Interview - Sick Amongst The Pure

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I spoke with Efrim of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion recently. I stuttered a lot, but tried to communicate sincerely. That’s all I really wanted to do. After talking with Efrim, I spoke with Ian of Silver Mt. Zion and Constellation Records. I stuttered a bit less. (...) conversation, the hierarchy that exists between bands and listeners; to really talk about a lot of the ideas that I think many young people are thinking about but may feel isolated or alienated because of those concerns. That’s especially evident on a lot of American university campuses, I think.

Personally, I know I feel a discontent characterized by broad social systems and institutions, and there are only a limited number of people I can comfortably speak with about these things. One thing I want to cover is the subject of youth protest, to almost make this conversation an example of protest – if that’s even possible – and begin the dialogue to bridge the distance between bands and listeners. It becomes not just a conversation about music but about larger themes as well.

Conversation with Efrim

A friend and I have been talking about how people react to social conditions and institutions in this world, and the model built on that reaction. You know, there are different progressive groups on this campus, for example, and each has its own agenda, but there’s no real unifying voice. I personally have a problem with that, and I think it’s partially an issue of information levels; that because information is a primary tool nowadays, it has to be written with history in mind, with past events and conditions in mind. Do you think your music can serve as an alternative information source?

No, not at all. That’s the biggest cliché. We make the music that makes sense to us. This tiny community we’re part of here… Amongst ourselves we understand what we’re trying to do. We share similar histories and similar experiences, so to each other we don’t seem odd and we don’t even seem particularly political. Most reactions we get from young Americans, especially young Americans, kids, who write about music on the Internet are that we’re political and we lecture a lot.

There was a review posted recently… in the body of the review it actually said, until the Left learns how to turn its inarticulate rage into concrete action — and this is a review of a Mt. Zion record, and I don’t know what this has to do with what we’re trying to do. It’s hard for me to answer; these are all really big ideas. We don’t look at our records as information sources.

Okay… I know that it’s easy to consider it as such simply because a lot of kids — including myself — are looking for that source we can, I guess, trust. But there’s a risk on our part of exaggerating what you’re doing, of turning your simple tiny reactions to your own lives into greater acts. I acknowledge that risk, I know about it, and it’s a constant struggle for me.

So if we consider the depth and the size of the problems — hierarchal capitalism alienating millions of people, imperialist drives to benefit the wealthy, among others — then we have to recognize that the target is big, and the response has to be equally big.

Yeah, but… I guess we’re at a point in history where the response has to start small, maybe that’s it. Change one mind at a time, one heart at a time. It’s weird, it’s a paradox. On one hand there is a broader movement now because George Bush, Jr. is such a polarizing figurehead, so there is agreement among parties where there once was no agreement. There are all these people now who are like, holy shit that’s the fucking president. When Clinton was president, there was less of that consensus. On one hand you have something you could vaguely term resistance. So much of that is focused on that one duke. It’s a continuation of a power structure and institutions. Essentially the difference between Clinton and Bush, in terms of foreign policy, is a difference in approach on how to keep America on top. If you have qualms about the idea that any nation should be on top, then Clinton is as much a part of the problem as Bush.

You mentioned the “figurehead”… Do you think it’s problematic that the focus is on one individual, Bush, since, you know, the government is not the president? I mean, the federal government consists of intelligence agencies, the military, and a lot of Americans don’t know much about these other agencies; it’s just centred on Bush while other areas remain ignored. Do you think people have to start looking at things in this holistic manner? That it’s a problem of how we react?

To be honest, I think what people need to start looking at is why they can buy a DVD player at Wal-Mart for $15.99 and then think about what economics created that circumstance. That’s the problem. The whole system is so rigged, and it’s so close to collapsing under its own contradictions. And I think that’s what everyone knows in their heart of hearts, that things are horribly wrong. And there are all sorts of manifestations and you cannot function in this world without witnessing those manifestations.

At the most all we’re trying to do is articulate our own comprehension of that and encourage people to connect those dots as well. It needs to start with people agreeing that things are just fucked; not fucked like we’re all going to die tomorrow, but kinda wrong… You know what I mean?

Yeah, I do. And when you made that example about the DVD player, that people need to see that consumer decisions affect other people, it makes me think about capitalism and its effect on consumers. That the middle- and upper-classes have gotten the idea that their decisions are not impacting other members of the hierarchy, you know? But all decisions are interconnected; social conditions are interlocked.

For sure, okay, and I believe in the goodness of people, and that people get distracted in their day-to-day needs. It’s easier for people to not give a shit about people an ocean away, or even on the other side of the highway. I can accept that, I’m not putting people down. People gotta work; people gotta take care of their families. What boggles my mind… Even when you’re looking at your own self-interest, things are wrong, even if you’re just talking about protecting yourself, protecting your family, even if you’re only looking at your own self-interest, you can’t avoid coming to the same conclusions. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does.

And you know, it keeps coming out that in semi-public meetings of heavy-duty investment banks on Wall Street and, you know, go-for-broke economists, people who are moving huge amounts of money, huge amounts of stock – these Wall Street heavy-hitters are having these conferences with each other and saying the bottom is going to fall out in the market sometime within the next two years and they’ve been saying this for the last year. They know what they’re gonna do when the bottom falls out in the market, they know how to protect themselves. They’re gonna move their money somewhere else – this information is out there. We’re not talking about the Bilderberg Convention or a Freemason conspiracy; this is public information.

And it just seems like the protection that some people know they have, these people are able to isolate themselves and go on existing without a direct regard for the people on, like you said, the other side of the highway. It’s a contradiction in our existence that you’re able to make decisions without thinking where the money is going. It’s impossible to trace the money with complete certainty, so we have to search for how corporations are spending it. I think if people start to mobilize behind this idea that things are interconnected, that as you continue to make these consumer decisions, the gap will become wider, then we might see some widespread action.

Do you think the ultimate source, if conditions are significantly determined by economics… Do you think that capitalism is the source of the many other problems?

Yeah, this idea that if you own a company then it’s not enough to just break even and pay everyone who works in the company and pay yourself but every year you should keep expanding. The fact that all our economies are based off resource extractions and there’s a finite supply of all that stuff. There’s less and less — oil is the obvious example, but there are other examples too — there’s less and less of everything. What’s happening now and what seems like is about to happen is that the people who have all the power and money in America who have been willing to share a little with the middle class aren’t going to have that luxury soon. The clock is going to turn back. To me, that seems like what’s going to happen. And that’s what they’re gearing up for. Does that make sense? Of course that’s unsustainable. You can’t keep expanding, can’t keep growing.

I know we started off very broadly; it’s just that I have am preoccupied these larger issues. Going to a more personal level, how are you and members of Mt. Zion and Godspeed preparing for this? It seems like when I try to talk to my friends and family about this, it becomes an issue of listening, of responsiveness, and often people don’t get the reception they need from their friends and family. It seems like your friends, your local surroundings, things at least seem more united at this point, and that’s not the case for others… What would you say to a kid who was thinking about these things but whenever she approached her friends, her family, it became an issue of alienation because her friends and family weren’t responding…

Well, you just gotta keep looking. That was my entire adolescence and young adulthood. That’s how it is. It takes a while to find people who aren’t gonna get freaked out by or ignore what you’re saying. I think that alienation is part of being young, and I’m not being dismissive at all… It gets better as you get older, I know that; if you’re lucky, it gets better as you get older. You find people who share the same concerns as you.

And so with people who listen to Godspeed and Mt. Zion, with bands that are trying to do things very sincerely and honestly, speaking from their own conditions, how do you try to break down the hierarchy that exists between bands and listeners and the fact that listeners may never talk to the band? When it comes to venues and space and alienation between the two parties, that sense of alienation grows as the venue grows. Do you try to setup communications between the two groups?

Yeah, and there are different ways to do that. When I was kid — you know a band called the Minutemen? — okay, Mike Watt was this huge important thing to me, and continues to be. I remember going to see fIREHOSE when I was a kid. And Mike Watt would always be standing by the front door after the show, and anyone who had anything to say, wanted to know anything, he was approachable. That period of Godspeed when the venues were getting bigger really fast… We didn’t have any frame of reference and we didn’t have any experience with that world at all, and we made a lot of poor decisions at that point in the game. A few years down the line we started to figure things out. Like instead of playing one night in a big ugly rock hall we could play three nights in a smaller place that was a bit more intimate.

In terms of how you function as a band, it comes down to small decisions like that, keeping yourself in check. And yeah, for myself all I’ve wanted to offer anyone is the same thing that the bands I loved offered me: the opposite of you’re living in clouds in the sky, it’s the opposite of that—like, holy fuck, if they’re doing this, I can do this too. That’s all we’re trying to do.

To stay on this personal level… Thinking in very tangible terms, do you think it comes down to, say, putting out your email address? I mean, and I know there are issues when you put out your phone number and say you’re open to calls? Is that a wild thing to do?

I’ve done it… It’s not wild, but it’s very hard. It’s… very hard. First of all, email is not the most intimate communication device. It’s hard… I remember being a fucked up teenager, you know what I mean, and dumping that sort of upset on a band, and being kinda heartbroken because the band wasn’t responsive, and I’m sensitive to that, and now I’m older… and when I put my email out there, I got emails from people like that, who were just at a hard point in their life… you know, very long, usually very articulate, and to actually respond in a sensitive way and in a thoughtful way to every one of those circumstances, that would have to be my fulltime job.

It would seem like… I wouldn’t think you’d want things to turn into a therapy session… you know, it’s similar, but if listeners can go to you, then they can go to fellow listeners, and find shared experiences and conditions in each other, and it’s not like you have some sort of divine advice to give. These similar conditions are throughout the listeners. You can listen to the same band, listen to the same music, but it goes deeper than that, and you can find solace in doing that collectively.

With some indie bands, it’s like, we’re going to fetishize this band, and we’re going to become fashionable because of it, instead of listening to the band to meet other listeners or simply to listen. The band is part of this, not separate. What are your thoughts on listeners grouping together?

I agree, it’s very important. Live shows, for instance. Part of the reason people go to see bands is be around other people. It really bugs me when people in the audience go, “Shhh” to other people when they’re talking. It’s like no, that’s not the fucking point. This isn’t the symphony orchestra. This is a social event. There are X number of people in this room together. People should be allowed to talk. I’ve never been into this fascism of this is a band on a stage — fascism is a strong word — but this idea that there’s this band on the stage and nothing else can be happening except for active listening.

Do you think that, assuming things have gotten to the point where listeners are not responding with that collective ear, do you think it’s gotten to the point where bands and listeners who are thinking this way have to get up and say, hey we can do these things a different way. It’s unfair to accuse someone of doing something “wrong” in how she listens, but there are differences in honesty and authenticity… Do you think it’s gotten to the point where people are doing this collectively and could actually suggest this to other people as well? Is there an appropriate way to do that?

Yeah, I dunno… Again it comes down to small gestures. I think that in terms of how people relate to music, a lot of the ownness is on bands and musicians. There are a lot of people making music who believe in their own genius, a lot of fucking people. You can tell by the person’s attitude, by what they say in interviews, you can tell by the presentation of the music, you can tell by the music itself, and as long as there are people glorifying their own specialness, and as long as that behaviour is rewarded, it’s all going to be variations on superstardom.

Just kind of perpetuates the alienation.

I agree.

Whenever I have these kinds of conversations, I always struggle with the long-term point of the conversation, thinking short-term vs. long-term, and asking myself, when is the minority of the people who are thinking along these lines…

But I don’t see it as the minority. I mean, we’re just talking about people into music. We could apply these same issues to people at large.

Yeah, that’s true. So what’s it going to take to get the majority responded to in a real and honest way — this is a big question again — but do you think you’re in a position to… How do you see your own capacity as a musician, and I know that all you can do is get your transmission going, put it in the waters, but don’t you think that is often not enough?

I mean, of course it’s not enough. Yeah, it’s not enough. There’s no action that you can take that is enough.

It’s hard for me to digest the hopelessness of it...

But it’s not hopelessness. Change happens slowly. We’re fortunate enough — or unfortunate enough — to be living in the year 2005, and big changes are afoot. In terms of long-term, I have no idea what the world is going to look like five years from now. There’s a kind of global restructuring, and yeah, I believe people are basically good… and that under extraordinary circumstances, under incredibly heavy shit, that goodness will manifest like a fucking miracle, and I believe that. And I don’t think I’m like a stupid idealist or whatever. I think there’s some ugly shit around the corner, and that’s not hopeless to me — it’s scary, but not hopeless.

When I think about… Yeah, I see that it’s not a feeling of hopelessness, but it’s dealing with the desire to push change and the desire to reach people and moving from individual consciousness to collective consciousness, and then when you try, it’s like going up against a wall.

Let’s say there are like five people stuck in an elevator, five different personality types, one being Mt. Zion. You have the lady in the corner, there’s the dude who wants to be the boss, there’s the dude who wants to panic, there’s the dude who wants to pretend everything is fine, and there’s Mt. Zion in the corner mostly keeping its mouth shut, just scribbling things down in a notebook later. That’s all you can do, you know what I mean? Change is coming anyway. It seems that all the signs are there that this is a time of crisis, and not the crisis that the American president says is going on but a whole different set of crises, and it’s happening, you know, it’s happening. So yeah… I don’t have any sort of...

I know, I don’t expect that…

What I’m saying is that’s all anyone can do… Do your best not to contribute to the bad stuff, take care of yourself and the people you love. Try to figure out how to articulate what it is you’re seeing around you, and no matter what you do in this life… I dunno… That’s what I know in terms of the big stuff.

That really has the effect of flattening the plain between bands and listeners… One of my major goals in doing this was to do just that, because through conversation people can help each other, and when you begin to think about discontent and dissatisfaction, and feeling that on a daily basis, then you realize that yeah, people are feeling these things very acutely on a daily basis. So many times it seems that people are totally shocked or surprised when they find out their friends are thinking about these things everyday. Do you feel that sort of weight as well, that if you did not have the friends, or the family, you wouldn’t be able to handle it yourself?

Yeah, of course I feel that.

A good way to start conversations with people who are around you is next time there’s an anti-war protest in your town, ask someone if they’re going and then when they say no, even if they’re against the war, ask them why and take it from there. I know all the reasons why I haven’t gone to marches; you know, I’m distrustful of large groups, the organizing committee — it pisses me off. But I think it’s important to go to just be a body in the crowd, number one, that’s as good as any mark on any ballot.

Number two, when you see the riot police coming and you see the small handle of people who are actually there to get into fistfights with the riot cops, go stand on the sidelines and see what that looks like. I think it’s important to see that… I dunno… to not watch that shit on the news or read it in the newspaper and actually be there to witness it. Otherwise there’s a whole level of social dynamics that you’re going to be clueless about it, and it’s important to talk about stuff like that. That can be a jumping off point to get people to talk about their own passivity.

Yes… When you mentioned groups and your distrust of the larger group, do you think that’s a problem with how people inherently think they have to organise? I do think that the larger group can cut off the individual, and the group isn’t organized of people who are necessarily sharing thoughts and have previously talked about these things, but they choose to mobilize for brute force and utter sound… I don’t think that’s always effective. You can’t have that revolutionary or dynamic change happening as a group without each individual already conscious of it. Do you think people need to think smaller at first, with the goal of informing everyone equally and then going out to the streets as a group?

Well, I think you need both. In terms of groups, the marches and stuff, when there were worldwide marches against the war and all over Europe and all over America leading up to the war, you know with criticism everywhere, you know, well shit, you have three million people marching in Rome and it doesn’t make a difference, then what’s the point? The point is, if it weren’t for those marches and for those pictures on TV screens, the fucking Bush administration would have had a much easier time denying the fact that there is worldwide resistance to this war, the fact that the Americans have pissed Europe off, that they’re not down with this. People would have been able to dismiss that very easily if it weren’t for that concrete manifestation of resistance. That’s hugely important; it doesn’t seem so at the time, you know what I mean? But it was actually an important thing. And yeah, so it’s important to keep stuff like that in mind. And with stuff like that, what exactly could the negative be? Maybe it’s an ideal, but what the fuck… what is there to lose? But of course you have people who need to work on themselves and they need to work on their friends and they need to work on their families and we all have a whole lot of figuring out to do, and organizing it… There are a million ways to organize it, and it depends on what you do with your life. I mean, I don’t know if this is happening in America, but in Canada there’s this wave now of Wal-Mart employees unionizing themselves. That’s a basic level of organizing that involves a small group and it involves the initiative of a handful of people.

Ideally, with bands like Godspeed and Mt. Zion, bands that are just reacting to their own conditions and trying to tell their stories sincerely, how would you have such bands perceived? The rock band nowadays is blown up, and it seems like, on a basic level, you’re just talking to us, and the only appropriate response we listeners can have is to, obviously, listen. To take what you have to say and think about it. Do you think it comes down to simplifying things and just listening? Has listening been compromised?

There are different sets of records that do different sorts of things. There are a small handful of records that I listen to only when I’m feeling hopeless. There are a handful of records I bring to friends’ places when I go to a party. There are records that when I hear I end up debating the merits of with friends. There are different things that records can do, and I think with both Godspeed and Mt. Zion, for ourselves, we presented them with those ideas in mind. Like with Yanqui U.X.O., part of the idea of that record was to draw a line in the sand, you know what I mean? And at least form some sort of debate on what the hell it all means… I don’t know if that was a successful tactic or not. And the first Mt. Zion record is the quiet thing that I think should be most listened to by yourself. There are many ways we hope people engage with the records.

With Yanqui U.X.O., the diagram on the back, and also “faulty schematics of a ruined machine” in f#a#oo, I think those diagrams are really effective for different reasons but especially in Yanqui U.X.O..… It’s a method of connecting the dots and showing different corporations, entertainment companies, the military — they’re all connected, and I think a lot of listeners might not suspect such connections.

And people do as well, but it’s not really commented on.

How did you arrive at those diagrams? Obviously it was a matter of research, but what was the thinking process for, like, the Yanqui U.X.O. diagram?

I knew the connections were there because all the first-world countries are basically still propped up by war economies. Everything trickles down to that. It’s just a matter of how many degrees of separation. In terms of actually figuring out the connections, it was a matter of going on the Internet, and every single company has a link in the top corner that says investor relations and you click on that and you see what they own. It was a couple afternoons staring at a computer monitor and writing things down.

There was a journalist named Mark Lombardi who is dead now, suicide I think; he drew these huge diagrams connecting people in the government, in corporations, in the military — players in huge scandals like Iran-Contra. I think it’s this hugely effective way to display these arrangements… You have these lines and circles and words and it all makes sense in a clear and concise way.

Yeah, and it’s a good jumping off point. I mean, you can make yourself crazy making connections between everything; the connections are there. It’s a good jumping off point, but I think it’s dangerous to spend too much time doing it, because it isn’t a secret — this is how our economies work.

And the danger of it you mentioned… In the case of a journalist like Gary Webb, when you dig so far only to lose your job and have papers like the New York Times try to discredit you… It seems like in the case of a young person who wants to explore these areas and get to the core and find these truths, when they read something like what happened to Gary Webb and about the danger involved… How are kids like this to react? Do they press on and hope the risk doesn’t overwhelm them, that they will have support along the way?

I think people who are getting into the environmental sciences and are planning on doing advocacy work, yeah, need to worry about these issues. But other than that, you don’t have to dig too far to get to this information. That’s the crazy thing about this: all these things are in the open. You have fucking Seymour Hirsch writing for The New Yorker, and all he’s doing now is plotting those lines in terms of how decisions are being made. So the information is there, and… stuff like the Patriot Act is hugely scary. And people being kidnapped and flown to Egypt and being tortured, that stuff is hugely frightening. There’s stuff to be afraid of. The fate of Gary Webb isn’t to be held up as the ultimate consequence though…

Yeah, that’s true.

I watched Paris, Texas recently, and I read that you appreciate that movie.

Yeah, it’s a good movie.

The particular scene in which Travis is walking across the bridge and the guy is yelling out towards the highway… this role of the preacher, or simply, the person who is shouting from the highway… it’s fascinating. And I haven’t had the chance to hear someone doing that around this town. But when I hear recordings on Godspeed records from people on the street, it makes me think that it’s a very effective way to get tiny voices heard that would otherwise be ignored, and still are, really…

It’s also, I think, the sound of hanging out on the street. As kids you grew up in the city, with not a whole lot to do. It’s kind of weirdly an underrepresented thing, the idea of spending three hours on the street corner. So it’s that too, and the idea that there’s stuff being talked about all over the place that’s, yeah, not being represented. I dunno… People are pretty fucking smart. That’s all I know. This idea that people don’t have a clue is nonsense. People know what’s going on. The big picture is replicated in smaller pictures, and it depends on how much time you’re spending in an isolated environment.

And that context on the street is direct source, you know; it’s not like they’re quoting New York Times articles or something like that. It’s speaking from the conditions, from their lives, and I think a lot of young people on university campuses think the information source has to be from a source like the New York Times, a so-called legitimate source, for it to be taken seriously. What are your thoughts on how people could begin to rethink representation; that who matters is the person on the street who isn’t reading the New York Times but is sleeping underneath it.

For sure, you either have your ears and eyes open or you don’t; you either know which way the wind is blowing or you don’t. It doesn’t interest me when people come debating at you with a handful of someone else’s facts and figures. It plain doesn’t interest me. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, I just can’t engage with it. I don’t want to engage with it. And that’s not a conversation I’m interested in having. That’s my own personal choice. It doesn’t mean I won’t stop and listen or if there’s a debate on television or if I’m reading a debate somewhere, you know; obviously I engage with that stuff. But it’s not my thing.

I’m not sure if you meant it consciously, but you mentioned that Bob Dylan lyric, which way the wind is blowing… the Weather Underground took that...

That’s part of what I’m saying, that there is a line in the sand. And you either get it or you don’t. I’m not at all saying you should go blow up houses of finance. Personally, I’m not so interested in the idea of, you know, like hardcore debate.

I was talking to a friend who had talked to her mom about Cuba and the Cuban missile crisis, and the degree or quality of information that was available to the public at the time, and I was talking to my parents about the missile crisis, my mom for example, and how much of a debacle it was, how horribly it went down. It makes you compare the levels of information between the two eras, and you’d like to think we’ve made progress in making and sustaining alternative sources, how people choose to get informed, but I think at the same time it’s that issue of rhetoric, emotive words that people in authority use to lure people in and essentially strip them of their rational thinking. What do you think of this practice of rhetoric, and this idea of being historically conscious of events in the past so that events now can be understood in light of past decisions? Knowing that history has the precedents, the examples, and we can look to the past to know how things are done today…

Yeah, I think that’s true, but at the same time, I don’t have a family, I don’t have to work two jobs to raise a family. I enjoy a lot of free time, you know, it’s a fucking luxury. So yeah, it’s easy for me to say everyone should read a lot, and I don’t understand why people don’t do more of that, but again it comes down to, you know, you watch news coverage of the pope dying. The big message is the pope defeated communism, that he was a great communicator, all the rest of it, but if you actually talk to people, people aren’t walking along, oh it’s such a shame the pope died, so there is this disconnect. The people — it’s a cliché at this point — but the people who get paid to write for newspapers and report news on cable news programs, they should be more informed. The ones who aren’t, there is a level of ignorance there that’s shocking, but also it’s made a level of cynicism that somehow they’re communicating to people who are ignorant, you know, who don’t have any faculty for critical thinking — they dumb it down. They’re always glorifying this mythical idea of the heartland of America, but there’s nothing but disdain for that. They live in castles in the clouds. They see the world through limousine windows for fuck’s sake. They drive through uptown Manhattan to wherever the fuck their TV studio is, it’s all an abstraction, fucking airplanes and first-class lounges at the airport.

You know, it’s like… the queen’s carriage would pass through whatever small town in medieval England with the curtains drawn so she didn’t have to see that people were dying on the side of the road—it’s the same thing. We could sit here for half an hour and list the different examples — it’s too easy to say the American empire — but all the wealthy nations, their empires have declined. And that manifests in, most importantly, a real sense of unreality but also in these disconnects all over the place that are as ridiculous as the dying days of the British Empire.

On the topic of collectivity, it seems a common misconception of Godspeed and Mt. Zion that everyone is thinking similarly about all the ideas presented in the music, the record-making, the artwork… You’ve talked about how it’s impossible to reach consensus on specific issues, especially political issues…

Yeah, all we can do is come up with terms that we all agree upon. The big thing is that whenever a decision comes down the pipe, you get the members together, one member one vote, and hash through it, and don’t make any decision if the band is split, you know; no one has final say. It was a lot of heavy debating. We never called ourselves a collective. We make decisions collectively, that’s all we ever said. But this word “collective” is subject to ridicule in the same way that hippie is or socialist is. But all that says more about the baggage that’s carried by people who write about music. That sort of conception that we all wear drab-coloured tunics and we’re walking along in-step together mouthing empty platitudes, okay, well, a lot of the stuff that has been written about Godspeed and Mt. Zion has started with that. Someone using a word that doesn’t apply to us deciding it does apply to us. So instead of addressing the music or the artwork or the subject at hand, they’re using that word as a jumping off point. You know, it’s like again the example with this review of Horses In The Sky that came out a few weeks ago claiming we’re somehow accountable for the failures of the Left. None of that has anything to do with the record. That’s an interesting debate, you know, there are failures, but we’re not speaking for the fucking Left. So, you know, you either liked the record or you didn’t, just say so. This record is not trying to voice things to the Left, and that happens a lot. Mostly I just think it’s laziness. I think it’s insecurity. I think people are like, I don’t like this, but they come up with all these justifications to dismiss it, when it’s fine to just not like something, you don’t need to be dragging in lazy thoughts. Just say you don’t like it. You don’t need a historical frame of reference that you obviously haven’t thought through.

The repetitive associations made… and fucking Pitchfork constantly raising this issue of pretentiousness…

Yeah…

I can only imagine how it must feel to be on the end of it, and then to wonder how that perception gets started, what it means for the listeners. To me, it reflects a fashionable way to listen to music. Godspeed and Mt. Zion aren’t trying to be clever, or ironic, or cynical, or approach knowledge and art in a fashionable way. So the degree of sincerity you bring to your music, I think, shocks people, so they don’t know how to react to it, and they label it pretentious. It just really bugs me, seems like they’re missing the point… It seems like sincerity is getting confused with pretentiousness…

Yeah, for sure, I’ve never understood the pretentious thing, it has something to do with long album titles...

You know, I don’t want it to seem like I’m on my knees defending you in court or something… I just like to hear it from your own mouth how you’re reacting to these reviews, and furthermore, how you’re reacting to the listeners writing them. Does it make you feel like you’ve failed or the listener has failed or a little bit of both? How personally do you take these things?

Not as personally as I once did. We started a while ago, when any of these Internet review sites would print a review in which they’re criticizing us politically, that we’re bringing politics into it, we’d write an email saying, hey it’s great that you want to bring politics into it. We’d be happy to do an interview with you anytime if you want to debate what you’re calling politics, or the failings of this record on a political level. Here’s the email, and no one would ever answer. But somehow doing that, it at least felt like a decent response. That’s good enough.

For the most part it’s all nonsense. With the Pitchfork thing, you know… I did an interview last year with this guy for a newspaper and he brought up Pitchfork and I described Pitchfork as reactionary. And this guy was like, oh, reactionary… I don’t know, maybe a bit irreverent. But you know, Pitchfork is actually reactionary. If you read their reviews, it’s like the dictionary definition of reactionary. Anything that has a whiff of politics about it is shot down, you know what I mean, anything that has a whiff of identity politics about it — I mean, they call lesbians dykes, they call gay men fags; it’s like jock central over there. It’s reactionary, but I mean, I don’t lose sleep over the existence of Pitchfork. That’s what they are, that’s what they do, and it seems to be working out for them. They’re taste-makers, which is great for them.

Yeah, a friend of mine once said that he bought this CD and it was the first CD in a couple years that he hadn’t first read the review of on Pitchfork to make sure it got an 8.0 or above or whatever. It’s that kind of authority that really bothers me the most. I mean, I think there is a risk in buying a CD that you haven’t read someone else’s opinion of first…

And given that we’re living in a time when anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can go download music. But yeah, there’s always a voice of authority in stuff like this, so I guess it’s better Pitchfork than Rolling Stone. There’s always going to be a group of people who think it’s the coolest thing ever that a song gets played on The O.C. or whatever, and that’s fine. I understand why people get excited, I understand the debate, that music should be heard by people and it’s elitism to think that music shouldn’t be heard. We’re just not that interested in having our music played on the fucking O.C., we’re not interested in being on the cover of a magazine. That’s our decision. It’s not like we’re standing on top some mountain hurling lightning bolts at bands that don’t make the decisions that we do. And then we’re preachy, not only are we pretentious but we’re preachy. And for what? For determining what it is we’re comfortable with. All we’re doing is making our own decisions. We’re not trying to… I dunno. That’s frustrating, the preachy stuff.

And with the media, I think the big point is that there are just piles and piles of people who are completely not represented by any form of media including the Internet, that’s the important thing, that that stuff is actually the voice of the few. That’s all I know for sure.

Conversation with Ian

First, I want to thank you for taking the time to do this. I talked to Efrim yesterday, and it was a very good conversation.

I want to talk about Constellation first. I’ve read the manifesto on the website several times now, and I really think it’s an inspired piece of writing. It achieves a really effective balance between emotive expressions and concrete realities, between things like hand-made records and local artisans and the broad systemic effects of capitalism.

Prior to starting Constellation, was music and making records always the means with which you wanted to resist and protest the system, or were you seeking other means?

That’s a good question… No, neither Don [label co-founder] nor I would have been gearing up for the release of records in particular as an act of resistance and protest, though music-making for me was always driven by a general HC ethic and I was more than ready to define this more sharply. But Constellation was pretty much uncalculated. The fact is, Constellation didn’t even really start… The seed of it was not a record label; it was actually a small performance space, and that’s what we had hoped to do, initially. Our political and artistic concerns were far more local, very much driven by a hopeless Montréal live music situation through the early ‘90s. Basically there were no venues that were artist-friendly and accessible for more experimental sounds – in the broadest definitions of experimental, anything from dirty Punk Rock to improvisers to whatever – and certainly our politics were sharpened by that.

I had been playing in a band called Sofa for a bunch of years, through the early ‘90s, and Don had done a lot of thinking about this. He had actually been living in Toronto for a couple years before coming back to Montréal, and he certainly gained a certain insight –not that he had anything to do with the music industry in Toronto, but being a music fan going to shows and stuff – that’s like the capital of the industry; you can see all its worst tendencies there. But all that stuff was obvious to us; there wasn’t going to be any question of doing it other than in a principled way. And I think that Don and I were both at a stage in our lives when it was like, if we’re going to start something like this, let’s not over-determine it in advance as a business – in fact, there was very little “preparation” except to make sure we had some notion of budget and cash flow for this performance space, which never ended up happening but, in a no-budget situation, we were at least trying to figure out how it would last. And the label ended up developing as a total bedroom project, you know; it was making no money; we had no idea about distribution or publicity or any of that. And we just figured if we stayed focused and cared about our terms of engagement, it would either have a life or it wouldn't.

Nevertheless though… I understand that the music created by Godspeed and Mt. Zion and other bands on the Constellation roster speaks from local conditions and local experiences, and that the broader critique of capitalism is deliberate in a sense but it seems like you all recognize that what you’re doing is still tiny compared to the target, in a way…

Right. And I don’t mean to downplay the politics of how we run Constellation and the politics of the bands and of how they run themselves, and in some cases what they try to achieve with their music. So you know, there’s been little conflict between, say, what bands like Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion in particular are trying to carve out poetically or aesthetically and what Constellation has been about. I feel like we run the label in the same way that Godspeed attempts to express a political perspective, as a protest on some level, and also as an affirmation of principles and processes that are in decline, even within the confines of so-called Indie rock. We’re not solely reactive by any means; we have what we think is a fairly basic progressive set of sustainable economic principles behind what we’re doing, and an emphasis on building local infrastructure that’s reflected in working with local bands and in non-contractual relationships and all the rest of it… But, you know, it just ends up being various instances of the particular and the universal, and I won’t speak for Efrim’s lyric-writing in Silver Mt. Zion but I play in the band too and obviously I think that’s a successful political art, if you’re able to channel a local experience and universalize it. And obviously Constellation as a label does that to a certain extent too; we have staked out some tiny position in an international playing field of music distribution and label recognition, so we’re trying to do a very similar thing there. And what’s been interesting about all of it for the last seven years is that those on the “business” side and on the artistic side, there have been so many different ways to play out those principles, and navigate that line of connection between the local and international, the particular and the universal.

It’s something I’m very curious about… A few close friends and I discuss this a lot, and we’ve been thinking about youth protest in terms of how the current model is, especially on college campuses, composed of several different progressive organizations, each with their own agenda, and it’s difficult to get a unifying voice. And then when everyone gets together at, for example, the marches at the Republican National Convention last summer, you still have that splinter effect in a way. And I’m not sure how productive that is long-term.

You’re concerned that there’s something inherent in the, for lack of a better term, progressive movement – because you know I certainly don’t consider myself an anarchist, though on many issues I find common cause with and have a healthy respect for a kind of radicalism I may not have the stomach for or am not convinced by theoretically – but, you know, you have this notion that the Right or the status quo or whatever is monolithic and speaks with a common voice – and they do obviously on a lot of levels; there’s a tremendous amount of wealth and influence behind staying on message. But there are different definitions of that big sense, you know. I think the biggest failing is finding a less obtuse (i.e. post-modern) or less flaky (i.e. identity-driven) language for really affirming the diversity or the microcosmic connections between smaller groups and smaller agendas, you know what I mean? That’s what seems to get lost. And all the personal politics – when you get involved in non-hierarchal committee work, you know, all that stuff – is incredibly time-consuming and energy-consuming and people burn out precisely because it isn’t a standard end-decision managerial model for necessarily getting all your ducks in a row, you know. But we should be able to say affirmative things about that too.

Yeah, that’s true.

But it’s hard, for sure.

I’m at a point where I’m doing a lot of research into American governmental history, specifically the 20th century, and really critically looking at capitalism and the conditions which exist today, and it seems like a lot of, again, campus groups neglect to look at capitalism as a potential source of many other problems. Would you say, if pressed to, that capitalism is the source of most of the problems…? You know, especially economic, but I think that stems into racial, ethnic, and sexual problems as well; patriarchy and its connection to capitalism and imperialism and its connection to capitalism. So I think that sometimes – and I want to hear your thoughts on this – the target isn’t big enough, that group agendas about direct action aren’t wide enough, you know. We should be looking at the entire federal government and the system its based upon rather than particular branches or just President Bush.

Obviously you’re as aware as anybody that there’s no shortage of analysis, critique, and constructive criticism when the target is as broad as capitalism and its discontents, and whether that’s coming from identity politics or – I mean, obviously there are all kinds of ways we identify oppression, and there are all kinds of ways that those can be traced back to a source – but I’m wary of being reductive, to target a source as vague as “capitalism”. I don’t know what the definition of capitalism is, but I know that the modern “science” of neo-liberal economics has influenced all sorts of techniques and institutions that shape economic life in liberal democracies that are fucked and seem to be getting more fucked. I'm not sure there's anything inherent in the seeds of capitalist “theory” that says you should maximise personal wealth accumulation at the top of the pyramid, or wilfully destroy the economies of developing nations. Capitalism as an economic system does not actually require a “greed is good” commandment as its starting point, or a dogmatic faith in unregulated markets (which is a two-faced lie, in any case), and if that's how we now define it, then let's find a new word to describe a money economy that can mediate between private and public spheres in a coherent, sustainable and non-violent way. There are ways that capitalism has been allowed to evolve, and yes, there are fundamental problems with capitalism in its basic principles that ought to always be attenuated, but the notion of “pure” capitalism is a complete abstraction in any case. There will be fundamental flaws in any system that’s trying to construct an economy and a civil society for millions of people.

So you know, work gets done in the direction of sustainable economics, or in the direction of, you know, whether it’s food or art or whatever else you’re consuming, that this at the very least is not a symptom of sick over-consumption. So let’s start with a basic set of values; here are things that we – or any society if it’s healthy and relatively just – should ultimately provide for ourselves and each other. And hopefully it starts in the form of a dialogue that can take some of its leads from art and artistic exchange as a model or conduit for communication and community.

How that gets done – and we talk about this a lot at Constellation – well, scale has so much to do with it. We had to ask ourselves hard questions at the end of the ‘90s when it came to Godspeed’s success. Even though it didn’t make a huge difference to us financially, insofar as we weren’t selling the CD, it still cast a fair amount of refractive light on what we were doing. We spent the first four years of the label pretty much catching up with demand, and we can well remember the time when we first went to press 4,000 copies of the CD – which felt insane. That’s now our baseline, which is a nice baseline to have. But, you know, we put out plenty of stuff that doesn’t sell more than that; there are lots of records that if we sell four or five thousand worldwide after a year, that’s a success. And there are all kinds of things that we do that limit sales even at the higher end, with a band like Mt. Zion or Do Make Say Think. The point is to preserve something like a human scale for this exchange; to value lines of exchange that are not mediated and polluted by large conglomerates, big box stores, fashion magazines, buzz-clips and bean-counting content managers.

Industrialisation and mass production have its discontents regardless of the economic “system” structuring it, and obviously the United States, more than any country, has huge amounts of state welfare – military-industrial contracts to corporations, underwriting empty fields, faith-based initiatives – propped up by holding the rest of the globe to ransom with debt-driven over-consumption and the levers of international finance. So the main point is that recent capitalist rhetoric is so hollow and dishonest and narrowly serves Wall Street while celebrating corporate jock-dom and praising neo-colonial realpolitik and all the rest, especially in the last twenty years.

The social impact is obviously gruesome, in the values it leads people to internalise here in Fortress North America, but perhaps slightly more so for the rest of the world, who far more often die as a direct result. I think, in fairness, when the politics and economics of resource scarcity, over-consumption, massive wealth discrepancies among nations, between hemispheres, when all of that ends up being so bare-faced and so abhorrent and so murderous as it has been in the last sixty years – these supposed years of relative peace for white people – there’s plenty of room for some pretty basic principles to start shifting the landscape. All of which begs the question: can we be spending more time in any given week doing things that are much more direct than running a moderately politically aware record label? We're hoping we can increasingly make time for both; the label is not as time-consuming for us as it used to be.

On the topic of art and its commodification, do you think that if some artists began to think more collectively… For example, here’s a proposal: a band writes a song and releases it without a title, without any identification, taking absolutely no ownership of it. A painter hears the song, and creates a work while listening to the song, and then the painter releases the painting without any title, name, anything. So this chain gets started; no ownership, no exchange value involving money. We can try this collective discourse based on emphasizing the art objects instead of the individuals behind the art. I talked about this in a previous SATP article actually… I had been listening to Godspeed and started thinking about this approach to art.

That happens, right? You know, the fungibility of goods, arguably, is inescapable and rational and really does make sense when the sheer scale of social organisation hits a certain point. The reasons why money or commodification becomes a pollutant, I think –you know, I’m not a Marxist in that sense. Again, it’s that reductive thing; I’m not sure it’s reducible to a money system, you know. I mean, there are two things going on. One is… Public art, there’s a huge – and I don’t mean state-sanctioned galleries – but there are people in our neighbourhood; for example, there’s an empty plot next to the railroad tracks just down the street from the Hotel 2 Tango where most of our stuff gets recorded, and there’s now this fantastic sculpture garden, completely made from recycled metal and wood and these sculptures have things that spin in the wind and they’re completely interactive with their environment. Just beautiful, and another one gets added every once in a while. So you know, as years have gone on, more and more people know who it is that’s actually doing this, but he keeps a really low profile, he makes no attempt to publicize that this is his work. Similarly, very recently in Montréal, this guy was doing stencils on the streets, really large ones, really inventive, that interact with the existing street markings… So if there was a crosswalk with the yellow rectangle painted across he would weave in big stencils – he’d turn them into candles or he’d turn them into light switches just by stencilling over top of them, and it’s the same thing – no one knew who this guy was, and he certainly transformed the urban geography, on some level, mostly playfully, of the neighbourhood we live in. And he finally did get nabbed and was served with, I dunno, 112 tickets, vandalism, I dunno what. So now there is this big support group around him to fight this court case, just to help with the fines he’s facing. Every city, once a city reaches a certain critical mass and enough artists are thinking about these issues the same way you are, it starts to happen.

When it comes to art commodification, I just think the simple message should be: hey, we worked really hard to make this; we didn't take the easy way out; we're not trumping up our market value using the various instruments of hype; we are, in some fundamental ways, not trying to sell you on anything, but here’s the fruit of our labour, which we make available at a reasonable price, an object similar in cost and about as non-essential as but perhaps more soul-sustaining than a nice chocolate cake; and if you care to know more about the larger political and economic motives and realities behind this, we'll be happy to share them; we have nothing to hide.

As a tiny example of how some of these background politics can get worked in to the object itself: we never print a copyright on a record. If someone wants to look at a Constellation CD and is like, oh fuck, there’s no “copyright and published in 2004”, I could run with this thing, perhaps that's a mild symbolic challenge to people, you know? There’s nothing on this disc that says that it’s owned by X or Y. Of course, what happens in reality is that people who want to use the music generally contact us and ask permission, which is generally granted, in good-faith and without legal contracts or release forms, for any non-commercial purpose. People do not, in the absence of clear legal ownership declared on the box, seize on this incredible lapse in the legal-contractual property regime and screw us over. Neither have any of our bands, none of which has any legal contract with us whatsoever. That, I feel, is where artistic and artisanal production can give the lie to all this shit that feeds the interests of the bankers and lawyers and bureaucrats and corporate managers. There can be confluence between strictly non-commercial art and small-scale ventures into a barter and money economy, where the motive is simply not financial, nor is it going to cop out easily in the face of financial “rules” and pressures.

Your whole notion of producing information that is public domain anyways, but people just aren’t talking about or few people are aware of, that kind of stuff is also in line with this notion of public art and public politics. If more people were already sensitive to these issues or had thought them through from the perspective of artists, as opposed to the perspective of activists, I mean, this is one of my little concerns right now – the amount of disconnect that can happen between artistic communities and activist communities, and that’s where some lines can be drawn… But then, you know, I’ll flip through the pages of Heart Attack or other documents of really hardcore punk scenes and read these articles about personal politics, and you know, they’re suffocating scenes as well… And so, on some level… I just don’t want to draw really hard lines because I think that you end up mistakenly getting the impression that so much is disallowed and the potential for creativity and trust ends up getting snuffed from the inside. People need to build some kind of real trust, and I think that Constellation has managed to build it in Montréal, even though I think we’re all largely perceived by a lot of younger musicians as a fairly closed environment – which is true as far as it goes. And there are a lot of reasons for that; not least of which is we just want to give other labels the same room to breathe; we've never wanted to be the top of some indie pyramid in this town. You know, it just takes time, you just have to build a track record, and people just see that you’ve followed through on principles, and that does engender all kinds of communication – I mean, the kind of exchange that is meaningful to use on a day-to-day basis has nothing to do with filling orders. It’s the kinds of emails we get, the kinds of conversations we have with people, you know, like you, who are inspired in some respect by what we’ve done and what other labels have done and what other artists have done to actually talk about things beyond, you know, what was it like recording the record, or whatever.

For the record, Silver Mt. Zion hopes to tour the United States in the fall (work paper processing and tight security make it difficult to get into the States), Godspeed is on extended hiatus and will return (even if it is in ten years), and Constellation Records hopes to update their website with more writings and essays by bands and such. I’m sorry — I couldn’t include the entire conversations.

Many thanks to Efrim and Ian and to you, the reader.

This interview was taken by Brad Hirn