Who are you and what do you do?

C: My name is Christian Wright and I live in Washington DC. I grew up in Atlanta but I moved here for school. Afterwards I didn’t know anybody in Atlanta who was still there and I didn’t have a compelling reason to move anywhere so I stayed here. I have always been very political, and very anti-the power structure. That’s why I came to DC, to study poli sci and learn about national politics. I worked for Nader in 2000 when I was in High School and I have been active in different things since. I consider myself a Marxist and I am a member of the International Socialist Organization. Anyways, I got so jaded by how corrupt and evil and contemptuous of the citizenry most DC politics are, and I don’t really work in an ostensibly political environment. I work in a restaurant, feeding evil political people, which is kind of ironic. Maybe I’ll get a ‘real’ job one day… hahahaha…. Maybe… but for now I just want to do rock and roll, full time, with some political activism thrown in on the side. Now and then I like to drive to the Shenandoah Mountains, drink and watch the sun go down.

J: They call me Juan Monarez. I’m just your favorite starving artist city boy from day worker central, Herndon VA. When I’m not painting I sing a lot for my two bands Bajskorv and Dephalt. I’m a Mexican American who doesn’t speak Spanish very well but practice when I can. I’m used to being to American for Mexicans and too, Mexican for Americans. I Grew up in a little town house out in the boondocks, during a rising suburban development and got a little taste here and there of what bigotry feels like, mostly for my transgender tendencies. I’ve been a firm fighter for GLBT rights and stand firmly in my liberal beliefs. I take heed of the world around me and all its hypocrisy in order to express its anguish though lyrics and paintings I constantly create. I studied Fine Art at the Corcoran College of Art and Design which landed me a teaching job for a year but now I’m just trying to make my music and art careers take off. I’m thinking about returning to teaching soon though. I just wish I didn’t have to cut my Mohawk. Seeing your impact on a child is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Just the other day I ran into an old student and he gave me a big hug and told me he’s doing well in school. I like making a brighter future and teaching kids that they deserve more than the streets. There are other ways out, then pushing drugs. Art and knowledge is certainly the bread and butter for me but it’s Bajskorv that sweetens it all like wine.

What is Bajskorv? What caused you to start it?

C: I started playing with music in High School. I started with the guitar, trying to be in punk rock bands that never practiced and never went anywhere. Later I started getting into electronics more and more, because of the wider range of sounds, and because you can get a lot more done as one person with electronics. I also started listening to industrial more and more in High School, going to clubs, meeting people and buying old wax trax vinyl at a used record store. My dad had an old realistic concertmate piano from radioshack I played around with, but I didn’t seriously invest in music until I moved to DC, where almost every cent I have made that hasn’t gone to rent or food has gone to music gear for the past 4 years. I started working as Bajskorv when I met Juan at a God Module show at a club called Nation. I had met this guy before at the store he worked at (I was then dating a coworker of his which brought us into contact now and then), and seen him around at clubs. You know all those people you see at the club every week but you might not even know their names and you know very little about them? Well, he was one of those people. But he was going to art school at the Corcoran right next to me at GW, and he was one of the few weird looking people I’d ever see walking around then (there was, at GW this time I believe, perhaps 5 students in the entire school who looked vaguely goth or punk at all).
Anyways, God Module was just the worst fucking thing I had ever heard or seen at that time. Since then I have seen a few things which may be worse, such as mutilated bodies of dead people in a war, the bottom of my refrigerator after I didn’t clean it for months, and drunk roommates fighting and biting each other while one tries to escape out the window of a smelly, shitty, roach infested apartment in a North Carolinian ghetto on a hot summer night. I am not sure if any of these things were actually worse looking than that concert, but if you give me more time for scientific analysis and reflection I can get back to you on that. This show was a total joke. Two guys singing over DAT tapes using a MIDI controller as a prop they pretended to play on, which wasn’t even turned on or plugged into anything. How fucking retarded is that? Probably as retarted as the fact that this band was signed, touring and people were paying money to see it. I knew I could do better and I felt I owed it to the music which has inspired me so much and kept me going so long to try and rescue it from this bullshit, much of which is so thickly smeared across the pages of Metropolis’ website you need a chisel just to hack through and navigate the pages. 4/4, repetitive beats, generic, incomprehensible, meaningless, lyrics, everyone using the exact same virtual analogs (you know which one)…. I don’t know which is worse, the wanna be VNV rip offs who just sing about their girlfriends, or the wanna be Suicide Commando rip offs who are often equally uncreative. I listen to both of those bands and I appreciate them but it’s the scenes wide tendency towards dumbing down itself and only playing clubby tunes that I can’t stand. Anyways, Juan and I met up at this show and we decided to unite our forces to form a better, more artistic, innovative, industrial music project in order to make up for all the crap that is out there and to help encourage other artists to do more than just mimic the crap that is being pitched to them. So the sessions began…

J: I think that about sums it up. I had a lot of poetry when I first met Christian and had always wanted to sing in an alternative band. I used to jump on my bed when I was six singing mostly Nine Inch Nail and Sister of Mercy songs. I have an awesome brother in law that introduced me to industrial and gothrock when I was young. Once I saw the live video “Ain’t It Dead Yet” by Skinny Puppy, I knew I wanted to one day sing in a group like them. My singing background prior to Bajskorv only included my elementary and Baptist church choirs. I’ve spent most of my life developing my first passion painting but these days music and art are about on the same level. When Christian and I first started doing music we didn’t know what was going to happen other than we did not want to be generic EBM. We watch an early Test Department video together the first day we started and it was then that I thought, wow what happened to bands looking and sounding like that. That was industrial. We were still new to the whole thing and called ourselves Nue Proletcult. After a year of working together we wanted a harder feel to our sound and changed our name to Bajskorv, which means shit sausage in Swedish. We thought this name was a good way to describe how we felt about the dance industrial scene. I love to dance but not to most stuff currently considered industrial, I usually just end up standing around. I think the God Module show especially sparked something in both Christian and I. We started talking about doing music and before we knew it I was laying vocals over his tunes. As for the sound and image of Bajskorv we wanted something that reference punk like the Dead Kennedys and old noise like Throbbing Gristle. We first and foremost also push our own style and creativity into the mix, but for the most part this was what we had in mind as things developed. Bajskorv is to be strong, political, experimental, driving, dark and uncompromising. To be blunt we will put the fucking lotion in the basket and rub all of our shit in your ear till your def or dead.

Why do you make industrial music?

C: It’s not really a choice, it’s sort of something I have to do. It is a compulsion. I have got problems with depression and maintaining relationships with people. Music has always been there for me though to deal with the things I feel, and it has also been through music that I’ve met some of the best and most important people in my life. I think that the food industry is the most important industry in terms of keeping people alive, but music is also just a psychological necessity for myself as well as so many others. So it’s something I want to be part of, in an artistic context. I think I do music mostly for myself. I like the way these songs sound and if other people don’t then that’s too bad. But I’d rather have 100 people really get into something I create that is very special and rare than I would have myself get 1000 fans who only hear me because I’m playing something that doesn’t challenge them very much and thus it is easier to get promoted, played, and signed.
I am of course also interested in the intersection of politics and music, which is important this day in age when many people listen to the opinions of actors and pop stars more than their own politicians. I like the fact that bands like Dead Kennedys, Leaether Strip, Skinny Puppy, Test Dept., Anti-Flag, or even Velvet Acid Christ, aren’t afraid to speak out on controversial issues, and I think that when bands can artistically incorporate politics into their songs it can give a lot of people the confidence to do something that they might not otherwise have. The far right has been very effective in the United States, as well as abroad, in using music to build a political base for themselves. The largest neo-nazi group in the US, the National Alliance, does this through their record label “Resistance Records”, and tries to put racism and aggressive music out there as two ways kids can deal with their problems. They sell a lot of records. The bands that play to Christian Fundamentalist congregations which then grow and do things like make it impossible for women to get abortions, or who make straight people think it’s ok to put down or beat up gay people, are also doing this, using music to a political end. I’d like to do the same thing, but like, for the far left, and encourage people to stop just voting democrat every 4 years and then whining the rest of the time about the wars and oppression and corporate domination the party they voted for has been the junior partner in perpetuating this whole time. I’d like to encourage people to think critically about what is wrong with this world and what kind of world they’d really like to live in. This country has a lot of inspiring history of people rising up and fighting the power and it’s a damn shame that more people aren’t reading it and applying it.
 

J: I mostly do the lyrics and sing. Christian has sung on a few tracks like our single “Blood Like Rain” which also has several remixes but for the most part vocals are my department. On the most recent album called Irsch Tomb Ich I had a larger part in the song creation process. Espiritu especially was my baby. I used a lot of simple instrumental sounds combined with experimental vocal expression. For me I feel more like I’m making art then “Industrial Music”. I love to experiment with object made sounds and human made sounds that can emit from the body. I love to play with instruments and then effect them to create as weird and unique a sound as imaginable. I enjoy synths but Christian is certainly the one very partial to them. I would be fine banging on a bunch of trashcans and playing a toy flute. As long as the energy is there and the lyrics are good with some strong blinding power, I’m down. I listen to a lot of different music ranging from Black Metal, New Wave, Progressive Rock, and even some Jazz. Why we make industrial music I think comes down to our interest in unique sounds that are often made from machines. That term “industrial” is about as good as calling something rock. There are so many kinds of rock the term is now almost useless. If I had to answer though, we make industrial music because it’s in our soul.

What do you hope to achieve with/through Bajskorv? Is it possible for a band alone to make a pronounced change in an entire scene?

C: One band can’t do everything, but one band, particularly if they exist at a time when similar people are thinking of similar ideas and similar bands are being formed, can help lead the way and set the bar for an aesthetic shift within an art scene. I’d like to see Bajskorv take off, get heard, and get shows, and help encourage rivetheads and other deviants to start thinking outside the box a little more. One big reason I decided music would be nice to do full time is that concerts give you an opportunity to visit places you wouldn’t normally go and meet people you wouldn’t normally meet. I have spent a lot of time these past few years in the studio, working, studying, honing this craft, but our perspective now is to tour more aggressively. So partly, through Bajskorv, I want to broaden my own understanding of other places and other scenes. Also though, I want to interact with everywhere my music gets a platform to challenge people’s conceptions about what direction industrial music should go in, what kind of songs can or can’t be written, and what kind of themes can or can’t be discussed.

J: I spend a lot of time on myspace while I work currently at a video store to make ends meet. While I’m there I find an amazing amount of good music that goes completely unheard by the masses. Honestly it just makes me sick. When I hear an amazing band and see they only have like twenty friends, my heart stops beating for a while. There is already a music scene that is against dance friendly formula EBM. But no one knows about it. Hopefully I can organize them enough to start a real alternative scene. Not some weird shadow of pop culture. The worst part is that no one would buy their albums anymore even if they did like them because everyone just downloads music. I do feel that it’s possible though for one band to just come around and get really noticed enough to change our whole scene. Skinny Puppy did it in the 80’s, Nine Inch Nails in the early 90’s and Suicide Commando earlier this decade. These bands can probably say they each have a hundred clone bands. Maybe were that next band, maybe were not but it’s certainly coming. I think that a band like Bajskorv can show up and know what’s there before it, know what it could do to make money, know what everyone want to hear, and finally know that it doesn’t give a shit. Bajskorv is here to educate people about political issues, drive you beyond your ability, share our human suffering, and make art that pounds your skull. NOT MAKE POP SONGS THAT SELL. As long as bands keep this attitude they will do well. And if not, at least they will really enjoy their own music. Maybe one day there will be Bajskorv clones, who knows?

Why should I or anyone else listen to Bajskorv? Why not just the same 10 EBM songs from the club over and over?

C: I think you just answered your own question. You should listen to Bajskorv because we’re not just the same 10 EBM songs from the club over again. Our music is really fucking weird. It is meant to be listened to and enjoyed. Like, get our music, and sit down in your living room with friends, but instead of watching the TV, watch this record. The weird experimental songs are very moody and very therapeutic, I find, just to come home exhausted from work and just lie down and hear this weird, beautiful stuff, and just feel and think for a little bit. The faster songs, which most of our first album was, are great to play live, and they are also good for listening. If you’re tired of that generic club sound, and you’d like to do something about it, you should pick up Bajskorv & hopefully it will give you some ideas to start thinking about alternatives.

J: One thing I’ve noticed is that Terror EBM gets a lot of promotion from dance compilations that claim to be industrial. I understand that when Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb first hit the scene is was time to dance. But it wasn’t time to snore until a later Terror EBM hit the scene. I like some of that sound but for the most part it’s very basic techno with lots of distortion over it to make it seem dark. Front 242 differed from say Throbbing Gristle or Einsturzende Neubauten because they layered many dance beats over one another and created very dynamic creative music while still maintaining the multiple experimental weird sounds that throttled industrial music into the face of punk. When Terror EBM hit the scene though it was more about being in a club and industrial kind of lost the weirdness it used to. It became too techno and dance friendly without the punk appeal it used to have. A lot of the new bands try to grow Mohawks or disguise their techno music with flavor but underneath it all, it’s still just another Suicide Commando Clone. I’m not a historian but Yelorc may have had the Terror EBM style first anyways, except theirs is far more dynamic and progressive. If you like techno that’s fine you welcome to it, but just don’t claim it to be industrial. The lines are not always so distinct, but you can feel them in your soul. As for Bajskorv, well we like to be weird as hell and keep our stuff far from having pop reference. I always think about industrial music in relation to regular clubs and radio. How close to the mainstream are we. Are we a real alternative? The only way we would be accepted by the masses is if dark music suddenly somehow appealed to everyone. I don’t think this will happen anytime soon. People try to forget the world around them and listen to happy music but were just here to remind you about things like sweatshops, human torture and racist excessive force. You can’t hide from reality, Bajskorv won’t let you. This world is a dark place and I can’t help it, I have to sing about it. The only place darker is possibly the valley of a tortured mind. I have nothing against the mainstream, if you wanna like it that’s fine you can have it. It just doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather listen to the alternative like my own band Bajskorv. Were not the only alternative though, give some other bands a chance and don’t just listen to what Dj’s feed you. Trust me there is a lot of good stuff out there. Have an open mind, and don’t forget to share.

What impact does being from Washington, DC have on you (personally, musically, etc)

C: Living in Washington, DC has destroyed any illusions I may have ever had in the presumed benevolence or intelligence of our political system. And I say system, because what’s wrong with DC is *not* just about personalities, it is about a firmly established, concrete, brick and mortar, structure, year in and year out, which keeps the same people in power and the same people out of power. For one, kids are funneled into its colleges from all over the country just to be fed into the government. So it’s not like, you, Joe America, from wherever, have your life and your accomplishments and your community and you are a leader in something, people respect you, so they ought to send you to DC to represent them in the government (by that I mean both the formal government, and the NGO/”non-profit” power structure which is tied into the organic functioning of that government). But that’s not the case at all. People in the government are for the most part born into a ruling class of the population. The colleges in DC closet to the government where the most political connections, internships, and entry level positions are most accessible are themselves only accessible to a narrow segment of the population which can afford to send their kids there. Another alternative way to get in is by proving your loyalty to the ruling class by fighting for them in Iraq, a service for which they will sometimes tip you out a couple grand in exchange to try to go to college with. Both ways are fucked up.
When I went to GW for 4 years, almost every student was white and wealthy, while almost everyone who worked for the school was black or Latino and was paid very little. That is how DC is, it is a government, of mostly wealthy white people, and a multiracial but predominately non-white service sector which feeds and maintains these people. Working in restaurants you see just how much waste and decadence there is. A month ago I worked a dinner banquet of a conference of international intelligence/ defense people from the US and Europe. I am told that over $100,000 USD was spent on this one banquet. Now the crowd was large, 500 people or so, but still, some soldiers in Iraq don’t have body armor they need, and kids are being told that the only way they can get money for college is by joining the army, but this much money exists just for food and drink for the architects and commanders behind “Defense” and intelligence? You know, if I fucked up my job as bad as they fucked up theirs, I’d be fired. But I guess when you’re part of the international leadership of the war on terror, you get treated well no matter how bad you are. Anyways, that is totally insane, and it is just one example of many I could use to show you the power dynamics of this city. Another example I have is about undocumented workers. Every single restaurant in DC employs many undocumented workers, mostly but not exclusively immigrants from Latin America. These people feed our government every day, and they work in construction to built houses for these people every day, but how do the politicians thank them? By passing racist laws to criminalize these people, split up their families, and drive them further into the powerless netherworld of atomized, working, existence. I have $100 right now I will bet that every single day some service each and every anti-immigrant bigot in congress depends on is being preformed by undocumented immigrant labor. But these people are good enough to feed and house them, but not good enough to enjoy the same basic rights and labor protections? This isn’t a democracy…
Musically, DC has been mixed. There are defiantly more club nights for industrial music in DC than there was in Atlanta, or really anywhere else around the Southeast when I lived there. Still, I think there is something missing. Some of the club nights have really alienated me by just playing horrible, horrible music. There is this one club on Saturday that only ever plays And One, Informatic, the many versions of The Lost Boys’ song, the Flogging Molly Irish dancing song, and crap like that, over and over. And this is supposed to be a goth/industrial night. I am boycotting that place. Another thing that kind of bugs me is that many DJs only want to play their own songs and they are very anti-requests. I have attended Alchemy many, many times while it existed, along with that night on Saturdays, and every single time I’ve requested they play a song by Leaether Strip, one of the best industrial bands of all time. Yet I have never heard a Leaether Strip song played in DC, ever. That annoys me. There are some good DJs who mix it up more though, DJ Panic, Paura, and Hardware are good. Raz DNA is good, and Dirty B is probably the best DJ in this city. But I can’t always get into all the clubs. I think they are getting better, but there are still some things that annoy me… like the guy at Alchemy who would play every night the black eyed peas’ “what you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?” song. That is the worst fucking song I have ever heard… and they wonder why not enough people made it out to Alchemy…
Personally, I find DC to be very alienating. There are people here I see at clubs or who I work with or who I used to go to school with, but I have very few close friends here… maybe like 1 or 2. There are very few people I can just call on the phone to hang out some night I have off. I don’t know if that is because I just suck, or I spend too much time working and doing music and not enough time socializing, or if the people just suck here, or what. It may be the people but I am not sure. I don’t really relate to the NGO political crowd who run staff dominated, bureaucratic organizations that the passive membership has no say in the running of (ex: AFL-CIO, Change to Win Coalition, National Organization for Women, NARAL, Human Rights Campaign, etc…). I don’t relate to the emo kids and the indy rockers who hang out at the Black Cat and the 9:30 because I don’t like that kind of music. I don’t relate to the college kids at GW because you cannot have a rational conversation about reality with 9/10ths of them. There’s also a lot of cultural differences to with a city like this that limits your ability to meet people. Because many people here are black or latino, and I am white, and this city is very segregated, it makes it harder to meet people. That doesn’t mean I don’t have black or latino friends, but it simply means that there is a bit of a social distance there which you can’t always jut over come in one conversation. The city is tremendously segregated. For example, I have about 100-200 coworkers, but every weekend night after work, we all go to different places. Latin people go to the latin clubs, black people go to the black clubs. Now of course most clubs on 14th/U st, in Adams Morgan, Dupont, or wherever, have got mixed crowds, which is a good thing, but I think that most of the city’s population as a whole doesn’t really go to these clubs and just stays in their neighborhood. For example, very few white people in Northwest go to black clubs in Southeast, and very few black people in Southeast go to white clubs in Northwest. The city is very fragmented, racially and ethnically. A lot of that gets broken down at work, but at clubs, you have to make a conscious effort to go to a different club where people who look different than you will be at, it doesn’t just happen naturally.
Sometime I think about moving, to somewhere more pretty, like maybe Denver or California or Asheville or something… somewhere with enough people I could do political and musical things in but where the geography is nicer. For now though I am sticking here, trying to get Bajskorv out there.

J: For me, I was never that into politics until I moved to the district to go to school. I think that since Bush was elected it’s impossible not to care anymore. Just look at voter turnout this year, it was amazing. I think politics is something that D.C. has made me very conscious of. When I first started going to college I had to walk by the White House every day to get to class and sometimes I would just stare and think of ways that we could oust Bush and get a good guy in there. Then one day I realized it’s not just what one guy says or does that runs this country it’s what the people believe. If you can change the way people think first then you can change how and who we elect. I still remember seeing tanks all over the city right after 911, it had a huge impact on me. It made me think that we are not so invincible after all and that if we don’t start treating other countries better it’s only going to get worse. I realized I needed to learn what our country was actually doing but lying about. You can’t trust anyone anymore. You got to be I2I with those slippery bastards. I’m reminded every day about how fucked up our country is because I live right in the heart of it all. It’s actually a really funny city because it’s very liberal and most people here hate Bush. That’s probably why he’s constantly in Texas. As far as the scene goes, it’s alright. The 9:30 club has got great bigger acts but as far as small nobody acts go, there isn’t a whole lot of that. And the goth/industrial promoters here are only into bringing big acts in from Europe. Midian has been the best local support we got for about a year now. We played their opening show and since they have booked other great local bands. It’s just a tough city. I hear that we’re actually a pretty noise friendly city though. My girlfriend is from Miami and she says that their clubs are a lot of synthpop and darkwave. I’m not going to shout out any names, but Christian got most that are good DJ’s pretty much covered. I will say though Raz DNA defiantly keeps us caught up on our power noise. I actually like a lot of goth and death rock and I must say that it’s certainly something that is .. missing from D.C. There is one night that kind of tries but there seems to just not be a crowd for it. It’s funny because I think our scene has scared away all the punks. We need some more deathrock and weird industrial acts to bring them back. D.C. is the birth place of a lot of punk and we’re proud to say also the birth place of Bajskorv.


For me personally, I don’t really take political bands (i.e. napalm death) very seriously; are lyrics and music enough to accurately project one’s ideas on something of that nature?

C: I don’t think so, not at all. A lot of bands will have political lyrics, and that can be a good thing (though of course, there are many bands with good political ideas but with little artistic talent, and vise versa), but if you are a politically conscious person who wants to influence others you need to give people more of a lead than that, and I think you have to lead by example. Otherwise, it’s just rhetoric and there’s often little solid politics to back it up. An example of this is Anti-Flag, whose songs are all about fighting “the rich, bigoted few”, “conservative capitalists”, and who like to throw the word “revolution” around a lot. To their credit these people have raised a lot of awareness about important things like the US Navy’s bombing of Vieques, Puerto Rico, the genocide of Native Americans. But at some times that have been a hard moment for the left, like Election 2004, they publicly supported John Kerry, who is a pro-war, pro-corporate, anti-abortion and anti-gay rights candidate. I remember seeing that and feeling very let down by it. So then you wonder, what just happened to all that energy, all those kids dancing at the concert, and all those people you’ve inspired to be political? You’re delivering them back into the crooked hands of the establishment because you don’t have a practical alternative you are building. So I think posture and rhetoric are bad things, actually, irresponsible. I think in that one case the good stuff they have done is probably greater than the things they’ve done that disappointed me, but after that I’ve always wondered about political bands, just how deep are the roots?
So many people have their hearts in the right place. If you read opinion polls, most Americans support a woman’s right to abortion, most Americans support Affirmative Action, most Americans are antiwar, most Americans don’t want to criminalize and deport undocumented immigrants, the list of polls go on and on. But you’d never know it from watching the news or reading the debates in Congress. And furthermore, so many people feel quite powerless to do anything about this. You’ve got feminists in this country who will argue with you that it is wrong to confront bigots when they protest and shut down abortion clinics. You’ve got gay rights advocates who tell gay people not to protest during election ’04 because it would make John Kerry look bad because he isn’t for full marriage rights for gays. You’ve got a split, feuding antiwar movement in this country where two large coalitions refuse to work together and like 9 year olds try and hold competing protests across town in DC or NY on the same day every year. The lead from them I think has been very inconsistent, like in September 2005 all these people were inspired by Cindy Sheehan and came out to protest on the mall, but by that winter most of them weren’t sure what else to do and were drifting back into passivity. And where are they now?
I think if there’s any hope for the left it is going to come in the form of a new generation of activists who care more about principles than in not offending their perceived electoral semi-allies; who care more about denouncing injustice consistently than in “not offending” semi-racist and the semi-chauvinist people. I think that bands, like anyone, whether you are in a band or not, should try and lead by example, and you can do that by developing an alternative you think makes more sense and fighting for it, and using your life to show people that “activism” isn’t just something for college students, or for professionals with degrees who micromanage from their DC offices, but it is something that all of us can do in an ongoing and sustainable way. For me, I think Socialism is the alternative, and with that I put my money and my time where my mouth is. If people agree or want to discuss politics, that is awesome, but if they don’t, I’m not going to hide what I believe or water down my principles and opinions just because it is maybe more fashionable in music scenes just to drink and go to bars than it is to be a political activist.

J: When I write lyrics I reference all kinds of things that are going on in the world. Sometimes I feel more like a poetic time keeper. I certainly take a stand though on most issues to be on the left. When you ask me what side are you on? I’ll be able to answer. Christian and I always have political debates and argue through the night. I’m a more moderate socialist than he is. I’m more into a system similar to what’s in Canada. I think that creating a political discussion is important for the human existence. As for a band having an effect with a political message, I tend to think that it depends on the vocal style and method of writing. I tend to write a lot about facts that many people might not know such as military spending on youth recruitment. If you’re singing with hardly understandable vocals then you’re probably not going to get much of a message across. If your stuff is somewhere in the middle it may be a little more helpful. Its fun to create catchy lines that are very “oi oi” but they don’t really address any issues. Screaming over and over “freedom” doesn’t really mean much of anything. You have to piss people off by sharing the truth to make them want to do something to change the beliefs of those that differ. When you hear about Christian conservatives trying to teach Intelligent Design to young students, it makes me go crazy. I just want every one to know what’s going on and how to change it. I think one of the best political bands I highly respect is Laibach. They are very clear and translate their messages well. They make good solid epic industrial. Politics is probably best in a discussion format but some message can be sent though music. Look at guys like Public Enemy who probably changed the entire way a young African American society viewed how they were being treated by society. Rap is an especially good format for politics. The more words you get in there to prove your point the better. If you don’t have something to say then, don’t.

How do you feel about sampling in industrial music?

C: Sampling is awesome. Taking a voice sample from somewhere can add so much more emotion and context to a song. The same thing can be accomplished with a non-digetic sample of random noise. The beauty to art, and music especially, is that you’re able to read into the pieces your own experiences and your own emotions. Using samples, like lyrics, you can steer people’s visions in a certain way. You can accent a particular emotion, a particular dramatic occurrence, using a sample of humans interacting in that way. Furthermore, using noise samples, you can also accomplish this heightening of emotion, but in a much more abstract way. Personally I like to play a lot with highly processed samples, or obscure samples, so that you aren’t exactly sure where they are coming from. If, for example, I sample a very popular film like the Terminator or Aliens in a song, people will instantly be able to relate to the cultural context of those films and read the mood of those films into that song, and once you’ve done that you’ve tied the song to that mood in way that is very strong. But, if the sample is something people are less familiar with, is maybe from a radio talk show, an old TV show, an obscure or foreign film, etc., you’re creating more of an organic emotional experience in that song. This gives the music more ability to act independently of the sample to influence the mood of the listener. Furthermore, if the sample is processed so much they have to hear it a few times to really make out everything, you can get the emotion in the voice across, without so much of the words per se, so that people are focusing more on the emotion and less on the actual specifics. “Hate Radio” from Irsch Tomb Ich does this, using samples of Christian Fundamentalists talking about how myspace is destroying the values they are trying to inoculate in women. It’s hard to hear specifically what they are saying, but their tone comes out. “Mant Dedsil” does the same thing at the end with the monotone rantings of a serial killer from Dragnet.
In these days of Cubase recording, any weird chain of noise you create in a studio and then put into a song essentially is both a “sample”, as well as a “part”, simultaneously. The boundaries are mixed, and the times I want to use an actually sampler like the ESI-2000, or the SK-1, and the times I want to just process something and record it onto Cubase and then process it more and arrange it there, are blurred and overlap. I think there is a use for both though and that’s why I’ve held onto my hard ware samplers. The ESI-2000 has a 4 gig hard drive via SCSI so when I watch a film or old show, you can grab samples and stick them on there, and then when you’re writing a song just flip through and look for something interesting to grab. The other method I like is just hitting “record” on a digital recorder, like Cubase, and recording an hour or 2 of the radio, and then go back over it and look for interesting parts. The third thing is to just always keep a Tape in the VCR and hit record whenever you’re watching the news or a fucked up commercial or something.
Sampling rocks. Sometimes I’m writing a song and I want to throw in samples right then, but then that fucks up the lyrics if Juan is trying to sing his own. So sometimes I wait until he has a chance to think about them first, but other times I can’t resist and I go ahead and throw something in there.

J: Sampling is okay. I think some bands go over board with it while others think it too taboo. The first Skinny Puppy album I ever heard was Rabies when I was like 10 or something. When the strange voices that I didn’t understand appeared in the songs I thought that my boom box was broken, maybe I was picking up radio transmissions. I later realized the brilliance of samples when I heard Ministry combine them into cohesive statements and coexisting with the lyrics in a song like “So What”. When I got older I heard Velvet Acid Christ’s samples from the movie scream and thought them to be very funny. I still love them and love to say “I’m gonna gut you like a fish, understand?” but I am probably more partial to incredible song lyrics like the late Rozz Williams, Nick Cave, and Edward Kaspel. Sometimes samples can break up singing to much. It makes it difficult to sing around them. It’s especially tough when I have a song idea but the sample doesn’t go with my ideas and Christian is partial to the sample. I would say all and all though, samples kick ass. They can set a really dark mood and reflect the society that we live.

Your album Irsch Tomb Ich is fucking mind-blowing, can you give some insight as to how you went about writing and recording it?

C: The first 8 songs were actually 1 single take of a studio session we did together. Formerly, I would always do all the music, and Juan would sing over it, and like that we’d have a fairly strict division of labor. I think we were also very touchy about our “own” areas of work. I had a feeling Juan felt cramped when I sang on Blood Like Rain without giving it to him to work on first, and I would feel cramped if he had something to say about the music or samples. I think we have mellowed out a bit though and since then I’ve sung on some songs and he’s written the music on some songs. I think it is much better this way, more comfortable and more collaborative.
For Irsch we just hit ‘record’ on the computer one day and went at it for a really long time, Juan on some keyboards and me on others. Then I think we went over it again and added more. Then I added a few extra music parts, worked on editing and production, and then Juan added the lyrics. The scream at the end there though is all mine, and I take 100% credit for it. It is a fantastic scream. Anyways I think the result is incredible, very good. I ate some acid while listening to an early mix of this album and it was pretty mind blowing, definitely more creepy and interesting than most clubby drug music I have heard. There’s also enough going on that it can keep my attention, which I think a lot of stuff that is marketed as “weird, abstract, anti-music noise” can’t always do. The key comes I think a lot through synthesis, a lot of evolving sounds, filter sweeps, and patch changes on the same synth on the same track. Also flirting with melodies helps, not so much as a real, structured song, but something to get started, and then cut out, but it gets noticed and makes things more catchy.
The other songs are written more traditionally. The title song I wrote about the futility of trying to meet people in bars around here. “Bars” was the working title for some time. I had a lot of fun putting guitar on it. I think I had walked home from some bar and I just sat down and wrote the whole thing. I2I and Hate Radio were written this summer, and Redemption was a track we thought about putting on the last album but we felt it didn’t fit with the mood right. I wrote that song the week California killed Stan Tookie Williams, and the samples are just going through how fucked up our culture is. Espirato, the last track, is all Juan, who did all the music and singing on it.

J: Well he just about covered it all for the music creation. As for the creation of the vocals, it was a fucked up emotional train ride for me. Christian had taken a trip home a few weeks prior to Atlanta and I got to play a lot in the studio while he was gone. I got a lot better at using all kinds of effects and playing the synths. Diamonda Gallas is one of my favorite artists now thanks to my girlfriend who introduced her to me almost a year ago. Upon recording Espiritu I had just gotten back from seeing her play in New York and had an idea to combine her elements with those of say someone like Cevin Key. I wanted to create some songs that were influenced by pretty dark music but that were still hard and industrial. I practiced singing a lot in that short period of time also thinking of Ogre and Blixa and how they reach high pitched shrieks. I also wanted to include my influence of Wumpscut and his strange high pitch vocals on Embryodead. I was heavily influenced by surreal writing and had recently visited a Dada exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. With all this said, I was thinking about all kinds of crazy madness. When Christian told me he took our jam session added more and wanted to turn it into our next album I thought it crazy but went with it anyways. I was writing so much dark poetry at the time and reading so much cruelty in the world that I created the vocals on the monster that is Irsch Tomb Ich actually with ease. I often sampled found effects like shaken bibles, running toilets, wires crackling together and other sounds. For the most part in finding meaning to Irsch Tomb Ich it’s mostly about how man craves religion, thinks the world is always the same and just a lot of surreal beauty. The thing as a whole though was just big middle finger and joke about EBM. If you hear me crying on the album it’s because I was, I got really into it. I let a lot of myself go.

Where is there to go next (for you, for industrial music in general)?

C: We already have a couple new albums almost done. I have a tendency to throw myself into many projects at once and then I have to really fight with myself to finish them. We’re almost done with a remix EP called “Blood Like Death” where there are 2 remixes each of Blood Like Rain and Death One from the original CD, along with a remix of Kids and maybe 1 bonus track. The two other projects are in the work. I have about an hour of some amazing sessions I did which I think are the most beautiful songs I have ever written. Very slow, very pretty. They don’t have lyrics yet, but they are dark, depressing, and beautiful. I was very bummed out when I wrote them, but I think they are incredible. Our third ongoing thing is a more upbeat album, which is a bout half written and partially recorded. I want to get the first two done first but then I feel like something more upbeat would be good for me to write.
Other than production I really want to get out of the studio. We’re working on a new live show and looking to book gigs. Maybe an upcoming tour would be fun. I really do not like living in Washington, DC., so I’d like to get this show on the road and see how far I can get it before I think about throwing in the towel and doing something/living somewhere else. But I owe it Bajskorv and I owe it to Juan to give this project 100% right now, as we have come this far and I think we need to finish.
Through Buried Electric, a label we invented, we are burning and packaging ourselves 200 copies each of Irsch Tomb Ich and Self Titled, which have both been mastered. We’d like to use these to sell and promote, and maybe put out a 3-4 song free demo to shop ourselves around some.
For industrial music in general, I am not sure. The scene seems to be a little stagnant, but there are so many people out there, unsigned artists, making great music. Production is easier and more accessible than ever before and the sheer number of new artists being created guarantees that there should be something worth listening in the future of this music. For the established scene though, I’m not sure. I think in 5 years things will be a lot better, but for something like the Metropolis artists, Future pop and Terror EBM, I’m not sure. Part of me would like to see their days numbered, but there are so many people who don’t know about electronic music who are learning about it and subsequently are easily impressed that I am sure there will be a market for mediocrity for some time to come. I am trying to keep in touch though and help out new artists that I think are good. I made a website, http://www.noisenobodys.com , which lists many such new acts. Because of time constraints I don’t get to update it quite as often as I’d like, but there is a lot on there that is worth going through.
The only thing I worry about is in 100 years, what will music sound like? How about in 50, or 25 years? Will there be anything left to innovate? How many more sounds and types of synthesis are there we don’t already have now? I suppose the future will tell us.

J: I’m ready to do another hard as hell album. I’ve always loved the pure anger in Nine Inch Nails “Broken”. I don’t actually want to sound like that, but I do want to be that heavy. I especially like really hard metal such as Meshuggah and have always thought that an industrial act should have that kind of carnage. I want to do some really heavy stuff soon and but at the same time I want to sing very pretty and weird on a lot of Christian’s epic songs that he’s been writing lately with some weird stories. I’ve also been thinking about, doing a concept album revolving around one long epic story of mankind’s birth to death. For now I’m just gathering more political and social news for Bajskorv poetic demolition. As for industrial music, dude I’m at the point were I just don’t care anymore. I think that eventually Metropolis will just be like Warner Brothers and signing pop acts. I actually don’t really care anymore, I can only hope to work on my little city right now and promote what’s going on here. I’m looking forward to a new D.C. compilation we may be on called Capital Hell. It should be released in a couple of months. It’s going to be pretty good. I guess we just have to change the scene one city at a time. And just so you know I do believe you can be an industrial act and still make music you can dance to. I just wish the music was more complicated and not always about being on your knees or on your back ala Combi Christ. I can’t believe people enjoy lyrics about which position you enjoy getting laid. Whatever

It seems that these days so many bands get signed before they have released any music at all; how important do you feel the process of putting of demos, playing live and so forth before getting signed is?

C: I think such things are incredibly important. I think that before you approach any label you should build some clout of your own. If you don’t have a fan base, or experience, or a style that has proven itself, you don’t have much to bargain with and I feel it would be easier to be pigeonholed by the designs of a label. I also feel a lot of resentment when I hear about someone, like a teenage pop star singer, getting signed and having music written for them to sing over while they have done very little themselves to work for their own music. There are so many great bands out there who work very hard and get no recognition and are just battling every day to produce great music… shows like “American Idol”, and the principle by which they operate, the same principle that organizes Britney Spears or N Sync, that just auction off artists to labels and the public, above and beyond the individual efforts of these bands themselves, really bother me.

J: I know that a lot of bands seem like they have never released any music but it’s usually because they released them independently like we do. I know some bands just make a small demo but create a lot of their own music and tour. For me the bottom line is that you have to tour. Look at a band like Terrorfakt, they tour like hell and they’re huge. Their albums are not the most amazingly impressive to me but certainly they are the head of their genre in America. I think that they got there mostly because they tour often. I had a good time at their last show. People like the experience they have when they see a band live, they have a memory that only they can remember. As long as bands get their own freedom I think getting signed can be a good thing. All that I ask is that you don’t get too assimilated into what the rest of the bands on the label sound like.

Speaking of which, would you guys ever sign to a major label?

C: Hell yeah! You think I want to work in restaurants for the rest of my life?

J: I do, but only if we can keep full artistic freedom, I ain’t selling my soul for peanuts. Bajskorv is our art and I’m sure Christian wouldn’t compromise it either. I’d be down if it were a really weird experimental label, not a dance techno one. Imagine this, an experimental non dance industrial label. Kind of like what Project is for the goth scene. Does this even exist anymore?

How is the industrial scene in DC?

C: I think I covered a lot of that above. Suffice to say it is larger than else where, it has pros and cons like elsewhere. There are very few local bands though in DC. In the suburbs, and going out to Baltimore and Richmond, you get some more bands, but as far as the city goes it’s pretty lonely. I knew one other band here but he moved to NY. Maybe there could be better attendance at things though. I don’t know any nights that are all ages, and I think it’s bad for a scene not to always have an eye to the next generation. I think that unless club nights and bands and concerts try and reach out to young people, by the time people turn 18 or 21 the only thing they will have been exposed to are indy rock or pop rock and by then it’s too late. I know clubs are afraid of underage drinking and maybe everyone’s afraid of hooking up with someone who turns out to be underage, but I think that the costs of not reaching out outway the temporary benefits that clubs and promoters get. Also, I don’t know if Juan thinks this, but I think we need more attractive single women in this scene. Just my 2 cents there, because, it is really hard to find someone who is attractive, likes good music, and is intelligent in this city.


J: It needs a band aid

What will it take to save industrial music from the likes of Combichrist and the elitist close-minded scenester mentality?

C: Irsch Tomb Ich.

J: Destroying all glow sticks and every neon color ever fabricated.


What can we expect from DC industrial (music-wise, band-wise, mentality-wise) now that you guys exist?

C: I donnu… there needs to be more bands coming out of here first. Until then you can expect to get your ass spanked while hearing good music at club lime Friday nights, get your ass not spanked while hearing some good and some bad music at club five Thursday nights, and hear the occasional good band the last Wednesday night of every month at club Asylum. This last night is called MIDIAN, and it is DC’s best kept secret.

J: Honestly dude, the only industrial I like is either too fast, too slow, or too weird for clubs. So I think it’s all down to what happens in live venues. People don’t even get excited for live shows in D.C. though. We should all gather together, wear our biggest spikes and go nuts for live shows till were all bloody on the floor. Why doesn’t this happen? I don’t want people to dance to industrial anymore, they should mash, cry or bleed. Stop dancing and start killing. Now that Bajskorv is here D.C. is a dangerous place to be. Keep looking over your shoulder.

What are the best & worst books?

C: The best books are Leon Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution”, C Vann Woodward’s “Origins of the New South”, Victor Serge’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionary”, Don West’s “In a Land of Plenty”, Justin Akers and Mike Davis’ “No One is Illegal”, Sharon Smith’s “Subterranean Fire”, Ahmed Shawki’s “Black Liberation and Socialism”, W.J. Cash’s “The Mind of the South”, Jack M Bloom’s “Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement”, Max Elbam’s “Revolution in the Air”, Paul Le Blanc’s “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party”, John Egerton’s “Speak Now Against the Day”, Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”, Robin Kelley’s “Hammer and Hoe”, David Cortwright’s “Soldiers in Revolt”, Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross”, Cockburn and St. Clair’s “A Dime’s Worth of Difference”, Malcom X’s Autobiography, to name a few…

The worst books are Lou Dobbs’ “War on the Middle Class”, “The South Was Right” by James Ronald Kennedy, and anything by Ann Coulter, Thomas Friedman, Bill O’Reiley, or Hitler. The polisci textbook “Comparative Politics” by Michael Sodaro is also very bad.

J: Honestly I don’t get to read a whole lot anymore because my off time from music is spent painting. When I did used to read often I read mostly non fiction about psychology and biology, poetry and news magazines like Newsweek and Time. I like reading current events and science articles but it’s honestly most effective when you have some one like Christian to talk to in order to run a synthesis over all the incoming information and get a different view. I’m usually more into discovering artists than writers and in such case could have to say Michael Hussar, Max Earnst, Salvador Dali, and Sharon Elise are my favorites. The Nightmare by John Henri Fuseli though, is and will always be my favorite painting. It’s so dark and brooding. As for poets whom I often try to read, I have to say Lord Byron, Rummi and Sylvia Plath are among my favorites. As for the worst artists and poets, I don’t think there is such a thing. There are only those who my tastes do not appreciate, but they are no less than the others.

What are the best & worst movies?

C: Best movies are anything by Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, the original “Nosferatu”, anything by Jean Pierre Juenet, “Tuvalu”, “Aliens” (2,3,1,4), “The Terminator”, “Heathers”, “UHF”, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, most spaghetti westerns, “Re-Animator”, anything with Jean Claude Van Damme in it.

The worst movies are “Titanic”, anything staring a former pop singer or pro athlete, “The Mighty Ducks 2”, “Forrest Gump”, “Legally Blonde”, “Legally Blonde 2”, “Mr. Smith goes to Washington”, and “UHF”.

J: First of all everyone should see An Inconvenient truth. There are a lot of other documentary type films that I enjoy also like: “Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price”, “Super-Size Me”, “Walk Out”, “Stand and Deliver”, “Stand By Me”, and “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu”. For artistry I like weird dark thrillers such as “Dark City”, “Fortress”, “The Cell”, “The Jacket”, “Lost Highway”, “Saw”, and “Brain Scan”. It’s always fun when you don’t know what to expect. For me a movie has to really set a mood and take me to another world. Even if it looks like our feet are still holding they should be floating away. I also like movies that involve history or exotic scenery which brings me to “Brave Heart”, “Frida”, “Luther”, “Conan”, “Downfall”, “The Last Samurai”, and “Legend”. To see the human existence at play with its destiny is like watching a chess game play itself though a dream. I also love the intensity of Asian films such as “Ichi the Killer”, “Ebola Syndrome” and “Old Boy”. These films keep me on my toes and constantly guessing what madness is capable of. You contort the mind enough and eventually it breaks.

The worst movies for me are probably any of those terrible teen pop films like “John Tucker Must Die”. It makes me sick seeing teens complain about their lives when their homes are twenty times larger than my apartment. Not that I’m complaining, but seeing someone cry about a teen breakup isn’t very saddening when a family in Iraq has just been evaporated by our elected extermination squads. I guess if it makes a teen smile though, why not.


Say something interesting:

C: The assumption that undocumented workers “drag down” wages for native born workers is a statement that no one who has been paying any attention to the labor movement over the past 10 years can proclaim with a straight face. Immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, have been leading the struggle to unionize America’s newest and fastest growing economic sectors: service, food, hospitality, and construction. It is precisely unions such as UNITE-HERE, UFCW, and SEIU, which have been showing the way forward and daily working alongside native workers in the fight for a better deal. Any attempt to unionize the service sector, agricultural labor, or meatpacking that does not join arms with the immigrant workers who make up large percentages of these industries’ workforces will be doomed to failure from the start. Amnesty is the only method whereby the civil rights of these workers to organize will be protected.
The threats of deportation bosses hold over the heads of the undocumented, and the threats of replacement by a population of workers with no capacity to fight for itself that bosses hold over the heads of native workers, are two sides of the same coin. It’s only by uniting on the basis of this recognition that either group of workers has any chance at all to win. An injury to one is an injury to all.

J: When you step back and take a look at this world from billions of miles away everything seems so insignificant. You fight with your neighbor, over nothing. You judge those who can help you, for nothing. You compete in a world where you can have everything and yet still there are those who have nothing. It’s in our nature to want more and to work less but somewhere along the way if we notice we are as infinitely large as we are small, then we can see that were just a tiny charge of energy within the whole. We should not be afraid to work together in unity, because if we don’t start soon we will just fade away like a spec of ash falling from the flame of eternity and no one will ever save, help or miss us. I am absolutely sure, this world can change. Don’t be afraid to look it, I2I.

-december 2006    by [.d4n b4rr3tt.]