Filastine Frequency

Last night we played  at El Tren, an enormous club in Granada. It’s about time I added another story to the How I Made a Dirty Bomb page.

On the guest list was the extended family of La Perla. She’s the vocalist featured on Como Fugitivos, the last track on Dirty Bomb. She’s a gypsy, which is a dubious word, but in spanish (gitana) it doesn’t have a pejorative meaning. Imagine her mom, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all in their white track suits and gold jewelry, hanging out in a club full of drugged spanish gadjos. It’s the kind of place they would never normally go, hearing a kind of music (electronic) they didn’t even know they would dislike because they’d never heard, nor even imagined, it before. Props to them for coming to place so foreign to their tastes, and putting up with the volume, the zombies, and all the other things that make nightclubs so charming.

The bridge between these worlds, and between me and this young gitana, is Carolina. She serves drinks at Eshavira, a tiny bar tucked away on a dead-end alleyway in the the Albayzín district of Granada. It’s a good place to see the roughest kind of flamenco, drunken gitanos with patent-leather shoes and barely-buttoned shirts do battle with guitars and voices ruined by smoke and drink, as people shout along & clap. It’s a miracle that a place like this has survived until the year 2009, whether by luck, accident, or the decelerated pace of change in Andalucia.

To enrich the plot, Carolina lives in a squatted cave, it’s well-tended, more like a hobbit hole in the side of a grassy hill directly overlooking the muslim palace of Alhambra. The first time I arrived here was a few years ago, after deejaying until dawn, we arrived to make a breakfast. It was a beautiful spring morning, the hill blanketed by delicate red flowers covered in dew drops, the birds chirping, the neighbor’s roosters announcing the day. My flight to Barcelona departed later that same day after a short nap, and there wasn’t a moment of doubt that I’d return here.

Semana Santa of 2008 I came back and stayed for a week in the cave, working on beatless track that I wanted to feature a flamenco vocal contribution. The woman who cleans the bar Eshavira (where Carolina bartends) has a 16 year old daughter, La Perla, known for her voice. The family lives in a zone of monotonous tower blocks on the periphery of Granada.

I set up the adhoc studio in the cave, my fancy microphone duct-taped to a broomstick. La Perla came with another 16yr old gitana. With the two girls, Carolina, myself and Manuel, we were five in that humid little cave. There was no possibility of going outside due to a massive thunderstorm dumping continuous rain for the duration of the session. We tried many different ideas but eventually settled on adapting some of the lyrics of a famous song from a film set in a notorious barrio of Barcelona in the 80’s.

The original lyrics told the story of a specific outlaw, but we changed the verbs to command form. Instead of telling the story of a criminal, the lyrics give the order to rob and live outside the law.  For this I had to make a convincing argument to La Perla, explaining capitalist enclosure, privatization and control, and how one of the few forms of resistance available to us is economic sabotage, aka stealing.

Later we returned the girls to their barrio, since this was Semana Santa we had to push our way through some twenty thousand KKK-dressed catholics. They meandered around the city from one holy site to another, bearing garish christian torture scenes. Each parade had a number of smartly uniformed marching bands belting out death waltzes at a slow goose-step.

Como Fugitivos was later tarted up with bowed upright bass by Jherek Bischoff of The Dead Science. And of course a billion hours of editing on my part. One technique I used a lot was to take the final note of each vocal phrase, put that slice into a sampler and extend the tail of a phrase, manipulating it’s loop fades, pitch and duration to make harmonic drones.

Last weekend I stumbled, hacked, and vomited my way from Bilbao to Slovenia, backtracking to Turin, up to Frankfurt, finally arriving in Salzburg. A big scribble the width of europe with fever-stolen memories.

Basta with the shopping carts, it’s time to change my m.o. and travel with a hospital gurney.

Assuming I kill this flu and not the reverse, I’ll be joining the peoples behind this video to make an interventionist bike gang at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen (December 8-16).

My grain of salt will be to mount loudspeakers on a number of bikes, and compose an 8 channel sound piece. Each bikes loudspeaker fed by an mp3 source, with a synchronized start time. As an example how it will work, one sound might chase, jump from one bike to another, then emit from a fraction of the bikes, then all of them, then shift & mutate. The sound fodder will be cutup dialogue collages on the subject, melting glaciers pitched-up to piercing frequencies, alarms, the tranquil animal sounds of species soon to be extinct, and, of course, hellish end of the world four horsemen of the apocalypse styled noise.

The last week I’ve lived in blurry distorted reality, alternating between sweats and chills, and coughing until my brain runs out of oxygen and forces the body to collapse. I thought it was a malaria relapse, but it’s more likely swine flu, or some other super-virus, because malaria doesn’t coat your lungs with green sticky rubber.

I had big plans to intervene in the Climate Summit talks in Barcelona. It’s the last place the big shots are meeting, right here right now in Barcelona, the final round of discussions before Copenhagen.

I did manage to crawl out to one action last night, where we disrupted the posh dinner of the hydroelectric dam lobby. They were treating various world gov’t officials to some fine fish and peddling their influence at the same time. Maybe they ate salmon, farmed salmon, since it’s nearly impossible to get wild salmon in europe, now that the rivers have long been modified to suit only mankind and no longer have healthy fish stocks.

We made noise, blocked the entrance, etc.. of course the police eventually arrived but the job was already done so we packed up and left. But now I’m thinking that I didn’t go nearly far enough, that I’ve got a special gift to deliver.

I should find out who the real assholes are at this summit, disguise myself as a courier, enter and elevator with them, and start coughing. My super-flu would take them out of the negotiations for a a few weeks. I could change the course of the Copenhagen Summit and save the fucking world, five well placed coughs could prevent total ecological collapse!

Here is a bit of press in Kenya about some of our antics here, it’s mentioned in local and UK media of course, but somehow it’s more exciting to think about Kenyans reading about our humble efforts while drinking their morning coffee.

In Rotterdam we played at Poortgebouw, a monumental building that’s been squatted since the 80’s, they have a legal contract that cedes use of the space to the squatters in perpetuity.

Back when it was initially squatted it was located in an semi-abandoned port district, now it’s surrounded by glass skyscrapers in one of those typical upscale port conversions (docklands, port vell bcn, etc).

Developers have a schemes for the Poortgebouw building now, and won’t leave the residents in peace. Just as a wilderness is bulldozed into a monoculture, complex urban landscapes disappear under the same tools, and with the same ultimate motive, to convert the “useless” into the profitable.

The following night in Amsterdam played at an another ex-squat, OT301, this one with a more secure future since the occupants have bought the building.  Ironically it was part of the Amsterdam Dance Event, a festival of club music. On a bike ride we bumped into the festival headquarters, a building vibrating to the oppressive metronome of house music. A security guard ordered me to step away from the door.

Next day on the train towards France I get the usual warm welcome, thugs with guns (and badges) search our bags looking for drugs.

Then the town of Thionville. These smaller town gigs are nearly always fun, low stress, and feels good to play to the uninitiated. The gig was in the city hall building, with massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the crests & seals of officialdom about.

Yes it’s strange to play at squats for two nights, then get profiled by the police on our way to play a state-subsidized event at the local city hall.

The next day had a 30 minute stopover in Marseille to change trains. The station was chock full of nervous riot cops, do they follow me? Outside it was a calm sunny sunday afternoon, we sat on the steps overlooking the city where I always sit while killing time in Marseille.

Suddenly the sound of explosions and yelling, then a mob bursts out of the tiny side streets. All young men, all in hoodies, most carrying flares or big sticks, in full riot mode. They attacked the train station with the same sense of purpose that a mountaineer takes on a peak… because it’s there. Bottles and flares were landing around us, smoke wafting into the station, we had to run to catch our train and never did get any explanation. Viva la france!

Twenty minutes later we arrived in Cassis, possibly one of the world’s most beautiful places, living like a billionaire in an apartment overlooking the sea, spent the day hiking, swimming in turquoise coves, eating fine food.

So, a pretty typical 4 days on tour.

The project Putting the fun between your legs: The Bike Bloc, is a collaboration between The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and the UK Climate Camp (www.climatecamp.org.uk). The idea is to design and build a new tool of creative resistance for the RECLAIM POWER mobilisations taking place in Copenhagen on the 16th of  December 16th, a day of civil disobedience supported by over 200 organisations many from the global south.(
www.climate-justice-action.org ). Made from hundreds of recycled bikes, The Bike Bloc will merge device of mass transportation and pedal powered resistance machine, postcapitalist bike gang and art bike carnival.

Bike hackers, artists, welders, climate campers and engineers will be working together to design and build The Bike Bloc across two cities: Bristol (Arnolfini Gallery 15th – 30th Nov, – as part of C-words exhibition - www.arnolfini.org.uk and somewhere in Copenhagen (4th- 18th  Dec.) The trouble is we no longer have a space or support resources in Copenhagen, which with only 8 weeks to go puts us under immense pressure.

If you have any idea of places, organisations, or, of collectives that would be interested in hosting this project, and are prepared to walk the talk, or would like to be involved please contact us as soon as possible.

As I child I was convinced that I would die in a nuclear holocaust, there was films like Red Dawn, and TV specials like The Day After to fuel my imagination. And even a little kid could figure out that Reagan was the type of asshole who would destroy planet earth in order to win against the evil empire. Yes, he really called the Soviet Union the “evil empire”, and often. I was raised to believe that there was evil in the world, and it was the USSR.

Ironic that when I finally arrive nobody seems to give a shit about communism. It’s basically a conversation killer. But I can’t stop thinking about what happened here, and can’t shake this profound sadness that they gained nothing from the experience, that humanity gained nothing from it, and that this country is now, at least economically, a shameless caricature of it’s historic enemy.

It’s such a politically difficult place, as any critique of capitalism comes off as a likely endorsement of socialism, and the failed utopian experiment that was communism. The big question, the elephant of a question is this: is it possible to create a cooperative society under different (better) circumstances? If the Soviet Union hadn’t been run by tyrants, and hadn’t existed in a continuous state of war crisis, could it have flourished and provided a better quality of life for it’s people?

In Petersburg I was hosted in a classic old flat, it’s cavernous interiors wallpapered with faded sepia fleur-de-lis and heavy wooden furniture. It’s the kind of furnishings that are passed down through generations as inheritance. Sad that we now live surrounded by flimsy particle-board kits shat out from china, assembled by hex-wrench, then later tossed onto the sidewalk when you change apartments.

The concert was a festival held in a Soviet cinema hall. It’s also palacial proportions common to that time when cinema was considered a keystone of culture, a right of the citizens to see film in relative luxury. It’s now disused, I assume the punters are all at the new multiplex watching dubbed versions of the latest hollywood output. Let freedom ring!

It’s not as if everything has been privatized and turned into a McDonalds. The Hermitage for instance, with it’s little collection of 3 million pieces of art, is still keeping it real. And just about every corner has some monument or another, a bronze poet here, a granite tsarina there, an onion-domed fantasy church (see foto) around every other corner. The city center is too old and beautiful to molt for every passing economic fad.

The periphery of Moscow, in contrast, confirms every cliché of modern Russia.  Luxury towers with whimsical shapes, common to places like Singapore or Dubai, sprout incongruently from neighborhoods identical to a blighted Paris banlieue. Black SUV’s and benz’s with tinted windows vie for roadspace with battered soviet-era mass transit.

The newest Moscow airport is actually a giant shopping mall, it’s honestly difficult to find the flight gates, hidden coyly behind shops that hawk gold watches or consumer electronics, fast food or sporting goods. At 4am on a sunday morning it was mobbed with consumers. MOBBED! I felt like a wretched hobo, humbly dragging my belongings through the maze, assaulted by the stink of luxury perfumes and the racket of cash registers.

For all my sadness and critique I love this place. The people are smart, skeptical, and brutally honest. And also because it’s exciting and dynamic. Seventy years ago they went from serfdom & tsars to an (allegedly) classless worker-run society, then twenty years ago from a tyranny of bureaucrats to a mafia state. Who knows what the fuck is going to happen next? In the meantime there are dystopian hyper-capitalist megacities of the future, only a short flight away from cozy old europe.

Athens again. I had every intention of spending some time in the countryside but got sucked in by this gravitational mass. A few blocks from Omonia square is a ghetto of dense high-rises, their once white facades now streaked with the patterns of pollution dust sculpted by rain. Here are stacked arab, african, and pakistani immigrants, all men, who live in converted office spaces or pay-by-week hotels. The last time I was in the barrio I stayed in narrow tower full of Somalis, the guy I befriended was waiting for his (false) EU papers to get sorted out, meanwhile trying to survive by any means possible.

I’ve got a story to tell about this last trip to Athens, the story starts in that hotel and later involves (witnessing other people) burning banks and storming the US embassy. I’ve got to wait until whatever EU statute of limitations expires, or it becomes irrelevant history, whichever comes first.

Foto from the train Thessaloniki-Athens. They have modern trains, I just took the most difficult and senseless route so I could end up on trains like this, with windows that open, and everything trimmed in sheet metal. Sheet metal will come to be considered a lost craft, like blacksmithing, as everything on earth is built by injection-molded plastic.

Update: posting this from Riga, Latvia. Here for a night due to a problem with my Russian visa, I can’t continue to Leningrad until September 23. Beautiful angular light here, the kind you find only in the higher latitudes. There are worse places to be in purgatory.

Visa problems have been a theme lately, or it’s just the inevitable consequence of dealing with some many nations frontiers. The word “erasmus” has also been a theme, but there is no excuse for that.

Here I am in that bit of pre-perfromance time, the few hours between soundcheck and performance that I usually try, but fail, to take a siesta. This particular night is different. Since the stage isn’t set up for video my VJ computer is unemployed. A rare chance to poop out another blog.

Last weekend in Norway Filastine expanded and we were suddenly three, with Amelie (cello) and Nova (voice). We stayed an extra day after the performance in Stavanger with no plan for where to sleep, where to go, or how to get there, but with the singular purpose of experiencing a fjord.
A contract worker from Romania who just left his job at an off-shore oil rig was our angel. The morning following the concert he brought us on the stunning hike to pulpit rock, a 2000 foot precipice dropping to Lysefjord. See embarrassing foto.

Norway is quietly drilling itself into being Saudia Arabia on ice. In fact the trickle down from those riches funded our performance (government subsidies for festivals), it’s why we can be 3 in Norway, but tonight I am alone in Greece.

So, I’ve officially nowhere to go tomorrow and haven’t had a moment to research any plans for these free days before the flight to Russia.

A tiny village near the sea would be perfect. Maybe those still exist in Greece? With old people who press their own olive oil and goats grazing in the hills. Some coastal place with no euro-trash discos nor luxury hotel towers. I have faith it can be found.

a great video made by Iñaki, shot with super 8 in mexico, a rare bit of sunshine for this doom-filled blog

Each nightfall brings a wave of deep mammalian terror. Total darkness, total solitude. We are programmed to fear this, just another link in the food chain. Scrawny naked ape so vulnerable sleeping on the ground, bigger animals with claws and teeth all about.

I find an an abandoned canoe on this glacial lake where no road arrives. How did it get here? A paddle made from chunks of wood pushes me towards the other shore. The sky turns black and the lake erupts into to milky green whitecaps. Maybe this janky canoe will leak or capsize in the storm. I’d die of hypothermia long before reaching the shore. A corpse would float to shore and be eaten by scavengers. I paddle furiously into the wind, feeling so tiny, and also so fucking happy.

After a few days my food runs out. And this place it better off without me anyway. It’s time to retrace steps back the road, fording rivers, wading through bogs.

Back at the highway there is a coyote with a panicked expression trying to cross the road. His eyes are golden, his fur dense and soft; he gets close to sniff and decides that I’m less a threat than the passing traffic. When the road is free of cars I clap and stomp to spook him across. We continue to stare at each for awhile. I feel profoundly apologetic for this highway and it’s cars, which, even in this most remote and protected place, circumscribe his territory and threaten his life.

I hope someday the coyotes, bears, and their allies encroach on human landscapes, that every trip to the corner store is an opportunity for attack by a mountain lion, that forests sprawl to swallow the cities.