Brooklyn’s A Place to Bury Strangers jumped from loudest band no one had ever heard of to the buzz on every music blog’s lips in the space of a couple of months. Credit may be largely due to a Pitchfork review of a record in such limited release that most folks probably couldn’t even get their hands on it at the time the review was posted. Their label quickly made more copies available, got the record on iTunes, and with that and what was certainly quite a bit of illegal downloading friendly file-sharing, everyone had a frame of reference to agree that APTBS was just as ear-drum shatteringly beautiful as was rumored.

There’s one line constantly quoted in article after article and blog after blog: “loudest band in Brooklyn/New York.” Tonight at the DAM!Fest show at the Rock and Roll Hotel, the band will make their bid to be the loudest band in D.C., for this one night at least. If the recording is any indication, when those songs are turned up to 11 and blasted out into the room, the crowd is going to not just hear the music, but feel it hit them like a cement wall, over and over, making their innards tingle, rumble, and shake.

Guitarist and singer Oliver Ackermann is no stranger to noisemaking. Before his profile shot through the roof, he was well known in certain circles as a maker of fine custom guitar pedals. If you want a sound a factory pedal just couldn’t make, Oliver is your man. All that tinkering and rewiring has resulted in a sound for his own band that is all My Bloody Valentine wash, Jesus & Mary Chain buzz, with a thick layer of sonic brutality slathered liberally over top. Attendees of tonight’s show should prepare to have their hair blown back and their skulls rattled, because A Place to Bury Strangers is prepared to bring the noise. We had a chance to ask Oliver a few questions in advance of the show:

Not too long ago, hardly anyone had heard of you, and you were only pressing 500 copies of your debut record. You get the Pitchfork review and suddenly everyone is talking and writing about you, you have to press more copies, you get a new label for the next record… what has the relatively sudden spotlight been like?

It has been really nice. I have been doing the same sort of thing musically since around 1994 with my old band Skywave. It is nice to have things turn out and get more purpose to what you are doing.