Locking Horns - The Antlers Interview

If you see Peter Silberman looking serene in The Olympia Theatre later this month, you can put it down to the fact that he’s likely been “centring” backstage. This is not the same man who delivered the intensely sorrowful crossover record Hospice five years ago, or the musician grappling with acclaim, attention and touring on the similarly accomplished and similarly weighty Burst Apart in 2011. This is a 28-year-old who has discovered a degree of peace; a contentment that long seemed elusive. You can hear it in the meditative, jazz-inflected soundscapes of Antlers’ fourth album, Familiars, as horns and exquisite guitars intertwine to soothe and cleanse.

Recorded with Darby Cicci and Michael Lerner in their Brooklyn studio, the graceful work is Silberman essentially taking stock. It also articulates the happiness the Antlers founder and frontman has found of late.
“I’ve got maybe a better head on my shoulders than I did a few years ago and I wanted my contributions to this record to reflect that change,” Silberman confides.
“At the time I made Burst Apart, I was so surprised by everything that had happened with Hospice and the way that our lives had changed as a result of it, which was hugely significant. The way it changed our lives was insane, we were pretty much gone all the time. Travelling and playing shows in a dream world. I didn’t always know the best way to handle that or to find my sense of normal, so at some point I stopped trying to seek out that normalcy...
“I figured it out a bit better on this record, probably from just trying to cultivate a sense of home, which was one of the most jarring things about becoming a constantly touring band. Your sense of home changes. It’s no longer the place you return to every day. It’s something that is in the distance from you.”
Familiars’ arrival this year means, naturally, that the band have to tour it, returning to the chaos of the road and attempting not to capsize. So how does Silberman face this long stretch without a home to call his own?
“Very good question... I don’t know!” he laughs. “I’ve got some ideas about what I might be doing. I’m pretty into mediation these days, so that’s definitely going to be part of my routine of centring myself. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different techniques, recently I’ve been doing breath meditation. I go through different phases; I was doing a mantra mediation when I first started. But that made me a little bit insane, so I started exploring some other things.
“So that’s going to play into it,” he continues. “I feel strange going into what I know is going be a long period of touring but it’s not like we didn’t choose this. I think it’s going to be cool. I’ve gotten too used to being in one place and living my Brooklyn life.”
And yet, Silberman will approach it all with caution, well aware of how one can succumb to rock ‘n’ roll cliches and wild behaviour and become decidedly ‘un-zen’ very quickly.
“The funny thing is, to you it seems like your actions have no consequences because you leave,” he says of moving from town to town. “But actions always have consequences. You don’t always realise the trail of destruction you might leave in your wake by disregarding your own influence. Think of a life where you are more stationary in the same way – there’s no guarantees that you’ll live to see another day, for anybody. If you think of it that way then you could also argue that your actions don’t have any consequences because you could be dead tomorrow! It’s not really true.”

The Antlers play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on October 30