Saturday, May 8, 2010

Inverted Forest

another print zine with a Blockade interview. The interview covers anti-intellectualism, the occult, power violence as a genre descriptor and a lot of words on why i reject both atheism and religion

available from this guy: Richard inverted.forest.zine@gmail.com

Loser Life, 16oh and Suffer are also interviewed. I checked out Suffer's myspace page after reading the zine and liked what i heard.

I particularly liked the introduction page and hope Richard writes more personal stuff in future issues, i feel his perspective is well thought out and his interests in the cultural aspects of hardcore are for the 'right' reasons. I guess i just mean i agree with him and we probably have some similar life experiences.

Anyway, support printed zines, blah blah blah. In this day and age of internet and paypals there are few excuses for not buying half decent zines when they come in to being; having to piss about with pre paid envelopes are thankfully a thing of the past.

Other reading:

Terror #1
Special Interests #2
Romio Shrestha - Celestial Gallery
Ivan Brun - No Comment
John O'Kane - Celtic Soccer Crew
David Peace - Occupied City
Joseph Campbell - The Mythic Dimension

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I've read quite a few interviews with you (minus this one on the way by mail), I've never read you voice your opinion on veganism. Curious to know how you feel about that and secondly, straight edge (i know you are not yourself but everyone has an opinion on the topic)

Survivalist said...

yeah, haven't been asked either of those questions in about a decade or so now. It seemed that every interview i did in the 1990s seemed to end with:

What are your views on the following?

-Veganism
-Anarcho syndicalism
-direct action
-straight edge
-religion
-america

Regarding veganism, of the 20+ years i've lived as a vegetarian, for 10 of those i was a vegan. And like many others who take up causes at a young age, in my early days i was definitely a fully fledged member of what would be reffered to as the Vegan Police (or self righteous fuck if you prefer). Time/ a gradual dawning of self awareness mellows most people out.

I stopped being vegan because it just wasn't something that was that important to me anymore. I remain vegetarian and will for the rest of my life because quite simply, it's all i know at this point of my life. Not eating meat is normal to me and also somehting i just don't discuss; people at work continually express suprise that i'm vegetarian and no band i'm in where i'm one of the driving forces will ever sing about animal rights as i find i have other things i want to cover.

Straight Edge is something i actually don't have any opinion on.

I find anti-Straight Edge stances to be utterly laughable. The infamous "i went to see xyz play a show at xyz and it was full of militant straight edgers knocking pints out of peoples hands and beating up people for smoking" is less true than stories years ago about mexican gangs hiding under cars in parking lots and slashing the ankles of shoppers returning to their vehicles or someone buying a ginat shaved rat uner the impression it's a rare chihuahua (ie; an urban legend).

If people are going to get involved in social movements without much thought i find it preferable that they`d get involved in one that isn`t harmful to their physical health than one that is. Bands singing about/ basing their identity around abstinence are fine, bands singing about/ basing their identity around drink and drugs are generally worthless in the extreme.

I'd rather listen to Straight Edge Revenge than More Beer.

And for anyone keeping count Blockade is 50% vegan and 25% straight edge

Tanner said...

I've been following your blog lately after finding it by accident as a link from somewhere else. I was a Shank fan so it was weird to find it. TEB is interesting stuff, so I picked up "Primitive" at the great Ear Wax records in Madison, WI a few weeks back. I wrote up a rough little blurb about "Primitive" at http://aphidhair.wordpress.com/

Hope you don't mind... probably will edit it more soon.

Survivalist said...

Thanks Tanner, that means a lot to me.

I'm glad that some of my allusions to language and culture; specifically the one (defined as loosely as possible) we belong to made some sense. Getting a complex idea across in 25 seconds of music is never the easiest thing. And i think you're the first to openly comment on the Chesed and Gevurah reference, bar just recognising their roots in Jewish mysticism and slightly mutated in the Western Tradition of the last 200 or so years.

I'm sure my syncretism would irritate many non-punks coming across our work though.

Obviously neither of us are new to idea that corporations are essentially using sigil magick. It's interesting to see McDonalds move towards a sonic identifier (the short refrain that precedes "i'm loving it") to go with their visual one. Something that i feel has been strangely under utilised in corporate identity.

We have our version of that in the song The Endless Blockade which appears on almost all of our releases.

And i'm the bass player, not the singer, though i think all the lyrics you commented on were one's i had penned.

Tanner said...

Ah okay, fixed the mistake.

Glad you thought it was alright... Honestly, I feel I should have gone on in greater depth, something which I feel it deserves, but I lack the time right now. It isn't usual for me to find many bands in this area to have much to actually engage with other than the purely visceral.

As for corporate sigils, Grant Morrison has some interesting things to say about that area. His work in the Invisibles introduced me to sigils back when I was a teenager. Strangely enough I haven't experimented much with them in the last few years, but any time I did use them in the past they were effective. In general, I haven't devoted much time to many of the magickal systems, as they've struck me as unduly restrictive and full of overly obscure language. But one could say that about physics or lepidopterology. That said, I'm also pretty undisciplined at this point.

By the way, I'm glad to see you also dig Robert Anton Wilson, another gateway author for me.

Christian said...

Not really on topic here, but didn't know any other way to contact you. A couple questions about that Toronto show on July 3rd.

Are you going to have copies of the split w/ Unearthly Trance? Seen pre-order notices floating round the net this week ... hate mail order. Rather just get it from the horses mouth so to speak. Damn, I'm so amped to hear ya do a Slogun cover!

Any chance at grabbing some Death Agonies material at the show? I would love to delve into this facet of Blockade. A more noise centered approach has my intrest peaking off the charts. From pictures I've seen I'm under the impression Death Agonies features drums correct? Hadly ever hear "noise" with drums ... would love to hear some!

Parts & Labour? Never heard of it ... any idea if they are doing advanced tix?

Thanks: Christian

Survivalist said...

Christian, we're always contactable at theendlessblockade@gmail.com. I did finally add the "view my profile" feature to the side bar of the blog a while ago so people could see it, but for some reason anytime there's a post with more than two paragraphs of text on the page the sidebar is relegated to the bottom of the page.

I'm sure there's a way to fix this, but i'll be damned if casting a bag of runes, reading a deck of tarot cards or 36 straight hours of mantra has been able to do anything about it....

regarding your other questions; if we have the UT split it'll be for sale art the show, otherwise it'll be available locally in Hits and Misses. When the records are in my hands i'll make some kind of release related post, but until then i personally don't endorse pre-orders for a variety of reasons.

There's a Death Agonies related post on the horizon with more details. Drums have only been a live facet so far.

Parts and Labour is in parkdale, new venue, the Inepsy show and a ton of others are all scheduled to happen there before our show.

And remember this is the first and last Blockade show in Ontario this year (and possibly last show for a long time)

Survivalist said...

Tanner, did you read that article by Morrison called Pop Magic? ASt least that's what i think it weas called.

Seems the Invisibles was a gateway for a lot of people. Phil Hines, Peter Carroll and Ramsey Dukes were more mine.

Most (all?) Magickal Systems are ultimately nonsense and the people that shout the loudest about this stuff are usually cut from the same cloth as the Christian that spends more time worrying about other people's souls than their own salvation.

If you ever want to equally amuse yourself and feed your sense of misanthropy watch youtube occultists and then read the comments: "OMG UR DOING IT RONG!!!! U CAN'T PRONunCE GAMLIEL PROpURRLY!!!!111!!!PWNED"

i think one of the things that's lasted the longest in the forefront of my mind is a Sorcerers Apprentice cassette on Chaos Magic that i still have somewhere around here. Anyway, the line "Chaos Magic is neither old aeon elitism or new aeon supersciliousness" was particularly useful in navigating the minefield of occult charlatanism.

As ever the question you have to ask when anyone raises their self disclosed knowledge and participation in esoterric ideas is "what is this person's intent?"

And yeah, purely from my own selfish perspective i feel Robert Anton Wilson was the most important thinker/ synthesist of the 20th Century