Celebration Offer A Guitorgan Fix For Those Who Need It

If it's true that there's something totally unique about every single band, Celebration are unparalleled in their instrumentation.

Clearly not a trio who care about mainstream acceptance, Celebration own three of the world's estimated 3,000 guitorgans, a handmade instrument from Waco, Texas. Sean Antanaitis plays the guitorgan — and everything else, excluding drums — for the band in both their studio and live performances.

"I have no idea how he does it," says awestruck-sounding singer Katrina Ford. "He's one of those weird people that have the ability to, I don't know, separate all of his limbs."

While Antanaitis goes it alone on organs, keyboards and bass pedals, David Bergander drums and Ford shows off her androgynous voice, which was damaged from years of rough performances as a teenager but is now slowly on the mend.

It's probably a good thing that there aren't any guitars in Celebration for Anatanaitis to worry about.

"He has to have everything stacked on top of each other so he could reach everything," says Ford. "His feet are playing the bass pedals and his hands are playing, one's on the organ, one's on the piano... It's crazy. Sometimes I forget he's really doing something athletic."

Ford and Antanaitis married about five years ago after meeting in high school in Michigan. They formed the punk band Jaks, but eventually quit the group because of "growing pains." Bergander was recruited in a grocery store when a bandmate noticed his shirt had a picture of a drum kit on it and asked him to audition for the goth-punk band, Love Life. When that combo collapsed and the bass player took off, the trio formed Celebration.

Their self-titled debut, which was produced by TV On The Radio's David Sitek, was released in October. The band's meandering, gothic tracks are infused with a slow-burning energy. It's the sort of kaleidoscopic album that you'd expect from a band that strive to incorporate a love of African music into indie rock. To get that sound, the Baltimore-based group holed up in a Brooklyn, New York studio.

"We wanted it to become like a womb, like our cave, where you go in and you're not distracted from being immersed in completely what you love to do," says Ford.

"We ordered all the food that we wanted to eat to be delivered, and we worked like insane hours, but it was really fun. I would like to do it that way again, but probably a different setting. Probably somewhere more tropical, so at least I can look out the window and see palm trees."

Though Celebration's members may not be the best at forming lasting bands, Ford believes that the new group will probably "be around for a while." And for as long as they perform under their current name, Ford and her bandmates will share in the same vision.

"We want to kind of release this idea of the human shell and transcend to the way music was created in the beginning of society, or even tribal living, where music was for celebrating things and a place where you could lose your inhibitions and trust each other and dance. Free yourself."

Celebration will open for TV On The Radio at Vancouver's Richard's On Richards on May 6.