later re-dubbed it onto his computer so he could DJ the song in clubs. “I still have that twisted dub,” he says. “Everything sounds better on cassette. It still blows me away — the rising and the falling of the track. Beauty and decay combined into a just beautiful, epic performance.”

For Ackermann, “Jazz Odeon” wasn’t just a rarity —it exposed how sound could exist in two states at once: immense yet fragile, soft yet crushing, distant yet intimate. That duality became central to his own approach with A Place to Bury Strangers.

“I always liked that duality,” he says. “It’s what we try to do with our live sound —overwhelming and loud, but soft like a warm blanket of static energy.”

That tension between distortion and emotion became influence and direction. “Different songs and sounds build the sonic universe I want to create in,” Ackermann explains, “and push the boundaries of what’s possible.” Those early encounters with unstable recordings ultimately led him to found Death By Audio, an effects company where he builds pedals that recreate that same unpredictability — tools for other musicians designed to craft new sonics that, if desired, can break apart in meaningful ways.

“It opened my mind to sounds I couldn’t quite place,” he notes, linking the Slowdive dub directly to his work as a sound designer. “It’s important to have that desire to go off on a journey… to see that goals lead to all sorts of other things along the way.”

Ackermann surmises that “Jazz Odeon” was as much a discovery as a threshold — the moment where the creative instinct to seek sound became permanent. “It’s an epic track,” he says. “Let the listener make up their own mind. No spoilers.”

Photo by Heather Bickford

The post A Song That Changed My Life: A Place to Bury Strangers on Slowdive’s “Jazz Odeon” first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.