Twenty-five years of late-night rehearsal space jams later and Family Underground (FU) are still chasing their sound: a primitive yet alien strain of free-drone that’s more than a little zonked. In the Copenhagen trio’s current formation, Nicolas Kauffmann cuts resonant paths into the lunar night (to quote their house label) with prepared and bowed guitar, while partner Sara Czerny and new third member Matt Saporito fan out and illuminate the landscape with Buchla, tapes, and other toys. FU carry the Velvets-cool aura of rock ‘n roll with them even if their music brushes up against the genre less these days, growing instead in more viscerally textured, cinematic directions.
Despite being based in Denmark, FU has strong ties to the early 2000s New Weird America scene that includes Fursaxa, Double Leopards, No Neck Blues Band, etc., and the various projects they’ve since splintered off into. In August 2024, when FU came to tour the East Coast and play with some of these old friends for the first time since 2011, I jumped at the chance to interview them. I’d recently rediscovered the group via a real headcleaner of a Bandcamp offering called Fixed Doubles, after losing track of them over a decade ago. But while attempting to go down an internet rabbit hole to brush up on all things FU, I came up almost completely empty-handed, with no interviews and very little recent coverage to be found.
So initially, I saw this interview as a small step toward righting that wrong, shining a light on a group whose sound – judging by the performance I caught in Vermont, where they summoned bats from the rafters – has come into full, blistering bloom. But when I found out FU was working on an archival release for the Fördämning Arkiv label, collecting unreleased recordings from 2003-2008, it made more sense to hold the interview until its release. I figured that new fans discovering the group through the resulting Triple Cool Hang would appreciate this oral history of sorts as much as those rediscovering the group, as I had. So dig in and read Sara and Nicolas’s reflections on all manner of influences and formidable experiences; losing one dear friend/band member and welcoming another; and why it feels like they might finally be in the place, sound-wise, that they’ve been aiming for since the start.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Triple Cool Hang is OUT NOW on Fördämning Arkiv.
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Going all the way back, what are your earliest music-related memories? Did you grow up in musical families?
SARA CZERNY: In my home, the radio was always on. My mom was and still is a huge fan of the musician Niemen, who was really popular in Poland, where my parents are from. She was so into him that she got thrown out of her home as a teenager. I don’t know exactly what happened, but she was really passionate about him! So I remember listening to Niemen in my parents’ car on family visits and holidays to Poland. And I remember hearing that Serge Gainsbourg song that he sings with his daughter on the radio, and my father would turn it up. I know there’s kind of a different subtext to the song, but it was our song. [laughs]
Nicolas Kauffman: The first thing I learned about Sara was that “Je T’aime – Moi Non Plus” was her and her dad’s favorite song. [both laugh]
SC: My parents were also fans of classical music. Growing up, I begged them to let me play the piano. When I would see somebody on TV play the synthesizer, I would say, “That could be me if you let me get piano lessons!”
Did they let you?
SC: Yeah, and they bought me a really beautiful white upright piano that we still have in our house and use on FU recordings. I’m an only child, so they were very supportive of what I wanted to do.
What about you, Nicolas? Did you grow up in a musical family?
NK: No, I didn’t grow up in a musical family, but my dad had a record collection. He liked to put on music to try to make me react. I remember in the 80s, he bought some early rap stuff, and he would put a blanket on the floor so I could try and do the “Electric Boogie” and breakdance.
Later at music school, I started practicing classical guitar. I had a really good teacher, so I think that’s why it stuck. But then my mom and I moved out of Copenhagen, so I had to leave that school because it’s based on where you live.
I was also in a band for fun at one point back in school.
Did you play guitar in that band?
NK: No, I was the singer. It was a straight-up rock band, cover songs and such.
I also started collecting records pretty early on. My cousins were into music and gave me some mixtapes and stuff in the late 80s/early 90s. They got me hooked.
What bands did they turn you onto?
NK: Early Soundgarden. Mother Love Bone. Green River. The Wipers. Mudhoney. Early Seattle and Northwest stuff. British music from back in the early 90s. And I would admire the record covers by Slayer, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, and other Metal albums. I loved that music too.
My mom also knew a guy who worked for Danish radio, who gave me access to the archives at his radio station. When we would visit him, he would let me tape whatever I wanted, like Guns N Roses and stuff like that. And then later on, when I started getting into the weirder stuff, that was through Sonic Youth. I would read interviews with those guys, and they would talk about the Dead C and the New Zealand scene. It made me wonder what else the world was hiding.
What about you, Sara? How did you get into the experimental stuff?
SC: Mainly through Nicolas, so maybe it was through Jan Sneum, the journalist. But my experience with techno raves in Copenhagen in the nineties, and dancing until the early morning, was also a key to making me open-minded to experimental music.
NK: In seventh or eighth grade, I had a good friend in school whose dad, Jan, was a journalist. At that time, he was one of the main rock journalists on Danish radio. And his music collection was huge. Vast. He really wanted somebody to sort it out and alphabetize it. I remember me and his son, Esben, spent two summers going through towers of CDs and alphabetizing them. We were there all alone in his apartment; Jan wasn’t there, so we listened to everything we thought was interesting. That was a really cool learning experience, listening to The Stooges and Velvet Underground and being like “Whoa, this is crazy!” And there was jazz, a lot of jazz.
For me, the real entrance into what we do now, though, was New Zealand – putting out our first stuff on Campbell Kneale’s label, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, and learning about the band Armpit. Do you know them? They’re a small, trashy rock band that resembles the Dead C. Then the ball kept rolling to the American noise scene. We started making music, Sara and I [as EKKO], from those influences. That was in 1998.
SC: Also, before we met each other, Copenhagen had a really good techno scene that really inspired us, where we were spoiled seeing and dancing to names like Robert Hood, Ken Ishii, Autechre, B12, Jeff Mills, Aphex Twin, Gigi Galaxy, and Basic Channel.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, Nicolas and I found out later that we were at a lot of the same raves, where they had DJs coming from Detroit, Chicago, Berlin, and all over. It was a really strong scene looking back. Very underground. Very creative. It was something that was otherwise missing in Copenhagen at that time.
NK: The organizers used a lot of venues in Copenhagen that weren’t supposed to be venues. Meeting the people who were arranging all of this, who were maybe ten years older than we were, was inspiring. There was this record shop called Baden Baden, which was one of the top Copenhagen shops at that time. They only had three sections: a Rock section, an Experimental/Industrial section, and a Techno section. I frequented all three of them.
The three major food groups! How did you and Sara meet, by the way? What inspired you to start Family Underground?
NICOLAS KAUFFMAN: We met in high school, Sara and I, in Gymnasium, as we call it in Denmark, which is three years of school right before university. We started FU in, I think, 1999.
SC: It was in 2000. We went for a sabbatical year. We liked American culture and art and music, and I have an uncle in New York, so we were like, “Let’s go and see how long we can stay there.” So in 2000, we went to the US and stayed for half a year. And when we came home from that trip, we were like, “Okay, let’s start a band,” even though at that point we already had some recordings under the name EKKO that had been released by Celebrate Psi Phenomenon.
NK: Had we already been in London at that point or…?
SC: Do you think? Oh, okay, maybe you’re right.
NK: Because I think what we did was Sara and I made a trip to London. We had a friend, Anders, whom we had met in Copenhagen, who had moved to London and was involved with the improv scene there, at a place called the Klinker Club run by Hugh Metcalf. And another spot arranged by Adam Bohman, who is a really dope British experimental improv artist, and his brother, Jonathan. That’s where we played our first two shows. It was very cool. I believe it was ‘99 in London. Bob Cobbing, a visual, concrete, and sound poet, performed with us at the Klinker. I think he died in 2002. But Sara and I had only a faint idea of who this old guy was, so before we played, she walked over to him and said, “It’s gonna get loud, so you should maybe use some earplugs.” And he was like, “That’s alright, miss, I think I can handle it.” Ha!
SC: Yeah, you’re right about the date because you knew Jesper before we left.
NK: Yeah, I had been working at a hospital after I finished school. That’s where I met our third member, Jesper [Hedegaard], aka Johnny Byronic. I was always surrounded by older guys who were always a bit cranky, who had been working there for way too long. And then I met this guy Jesper who was into MC5 and Velvet Underground, and we figured we should be playing music together.
Where did the name Family Underground come from?
NK: When we started playing music, the first record we did was a split lathe-cut with Armpit, where we were called F.L.O.W.E.R. It was an acronym for Fuck, Love, or Wild Ecstatic Reactions. [both laugh] And then one night, we were sitting around the table in our rehearsal space – we had a really nice loft-style rehearsal space where we’d have long, long hangouts at night after a jam. Jesper came up with the name Family Underground. He suggested it, and we were like, “Yeah, that sounds good!” It really fit, because we felt like a family – me, Sara, and Jesper. And we’re definitely underground. Sub underground.
SC: And with F.L.O.W.E.R., people were like “Oh, flower power!” People were always joking with us about the name, and it was kind of annoying, so we wanted to change it. The name Family Underground came from Sly & The Family Stone and the Velvet Underground – a combination of their names and also their inspiration.
You’ve been a group for almost 25 years now. Starting out, did you ever think it would last this long?
NK: No. I mean, I think we knew what we wanted to do, and we knew that we wanted to do it for as long as possible, but it’s a special thing when you live together.
SC: I always knew that I wanted to do something creative. For me, I’m just surprised that it hasn’t developed that much. It has in some ways, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve been playing for 25 years! There’s not that confidence you would think you would have at this point. We’re still struggling in the rehearsal space to make it sound like we want it to. It’s still very raw and fresh somehow.
We have this Robbie Basho quote hanging in our studio: “I don’t try to follow the masters; I try to ask the same questions they asked,” or something to that degree.
What do you think your biggest evolution has been as a group? I know you said it’s been minimal, but…
NK: The biggest evolution’s been when we did that record, The Dark Light Years, which was more song-based. That took a totally different route from the abstract, sound-based stuff that we started out doing.
Also, our equipment. We’ve been going through a lot of our old CD-R releases and early stuff because we have been asked to do a retrospective LP by Fördämning Arkiv, Discreet’s archive label. We’ve always recorded our own stuff, more or less, but we’ve been through different periods of recording technologies. We started out recording with a really nice old reel-to-reel that was all tubes, called a Movicorder, with just one mic in the room. When we listen back to it now, it sounds really good. Surprisingly good.
SC: And we were mixing everything on a CD-R recorder.
NK: Then we got a reel-to-reel with four tracks, and things developed a little bit more. And then a digital 8-track recorder when we started making songs. I think that’s the biggest development from the beginning. I think we’ve ended up now in the place where we wanted to go when we were starting out.
SC: Yeah, I think what’s developed the most is our basic knowledge around music and having more control over it.
Control over making things sound the way you want them to sound?
NK: Yeah, exactly. Our gear is getting a little more sophisticated, which might be part of that.
SC: That’s where we’ve started to notice an upgrade because it sounds more wild.
NK: You know, Sara started out playing on a Novation Bass Station.
SC: And a mini Korg, that was nice too. A very simple old synth.
And now you use a Buchla Easel?
SC: Yeah, and I think that’s it – always being able to get something new to upgrade your sound.
NK: And I’ve always been on guitar. It comes in waves; sometimes I get really tired of the guitar. I have a synth as well, but it doesn’t give me the same kick. But I’ve found that pleasure again with the guitar, which has been really good. I’m a stringman, I guess.
What about your approach to the guitar? How has it changed over the years?
NK: I had a period where I was into playing more repetitious and melodic stuff. And Sara’s thing was more rhythmical. And Jesper’s guitar playing was very staccato and rhythmical, with long passages of warp speed wah-wah. But now, I’m back to picking the guitar and using extended techniques with bow and Ebow, and scraping and preparing the guitar with trinkets and metal parts.
We played in Gothenburg this past May, and some people who were there have known us for many years. They said it sounded like we had found our way back to what we used to do, which was nice to hear because we had a period where we had lost our third member – when Jesper died, in 2015 – and it took the breath out of things. We didn’t really want to do much with music after that.
SC: During that period, we had this rock band called Timeless Reality, where I played the bass, and we did more traditional rock stuff. It was really great, that feeling of knowing what’s going to happen next instead of always being a little bit nervous about the next move. That was right after the Dark Light Years, when things were getting a little more structured.
That touches on something I wanted to ask you about, which is how you approach things live versus when you’re recording. Do you sketch things out ahead of time, or are you always strictly improvising?
SC: Yeah, we sketch things out. We always rehearse a lot before concerts. We have this idea of what’s going to happen, but then reality kicks in. We rehearsed two sets for this tour called ‘Soft’ and ‘Loud,’ so we can adjust to the environment because we never know what it’s going to be like. And we like to play – not loud loud – but we like to have some volume and texture to our sound. But what happens is the music takes weird, different directions, as our new member, Matt [Saporito], says. Even though we start the sets the same, they often end very differently.
That’s the fun part!
SC: Yeah, exactly, the chance of improv. We know something is going to happen, but we don’t know exactly what will happen.
NK: The two sets have sort of melded together during some of the shows, and it’s kind of surprising when that happens.
You mentioned your new third member, Matt. Can you talk a little bit about how he came to be in Family Underground? He joined about a year ago, yeah?
NK: Yeah. I met him at a show in Copenhagen. Our studio is in the same building as a venue called Mayhem. They have shows like two or three times a week, and I met him at one, this American guy who was hanging outside. We fell into an interesting talk about music and why he was in Denmark. He’s moved from America to Copenhagen because of his wife, and they have a kid now. And then we started jamming, and it felt like a good idea to try him in Family Underground.
What’s it like having a third member again? How has it affected things?
SC: We’ve always been a trio in our mindset, even though Jesper was on and off for periods. Looking back, Jesper was giving a lot of rhythm and space to our drones, but also a lot of texture, and Matt has somehow tapped into that. What I like about Matt is that even when the music is quiet, he doesn’t feel the need to just blast something. He’s really good at adjusting to what the music should sound like, what the music needs.
NK: And Matt is musical. He’s a drummer, his dad’s a drummer, it’s like a whole family of drummers!
SC: We have this idea about Matt… What do you call it when someone is good at playing pool but doesn’t show it?
A pool shark?
SC: Yeah, we think he’s like that with music. He’s a music shark. He has some really nice gear too, microphones and stuff that we’ve been really happy to use. [both laugh]
NK: I’ve always been the one who records our stuff, but he has some views on that, too. So it’s really nice to be able to talk about techniques and recording ideas. We still record through amps in a room, and mic’ing everything as little but effectively as possible can be difficult.
SC: Also, to your question, we’ve always recorded live and rarely overdub anything. I think it’s because we don’t know many people in Copenhagen doing similar music. All our friends from New York, we used to listen to their records and wonder, “Is this live?” But later, we found out that they did overdubs to get that fat sound.
At one of our first jams with Matt, he was so surprised that we were just playing live through amps. We usually don’t use the PA live; I have a Fender bass amp from the ’60s. So that’s something else that’s new with using a Buchla Easel and electronics: We’re working more with perspectives and stereo sound.
NK: Yeah, we’re trying to use Sara’s Buchla in the way that it’s really good at, to produce more of a spectrum of sound. I still play my guitar through my amp, so it’s very one-dimensional, but it sits really well with the wide Buchla sound. And Matt plays his tapes, which add texture. It’s a good combination, I think.
Also, Matt doesn’t know a lot of the same music as we do, so it’s been really cool to expose him to new music and have him be like, “Wow, this is really good!” You know, No Neck Blues Band, early Lamonte Young stuff, the Skaters.
Speaking of which, you’re playing with a lot of old friends on this tour, and you mentioned earlier today that you have good stories about meeting some of them. I’d love to hear one of those.
NK: Hmm, well, we used to arrange shows in Copenhagen, and so we got the chance to know people like Jack Rose, R.I.P. One night when he was in town with a bunch of Belgians who were touring with him, we had a party at our place after the show. It’s a party we still talk about. One thing I learned that night was Jack proclaiming loudly, “In music, there is no age!” to someone who asked me why we played with an older guy [Jesper] in Family Underground. Jack shut that conversation right down. We miss him a lot. He was a great guest.
What about this tour? Any highlights?
NK: All of it has been exciting. We haven’t travelled or toured in a while, so it’s like an enema to the brain for me. So far, the shows in NYC at Sunview Luncheonette, which was a collaboration with Samara Lubelski and Marcia Bassett, and at Abasement, have been great. It’s super fucking hot and sweaty in NYC, but always sick. The Greensburg gig was great too.
I got bitten by a mean spider at the show in Baltimore, and my hand was bad. It swelled up to twice its normal size, but luckily, our pals Mike and Maya (Religious Knives) have a doctor friend who helped out with some medication. But it kinda freaked me out. Last time when we toured the states, I got bitten in the same place by a spider in Chicago. Brown recluses like my meat apparently!
Oh man! That doesn’t sound fun. I wanted to ask you about Fixed Doubles. I love that release and went through a period where I was listening to it every day after work to clear my head. The Bandcamp description says it was produced through voltage layering, and the result was like a photographic double exposure. Can you tell me a little more about how that one was made?
NK: Did I write that? I must have. I remember that one being made through randomness, more or less. One part is a synth part that I thought I might put out as a solo thing. But then Sara recorded something that was well-suited to it and the same length, so I thought I’d put them together and see what happened. It’s the same process with both numbers on that record, two different recordings put together randomly. They were recorded within a couple of months of each other. I remember, when it was finished, I was like, “This will be a Bandcamp release.” But we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about it from people, so it might be a good thing to put out in a physical format someday.
That would be great! Well, before I let you go, I wanted to see what’s inspiring you these days? Books/music/movies/other things?
NK: We’ve been really into visual art lately. Mike Kelley, for instance. And we’ve been listening to a lot of LA Free Music Society again. Spinning lots of non-music at home.
SC: We bought a new stereo, a really nice one, because we connected two apartments at home and have a music room now, with all of Nicolas’s records in it. We thought it was time to get a really nice stereo system and some really nice speakers. So we’ve been revisiting a lot of old records.
NK: Yeah, we’ve been reconnecting with our old inspirations, stuff that we know really well but hear differently now because of the new system. It has a lot of detail in the top end. It makes some records sound like an almost entirely new record, especially experimental music with a lot of overtones.
SC: Like Organum.
NK: Yeah, I don’t know if you know Organum. He’s a British artist from that Nurse With Wound scene. His stuff is more insular, more droney. Very good stuff. David Jackman is his name. He’s been doing this long series on a German label [Die Stadt]. There are 10 CDs so far of these electronic pieces. It’s one-track frame of mind music, kind of harsh but not noisy. That’s been very inspiring to hear, and very puzzling because it’s really hard to decipher what’s going on.
SC: We’ve also been listening to that Neil Young record a lot at the rehearsal space. Do you remember what it’s called?
NK: Yes, the Archives box, the second volume. There are two live tracks with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Pushed It Over The End” and “On The Beach.” Those two renditions are amazing. Every time we listen to them at the rehearsal space, we play afterward. It’s a really good way of getting into the zone.
SC: And we’ve been enjoying some techno also, like some Terrence Dixon, who we had the pleasure of seeing when we were in New York.
NK: That was really good. We saw him play at Pier 1 on one of the worst rainy days. Torrential rain, but it was really good.
We like techno music that doesn’t shove stuff down your throat; that’s pulsating rather than dropping. That’s one of the things he’s really good at. We try to do the same thing with Family Underground, make layers of sound that vibrate with each other.
SC: In terms of development, that’s one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about. On the recordings, I want my mixes to be lower because I’m adding texture; it’s not a present sound.
But Nicolas has this equal, very democratic style where he wants everyone to be present at the same level. That’s changing, though. And that’s also what’s nice about being a trio again: there are more people to fill in the space.
Okay, one last question. What can you tell me about the archival release you’re working on for Discreet? What’s the status of that?
NK: All the tracks have been put aside. Now we have to go home and listen to what we want to use. Matthias, who runs Discreet, said he wants to include some unreleased stuff. And we actually have a lot of outtakes from the early years that sound really good. So we have to cut out some of that to use.
For us, it’ll be a good opportunity to put the final stone down for our friend Jesper, to commemorate him. We have a lot of really cool pictures that we want to include. And Fördämning has also been releasing some New Zealand artists, so it feels like we are getting proper historization.
Then we are going to start recording a new LP, which will also be for Discreet. So it’s going to be recording time when we come home, well-rehearsed and ready to find our new sounds.
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